Shining Soul

It’s portable. It’s colorful. It’s Diablo! Well, no. It’sShining Soul, an action-rpg by Sega, but this game just begs to be called “Diablo-To-Go”. Still, despite the remarkable similarities, this game manages to bring something new to the portable world.

You start the game by selecting a file to take up, eight in total. This large number of files is nice, but I wouldn’t exactly call it essential. Like I said, nice. There are four classes to pick from. There is the melee Warrior, the ranged Archer, the slow-as-beans Dragon Knight, and the magical Sorceress. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Each of these classes also have eight skills for you to level up in. These can vary from weapon mastering to resistance building against fire or even regeneration. There was quite a variance in the different skills.

You start in the beginning town which is the ONLY town in the game. Yup, that’s right, the entire world consists of one town. It is here where your character can buy weapons, spells, and armor. You can also identify stuff and then store it in a ‘locker'(This locker is massive. I mean, really, do you REALLY need to store a hundred items?) You can also learn gossip and hints from the local townsfolk. The rest of the game consists of fighting in dungeons, each of which has sub-levels and a boss. The first dungeon has three levels while the eighth one has fifteen. To get to the next sub-level you have to defeat a certain enemy on the level you’re on to open a stairway/tunnel/vortex that leads to the next level. Unfortunately, this means trekking through a lot of monotonous dungeon while fighting off spawned enemies.

Eventually you level up. You get four skill points to distribute between Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality. Simple enough. You also get a smiley face (*sigh*, yes, a smiley face) to put in a skill. When the skill is unleveled, it takes one smiley face (*sigh*) to level it up to level one. Then it takes two smiley faces (*sigh*) to level it up to level two, and so forth. If you have a level-four skill and three smiley faces (really, did they have to be smiley faces? Could they not be stars or something?), you can place the three smiley faces in the slots, have two slots left, and just leave them there until you get enough smiley faces to fill up all the slots. When it comes to weapon skills such as spear, sword, and spells, the level corresponds to how much you can charge up the attack. The higher you charge an attack, the more damage it does. It takes little time to charge to a level five attack, but after playing a few hours, you can get really annoyed at the constant ‘beep, beep, beep, beep, beep’ as your attacks become stronger. I kind of liked this skill system. It was simple, yet you still looked forward to boosting each skill.

Story? Hahahaha. There is an evil dragon that’s going to destroy the world, and four adventurers are sent to destroy its reign of terror. Okay, cliche, but still okay. Now this is the part I don’t understand. You are the one who goes out and kills the dragon’s generals and eventually the dragon itself. During all this, the four adventurers are at the town on their lazy butts! They appear in the fray but once, after you’ve taken care of the dragon, so that they can imprison it for a thousand years. It was good that leveling up in this game was so addictive, because with such a little story, there wasn’t much of an incentive to continue to the next stage.

There was little challenge in playing the game. The enemies only hurt you when they attacked (as opposed to when you touch them), and they had a very slow attack rate. That meant I found myself walking through crowds of enemies, turning around, attacking, then repeating from step one. The AI is almost non-existent. There is the ‘Melee AI’, which means the monsters walk towards you and attack when they are next to you, there is the ‘Ranged AI’, which means the monsters stand completely still while plunking arrows in your general direction, and there is the ‘Magical AI’, which had the monsters running around in no particular direction while casting spells at you. Little challenge. The bosses were bigger and better. They had special moves and different tactics, and each of them was different.

The graphics are marvelous in this game. Everything is crisp and defined, and even the pixel graphics were great. While it’s no 3D rendering, this definitely beat the old Super Nintendo in this department. One scene that sticks in my mind is what occurs when you beat a boss. Something that can only be described as a glowing blue hole-in-the-ground appears, and there are some blue lights coming from it. The well-colored lights made me raise an eyebrow, and this is AFTER playing the GameCube for an hour.

Even after you play through all eight dungeons within this game, you still have the advanced mode to fight through, which means MUCH harder enemies to defeat and better rewards to get. And, if you have up to four catridges, GBAs, and friends, you can play a multiplayer game! While I never had the chance to do this, I believe that it can only get better. It’s a game that is meant for all audiences, the graphics are good, the gameplay is strangely addictive, and best of all, it’s portable.

Final Grade: 89%