Sol Trigger made me rage and The Last Story had a really weak story (moar liek “The Last Story Left After All The Good Ones Had Been Taken” amirite?), but both games at least had good gameplay going for them. Shining Blade is just crap. Poop. Excrement in game form. It’s the most eloquent way I can put it. I can’t remember the last time I played a game so bright and polished on the outside and so dry and devoid of substance on the inside. Now certainly a game doesn’t need “substance” to be good. It just needs to be fun, and Shining Blade doesn’t even clear that low, low hurdle.

In the interest of fairness, here comes the obligatory “good parts” section. I played for almost 30 hours and I finished it so there must be some in there. So what does Shining Blade have?

1. Good voice acting. It should be “great” given all the famous VAs they used but first, I’ve heard better performances from them and second, it doesn’t matter how nice your voice is if you’ve got nothing worthy to say.

2. Good character designs. A little heavy on the heaving bosoms and breast implants, but apparently this is Tony Taka’s entire raison d’être. His men are covered from top to toe while his women wear negligee in snowstorms because that’s what his audience demands.

3. Nostalgia factor for fans of the older games. Except Shining Hearts fans, who will just be depressed. Each chapter drags out characters from older games like Shining Wind and Shining Tears and Shining [crass comments deleted. My apologies]. Wait, I’m supposed to be talking about the good parts.

4. The battle system is good. I hear it’s straight up copied from Valkyria Chronicles but copying good ideas is not a bad thing. Duck and weave your way to the enemy, choose an attack, execute it, end your turn. Do the same for your other party members until you run out of moves then let the enemy do its worst. You can strengthen your weapons with enemy drops, strengthen your skills with Soul Points, perform dual attacks with nearby party members, destroy boss parts to expose weak points, buff your party by eating bread, buff your party by singing songs, etc etc. It’s just too bad you don’t have anyone to use all your battle-fu on. The enemies die so fast you’ll wonder if they committed hara-kiri when they saw you coming.

5. It was short. 28 hours and 39 minutes to get Elmina’s ending, and this is after I wasted all that time on sidequests.

There, I’ve racked my brain enough for compliments. On the other side of the equation, we have…

So many problems I don’t even know where to start

1. Shining Blade is just plain boring from beginning to end. The story is a Category 5 cliche tornado. Empire. Resistance. Sealed Evil. Brainwashed character. Dead little sister figures. Friend turned evil. Power of music. Power of friendship. But all that shouldn’t necessarily make it bad. Not if you have good characterization, interesting gameplay, well-written dialogue, memorable events and all the other elements needed to make a great game. If Shining Blade had had any of that, any at all, I’d be writing a different sort of review right now.

2. Was it really necessary to bring back characters from Shining Hearts just to kill them off? Is there really no way Sega could have predicted how this would make me feel? Do they really hate me that much?

3. Atrocious loading times, upwards of 10 seconds at a time. They’re so bad that Sega uses them for character introductions and tutorials so you can learn while you wait.

4. Too many characters with too little story relevance. With very few exceptions most of them show up, get two or three lines and never matter again. I can understand bringing one or two people back for “Hey, it’s that guy!” purposes, but when 90% of the cast is made of up cameos, it’s just ridiculous.

5. You can only use 5 characters per battle even though you have 22 PCs by the end. It’s impossible to raise them all equally unless you grind. Even if you do raise them all, again you can only use 5 in battle. Some of them are just duplicates of other party members as well. This means you’ll probably settle on a party really early and all the late additions might as well not bother.

6. The Stranger’s Family Reunion issue crops up again. If you’re not familiar with the earlier games, tons of references will go straight over your head. You’re who? The princess of where? It’s annoying how everybody knows everybody else from way back when and we should totally get together more often and wasn’t it fun that last time we– No. Shut up.

This also makes it hard to get into the story, because Rage spends the game trying to save his friend Roselinde but I don’t know Roselinde! He wants to retake the country of Clantol, but I don’t know Clantol! It’s already been invaded by the time the game starts. If I hadn’t played Shining Hearts, all the time Rick spends mourning over his friends would have been infuriating. Why should I care about any of this?

7. A game about a continent on the verge of being overrun by dark forces and yet there’s no sense of damage, despair or desperation. Thousands of people have allegedly been killed or hurt in this war, but there’s nary a sign of this in-game. No burning ruins, no orphans, no refugees, dead characters are even cheerier than live ones, all POWs are tucked neatly out of sight, all buildings and facilities are in pristine condition, the Resistance plans their strategies in plush restaurants, and so on and so forth. What am I liberating people from, a wine-tasting tour?

8. They wasted a perfectly good battle system. The final boss was tough. Seriously, each of his hits was taking off 170+ HP on characters that had only 400-600 HP. A tough final battle is a good thing. If the other boss fights had been this challenging, again, I’d be writing a different review. What that means, however, is if I hadn’t accidentally grinded through sidequests I would have been in a world of trouble. But precisely because I did grind, the other 99% of the battles were a complete joke. The game balance is terrible.

9. The game is way too easy unless you deliberately nerf yourself by not taking sidequests. Enemies have barely any HP or DEF or RES, the AI is Dumb with a capital D, they hit like girls and they almost never inflict status effects on you. Once you upgrade a couple of your skills you’re basically invincible. Normally I don’t hold a lack of difficulty against a game too much but this is really, really easy. Like almost impossible to die kind of easy. Like P2: Innocent Sin is writing its resignation letter kind of easy. Couple that with how excellent the system appears on paper and you begin to understand my disappointment.

10. The low difficulty means items and accessories are useless and just clutter your inventory. I never used a single potion, much less any of the other things. Magic and skills are very useful, but you only need one or two per character. Most higher-leveled skills are useless because the battle will be long over by the time your force gauge even gets that high.

11. That boss you very definitely killed? He’s going to escape, even when surrounded on all sides. He will return to menace you again in the very next battle, where he will escape again. And again. And again. Unless the game tells you that this is the very final showdown, you’re wasting your time.

 12. All sidequests are battle quests. They all have the same objective: kill all monsters. Most story quests have one of two objectives: kill all monsters or kill so-and-so, which can be achieved just as well by killing all monsters. There were only two or three exceptions.

13. Low monster variety. Roughly ten types and one million palette swaps. Map variety is low too. Tiny maps that are constantly reused, two or three types of terrain, one or two obstacles, one or two treasure chests containing junk, the end. They blew the entire design budget on Tony Taka, I just know it.

14. The character designs are good but the 3D models, backgrounds, spell animations and every other visual aspect was awful.

15. All the songs the songstresses sing are bad. Too “modern” and “j-pop” for a fantasy world. And apart from Elmina’s regen song most of them are useless for boss battles, where you need to keep your health up, and regular battles, which are too simple to be worth singing for.

16. Elmina’s ending was meh. I didn’t see the chemistry between Rage and her or between Rage and any of the other female characters, to be honest. He interacted much more naturally with guys like Fenrir and Rick imho, but I think it’s due more to poor writing on Sega’s part than to any actual intention to make it seem that way.

17. Rage’s party rename themselves from ‘Valleria Liberation Front’ to ‘Shining Force.’ This is Sega’s way of saying “Suck it fans, you’ll never get another one!” Thanks Sega, I love you too.

18. I never did get to find out exactly how Rick ended up on the other island. The game did reveal that there’s an Astral world/ spirit plane where souls live while they await reincarnation. That’s where Rick and his ladies are in Shining Hearts. Fine, but how did Rick get there when he’s alive and well at the end of Blade? What about Ranah? What about Xiaomei? Are they dead too? It didn’t answer my questions at all.

19. You can try to write off Shining Blade as a romantic visual novel disguised as an RPG, but even then it still fails. There are so many characters that you don’t get to spend enough time with any one girl. Certainly not enough for any convincing romantic interaction to take place. Also your magical sword gets jealous if you spend too much time with girls (true story).

tl;dr – It’s a bad RPG, and a bad game in general.
Slow, boring, predictable -> there’s no need to use original adjectives to describe a game without a shred of originality.
Dull, hackneyed, repetitive. Instead of making new Phantasy Star Portable or proper Shining Force games, Sega is churning out crap and sticking boobs in it like wafers in a sundae (mmm, crap sundae). And this, too, sold well enough to get a sequel. I just don’t understand RPGs any more. Well, I did at least finish it, which puts it one step above junk like Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. Good job, Sega, good job.