The game is definitely enjoyable with a few friends, but alone, this dungeon crawler can be your worst nightmare.
User Rating: 6.8 | Shining Soul II GBA
Sega’s Shining series has been around since the early 90’s, and they started all the way back on their Genesis system. Shining Force, at the time, was Sega’s best RPG available – lets face it, it was probably their only RPG series since Square did all their work with Nintendo. Shining Soul is a spin-off to the series that included characters with many strengths and a few weaknesses, and it took place at a lot of areas you’d find in the Shining Force games. The first Shining Soul wasn’t very promising at all. With horrible AI, bad dungeons, and a mediocre story, it was never a fan favorite. Atlus even ported the game to Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance to even gain more haters to the game. Now Sega is making a sequel to the game, and they hope to bring confused fans back to the Shining ages. Is it a false attempt, or can this actually work? Shining Soul II isn’t your average RPG. It makes use of the name “dungeon crawler”, and does a really good job with it. At the beginning, you can choose from eight characters including a Warrior named Eric, a Wizard named Raine, a Ninja named Raizen, a Brawler named Zachs, a Dark Wizard named Armand, a Preist named Paige, a Dragonute named Tyroth, and an Archer named Rwinn – all of the characters are available for rename. Once you choose a character, you’ll meet someone who teaches you the game’s basics, and you’ll end up fighting a few creatures as a tutorial. The game is about your noble character following the king’s orders by taking out every boss in every dungeon. Though that may sound a bit linear or repetitive, this is all the game actually lets you do. After making preparations at the merchant’s area at the castle, you can embark on your journey. The problem is there’s no actual journey because you really aren’t exploring. Upon leaving town, you’ll be sent to a world map where you can move your cursor and tap the A button to arrive at another dungeon area. The gameplay within dungeons is pretty simple. When exploring, all you really have to do is kill every enemy in sight to upon a path closer to the dungeon’s boss – a lot like Square’s Mana games or the GBA Dragon Ball Z RPG’s, except more repetitive. The battle system takes place in real time, so there’s no menu of abilities for you to use on your opponents. Depending on your character, whether he or she is a magic user or just a brute fighter, you can attack from a distance or in an adjacent area with minor taps of the B button. Be aware that the enemies are extremely hard to kill, and you’ll find yourself at the bed of the inn every fifteen minutes. Nothing to worry about though, since outside if the inn there’ll be golden wings for you to fly back to the area in which you were killed. Upon your exploration in the dungeons, you can find items in treasure chests that you can use. To equip or use an item, go into your menu screen by pressing start. This is where the game gets tricky. There’s no actual pause screen in the game, so if you think you can heal yourself (or even go to the bathroom for all it’s worth) in the middle of a battlefield with the enemy about to charge at you – your healing herb or whatever you’re using will prove to be useless. After defeating any enemy, you’ll gain experience points. Experience points are points that’ll keep tab of your character, so he or she can get better stats and level them up. When you’re ready to level up, there’ll be some text over your character’s head telling you that the character is ready to be leveled up, so it’ll be time to open up the menu screen. When leveling up, you’ll have the option to choose which stats your to increase on your character, giving you the ability to either increase his or her strengths or making the character a bit more balanced. The maxed out level in Shining Soul II is 200, so it’d be a good idea to level up your characters early for the game to be easier. Again, since there’s no actual pause screen – even increasing your characters stats is a risk of getting the person killed. The game is obviously hard, and the fact that there’s no pause screen doesn’t help either. So what has Sega actually done to improve Shining Soul’s gameplay? They improved it all right, but it’s just as gimmicky as The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. The game is much easier when you’re linked up with your friends for cooperative gameplay. So when you have the game paused to do something, your friends can back you up by doing necessary damage to any opponent. The problem with this is the same problem you’d encounter in Champions of Norrath or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, you have to stay at the same portion of the screen, and that can slow a lot of the play down. But once you have it all resolved, the gameplay is actually enhanced and can actually be called fun. The game, visually, looks good and has a nice medieval anime tone to it. In some points of the game, you’ll actually feel like you’re in a forest because the texture of the backgrounds rivals that of actual photographs. The sprites used for the attacks don’t look as good, but Shining Soul II still looks as good as the original and also has a little Golden Sun charm to it. That shouldn’t be something alarming though because Shining Force and Shining Soul were some of Camelot’s – the developer in charge of Golden Sun - first few games. The game’s soundtrack really isn’t too bad either, but there are honestly only about fifteen songs in the game or so. Nonetheless, they all sound particularly good. The sound effects aren’t as top notch as the music, but they get the job done and Shining Soul II should serve no problem in the sound department. Shining Soul II was definitely built to be a good GBA multiplayer experience. The game has crisp graphics, good sound quality, and an improved user-interface. The game is definitely enjoyable with a few friends, but alone, this dungeon crawler can be your worst nightmare. So unless your friends are all willing to get a copy, it’d probably be best to pass on Shining Soul II.
