Retro Achievement Mastery 169 - Shining the Holy Ark

This is one of my favorite games I’ve played this year so far. It’s not the best, it has too many flaws for that, but I had an absolute blast experiencing this for the first time, and I really loved it. This is Shining the Holy Ark, one of the last games in the Shining series before Sega rebooted it in 2002. Released exclusively on the Saturn in 1996, and never re-released anywhere, it is a spiritual sequel to the first Shining game, Shining in the Darkness. Not a tactics RPG like all the other games in the series, but instead a dungeon crawler.

In Shining the Holy Ark you play as Arthur, a mercenary. He is accompanied by other mercenaries Melody and Forte, and is hired by the King of Enrich to hunt down and capture a ninja outlaw by the name of Rodi. The three of you follow Rodi to a nearby mine and, after a battle, are interrupted by a spaceship crashing into the fucking roof and killing all four of you. The spirits inside the ship are like “oh shit” and heal you all, but not before Forte is dragged away by an evil spirit. However, the side effect of this healing is that Rodi has lost his memories, and you all cannot step away from each other, or you’ll all die.

Then game then kinda meanders, as you’re like “well shit NOW what” and you try to find out what the hell is even going on, and uncover a plot years in the making to imbue the Vandals, an ancient lineage of powerful beings, with power and revive an ancient empire. Along the way you’ll get eight characters over all to join your party, and unlike other RPGs where this is almost a downside cause you don’t get to use everyone and have to throw new characters to the side, this game fixes that! But we’ll get into that soon.

Holy Ark is a rather classic Blobber which does a lot to improve the formula and make it modern and enjoyable. Y’know, for 1996. When I played Shining in the Darkness, I was surprised that it felt so classic but with updated style. It was like, the perfect example of what a blobber should be. THIS, however, feels like the next evolution. You’re all on the same tile and you walk through dungeons, forests, mansions, even towns, one tile at at time. You run into enemies and do turn-based combat, typical RPG combat stuff. Usually that kind of combat is kinda mind numbing, and you end up turning your brain off and not focusing much on the game, BUT that’s where the first new inovation of this game comes into play!

As you progress, you can find “pixies”. They’re hidden throughout the world, sometimes in obvious spots like pots or in a weird dead end, but often times they’re VERY well hidden. All the more reason to explore. You have five kinds of pixies: Fairies, Pixies, Succubus, Incubus, and Leprechauns. When you get into combat, you’ll see the enemy move into frame from somewhere off screen. Depending on where that enemy is coming from, you can select your pixie and press the A button. Fairies hit things coming from the front, pixies above, succubi to the left, incubi to the right, and leprechauns when things are attacking from below you. They then attack and deal extra damage to the whole enemy group, and give you bonus gold and EXP. You can often tell what kind of enemy will come from where depending on the layout of the dungeon you’re in, so you can prepare ahead of time, but it’s a short window to swap fairies as something is attacking you.

This is a FANTASTIC system, IMO, and keeps you on your toes and focused as you explore, not just mindlessly moving forward and mashing A to do battles. No, you’re trying to get those fairy bonuses. Amazing system.

The other improvement this game makes, IMO, is to its party system. Usually in a game like this, you swap party members out at towns, and can only use three to four at a time. But not here. You can, in fact, only use four at a time, but your party is always with you. Oh okay, so you swap them out inbetween battles then? That’s cool. Nope. You can swap them mid battle. EXP is shared with everyone, and if you decide suddenly you need your healers to come in and heal for this next battle turn, you can swap someone out for them. It makes for GREAT on the fly strategizing, and is absolutely freaking fantastic. This also works if someone dies, you can throw them in the back and replace them, so it’s not like “ugh god, gotta trudge back to town to revive”. Rodi, Arthur, and Melody actually CAN’T die btw. Cause they’re inhabited by holy spirits, they will revive to 1 HP after each battle. Everyone else has to be revived though.

Speaking of the different characters, I wanna talk about the art style. Obviously I love the 3D world, it’s so of its time in a way I like, but the character models are fantastic too. And you might recognize it. This is the art style that Camelot will stick to moving forward, as they exclusively work with Nintendo moving into the 2000s and make the Golden Sun games. This game feels like a bridge between Golden Sun and Shining Force, which is pretty neat. I personally prefer the art styles of Shining Force 1 and 2, but this is a good one too. Sadly, the one problem with the character designs in this game is the serious lack of non-humans. There’s one wolf man, and one dragon man, and that’s it. No centaurs, no weird deer-people, not even any elves or dwarves, nothing. You see some in towns, but not for your playable characters.

All in all, this is probably the best dungeon crawler I’ve ever played. My main issue is the dungeon design isn’t SUPER interesting? It’s better than Shining in the Darkness, to be fair, but I dunno, I feel they could have done a bit more. Though a lot of the dungeons have unique gimmicks to them that helps.

Camelot would make one more game for this series, the terrifyingly long Shining Force 3, which I will hopefully tackle this year, before moving over to Nintendo, and the series would eventually be rebooted. There’s also Shining Wisdom which uh, I’ll have to get to sometime, too, though I am less excited for that.

Fantastic game, highly recommended.