Rating of
2/5
Grinding in the Darkness
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/25/13
I was a SNES kid. I never saw a reason to even acknowledge Sega’s existence as a console and game maker until the 5th Generation when Nintendo completely dropped the ball and I abandoned that sinking ship in favor of Sony’s original PlayStation. However, in opening myself up to one non-Nintendo console, I figured I may as well check out the rest of the competition and bought myself a Saturn too. The few extremely good games I played on the Saturn made me second guess my skipping of the Genesis. Were there spectacular gems on the SNES’ competitor that I had missed out on? Well, at the end of the 5th Generation, I finally bought a Genesis and grabbed some games with the aim of finding out… only to have these cartridges sit in my backlog for over a decade. Now, however, I am finally making an effort to clear out the lowest strata of my backlog, and the Genesis is getting a bit more attention.
“Shining in the Darkness” is the original game in the ‘Shining’ RPG series, with Saturn sequels such as “Shining Wisdom” and “Shining the Holy Ark,” as well as Game Boy Advance sequels such as “Shining Soul.” The main branch of the ‘Shining’ series, however, is “Shining Force” and its sequels – one of the primogenitors of the TRPG subgenre. Going into “Shining in the Darkness,” I wasn’t really sure what to expect… but after playing it for a bit, the foggy memories of my frustration, disappointment, and outright hatred of the non-‘Force’ games in the ‘Shining’ series all came flooding back.
Presentation
“Shining in the Darkness” looks pretty good for a Genesis game, with its more limited color pallet than the SNES. But on the whole, the game looks pretty average. Everything in the game is presented from a first-person perspective, with a town and castle full of poorly-animated NPCs and merchants to talk to, and a dungeon full of non-animated, heavily pallet-swapped monsters to kill.
The soundtrack in “Shining in the Darkness” is pretty average as far as musicality goes. The quality of the Genesis’ sound chip, however, makes all of the music sound far more primitive than the SNES’ MIDI processor.
Story
“Shining in the Darkness” is about the most clichéd game I’ve ever played. The story takes place in the Kingdom of Thornwood, introduced by an old man in purple pajamas who serves as the game’s title screen. Thornwood is a tiny country with one castle, one town, and one dungeon. The Hero, who has no default name as far as I can tell, is a young squire and son of a dishonored knight. When the King’s daughter is kidnapped by a crazy villain named Dark Sol, who actually shows up at the castle to brag about how he kidnapped the princess before disappearing and hiding in the kingdom’s ancient labyrinth, the King and his advisors send all of the knights into the first level of the labyrinth to face the Knights’ Trials, which will give them access to the labyrinth proper. All of the knights fail in their attempt, so it is up to our nameless hero to succeed where all others could not.
But our hero is not alone in his endeavor! No, he is joined by two ‘friends’ of his, who both seem to be children of ill repute in Thornwood: A red-headed female elf wizard named Pyra and a portly altar boy named Milo. This group of misfits must navigate the Knights’ Trials, then find their way through 5 floors of increasingly horrible monsters to find the princess and confront Dark Sol. The titular ‘shining’ refers to the fact that the Hero must collect and wear the lost pieces of Light Equipment in order to counter the dark powers of Dark Sol.
Ultimately, this story is incredibly boring. While there are a few interesting townsfolk to talk to in the tavern, none of them are important to the story, and at least three of them make no sense whatsoever in the game’s larger context. Hero, Pyra, and Milo don’t really have much in the way of personality and little dialog. There is one plot twist that doesn’t is only mildly surprising, while the rest of the narrative is a by-the-books, fluff-free trope-fest.
Gameplay
“Shining in the Darkness” starts out as a fairly solid old-school dungeon crawler. The first-person dungeon is fairly straight-forward on the first floor and in the first few Trials. This is, of course, because the Hero must navigate the first floor alone before Pyra and Milo join, and the only way to see a map of the dungeon is to eat a consumable item called a Wisdom Seed or to have Pyra cast a 1MP Vision spell. In either case, the game shows a small area directly around the party’s current location that isn’t scrollable and doesn’t show any features like chests, stairs, or pits. Thus playing the game pretty much requires the player to have a map or make one as they go along using graph paper. I have always found dungeon crawl games that require manual map-making to be incredibly tedious.
Outside of map-making outside the game, the only real form of gameplay in “Shining in the Darkness” is the traditional turn-based battle system. “Shining in the Darkness” has an obscenely high random encounter rate, but this is necessary in order to give the player enemies to grind on… as grinding is really the only thing to do in this game. Sure, it’s possible to work on min-maxing character equipment, but the gear that can be bought in town is fairly limited in variety, and the only way to pay for it is… grinding gold off random encounters. After completing the Knights’ Trials, the game does add a new merchant who can craft the best equipment in the game (as well as powerful, but cursed equipment) if the player gives him a chunk of crafting material and a large sum of money… but again, finding crafting material involves exploring/mapping the dungeon to get it out of chests or hoping beyond hope for a (very) rare random drop from a random encounter.
As an old-school RPG with little story, no side-quests, and a focus on exploration, one would think “Shining in the Darkness” could at least be balanced… but it is absolutely unbalanced. Up until the third or fourth Knight’s Trial, the game is an absolute cake-walk, with enemies either missing or dealing 1 point of damage per attack, and appearing in sane numbers. After that, the game hits its first difficulty spike and enemies start attacking in enormous swarms, dealing double-digit damage per hit, and frequently using cheap abilities that allow them to damage all three of the player’s characters in a single turn (I hated the proliferation of ‘hit everyone’ enemy skills in “Shining the Holy Ark” too). Once through the Knights’ Trials, every successive floor of the labyrinth proper features a similar ridiculous difficulty spike that requires hours and hours of grinding a few battles, spending a huge amount of MP healing after each, then teleporting out of the labyrinth to sleep at the inn. This impediment to exploration and progress (what would seem to be the main point of a first-person dungeon crawler) is not fun and becomes incredibly boring and tedious after only a short time.
Overall
“Shining in the Darkness” starts out as a fun old-school dungeon crawl, but quickly escalates into a prolonged grind-fest that sucks any and all fun out of wandering a dungeon and/or making physical maps. The encounter rate is obscene, the difficulty spikes are obscene, and the amount of grinding required to make tiny bits of progress takes what would otherwise be a 20 hour game and streeeeeeetches it until it is transparent. Playing this game reminded me of how much I hated “Shining the Holy Ark” on the Saturn… it seems that this is one RPG series that was never any good.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 1.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
