Game

I recently decided to tackle the Shining series. This was a series of RPGs made by Sega in the early to late 90s, and the first series that beloved studio Camelot is known for. Before they made Golden Sun and were locked in the Mario Sports Mines for the rest of time, they made things like this. Though in this case, I’m a bit confused. The early era of Camelot is shakey, and I see a lot of conflicting information. Because there was ANOTHER company that worked on this game as their first game, and that’s Climax Entertainment. Their standout hit down the way would be Landstalker, but they’d also work on Shining Force alongside Camelot… I think. See, Wikipedia claims Camelot is “credited” on those two games, though it also claims they didn’t exist until 1994, and this is from 1991. Other sites I look up the info on have different information. Look, it doesn’t matter that much. My guess is a lot of the people who made this went on to form Camelot, and both Climax and Camelot basically own it, because one of the characters for this game would be put in Climax’s Time Stalkers years down the way, and of course Camelot continued the series later. So who the hell knows, they both own the series and the game. Or more likely Sega does. Whatever. Let’s get on with it.

The Shining series is of course mostly known for Shining Force. A lot of people entered my stream as I played this and went “Wow this looks cool, the art reminds me of Shining Force” and I had to go “funny thing about that”. Shining in the Darkness is just not as well known as Shining Force, it’s the first game in the series, but is nothing like the rest of it… except for Holy Ark, but I’ll get to that one eventually.

Game

In SitD, you play as a young knight named Hiro, who’s knight father has gone missing. At the same time, the princess has been kidnapped by an evil being who is translated as Dark Sol. You might know that’s the villain of Shining Force, but actually this is not Dark Sol, that’s a mistranslation. This is his son, meaning Shining Force will be a prequel to this game. Anyway, you need to go into The Labyrinth, the training round for knights in the Kingdom, to try and save your father and the Princess. At first it’s just you, but you’ll eventually be accompanied by your friends, Pyra the Elven Mage, and Milo the Hobbit cleric. Milo is your traditional D&D Cleric, with maces and axes and heavy armor. You’re basically a straight up warrior with no magic. And Pyra isn’t USELESS in combat, but she’s a bit weaker, and uses magic as her main damage, though she can ALSO use whips that hit entire groups. She’s also HORRIBLE. There’s a scene where she bumps into a guy and is annoyed he doesn’t apologize, so she casts slow on him as he enters the Labyrinth and is like “He’s gonna have a real surprise when he runs into the monsters!”

It’s great.

Game

Unlike the later games in the series, SitD is a dungeon crawler. It’s a good ol fashioned Blobber, where your entire party is in one square and you walk square by square around a 3D environment. In my opinion, SitD is basically the perfect example of that very early version of the genre. It’s the quintessential 80s Blobber, even though it’s from the 90s. It doesn’t try too many new ideas. It’s very accessible, anyone can pick it up and enjoy it. And it looks AMAZING. This game’s style is off the charts. That’s one of the best things about early Shining Force especially, the art and the style are so good. The UI is simple and pleasing, the characters are varied and fun even for a game with barely any story or plot like this one. And of course not everyone is a boring Human. We’ll see that even more on display in the Force games, but it’s seen here too. We’ve got Hobbits and Elves, but we’ve also got Wolflings and Lizardfolk. And most interestingly, you can find some Gelflings. GELFLINGS. From Dark Crystal! That’s wild. They never appear ever again, but SUSPICIOUSLY some similar looking creatures called the Kyantol would appear later on, so that’s prolly where they went.

Game

It’s very simple. You explore a 3D dungeon, run into random encounters, the combat is turn based and easy to grok. There’s no map, you make your own. There’s a FEW new ideas here, like you can go back to town and get new items with your gold, but later in the game you can also use the blacksmith to forge special equipment for each character using Mythril for some of the best equipment in the game. There’s also Cursed items, which in PYra’s case is her best weapon, IMO.

The level design is also pretty good, IMO. There’s some fun puzzles, but the real great thing IMO is how they handle delving deeper into a dungeon then needing to dip back out to heal and save. That’d get very annoying very quickly. So what, is there a scroll of town portal? Not quite. You DO have the classic Egress spell to teleport back, but you have to walk back. But it’s not that big of a deal, because the first 60% of the game is right on the first floor of the Labyrinth. You first need to solve The Four Trials, which are accessed on the first floor, and are their own floors, so you don’t need to go in deep to get to them. Once you finish THOSE, you start climbing up to the fifth floor, and you also get an item, the Gold Coin. You can toss it into Golden Wells you come across, to make those your teleport spot. Interestingly though, in order to make another one your teleport spot, you need to fish the coin out of the previous one. So you need to make SURE you can safely reach the next well before you try. It’s a neat mechanic, IMO.

In the end, I do like Shining in the Darkness quite a bit, though it does overstay it’s welcome a tad, and it doesn’t try a WHOLE lot new with the formula. Like I said, it really just makes it easier to approach, and really pretty. I’d give it a 7.5/10. If you like grinding through legions of monsters so you can safely reach the next floor for 30 hours, go right ahead, it’s well worth your time. If not? Eh, maybe consider the rest of the Shining series instead.