Finished after 52 hours and 55 minutes. I got sick of it pretty quickly and had been trying hard to finish it for the past 5 days or so, but the harder I tried, the longer it dragged on. I’m really, really glad it’s finally over.
Thinking back, I went through the same 3 stages with Shining Hearts as I did with Tactics Layer last year, namely:
Stage 1. This game sucks
Stage 2. The game sucks, but the gimmick is fun
Stage 3. The gimmick is fun, but the game really sucks
For those of you lucky people who’ve never played it, Tactics Layer is a dress-up game/visual novel/SRPG where the dress-up part was fun and the SRPG part was okay, but the story and the characters (or one character in particular) ended up ruining everything positive that was going on. Shining Hearts
The story was just weird. Like, stupid weird, not good weird. One moment we were all happy in our organic little world, living in harmony with nature, then these pirates show up out of nowhere and turn out to have no real plot relevance, and then the real bad guys show up and they’re all robots and stuff. They’re from another world and they’re after this girl named Kaguya who is also from that world and it’s like, what? What’s that’s got to do with me? I’m just a baker. Here, take her and go, and have some apple pie while you’re it.
Gamer shall not live by bread alone
As you might expect, we solved everything through the power of bread (you’d better believe it) and the power of hearts and killed the bad guys. But the game didn’t end! I had to make even more bread deliveries and do even more quests to trigger the ending sequence. Eventually something happened and Kaguya buggered off back to space because she’s actually a goddess or something, roll credits…
But the game still didn’t end! Apparently I’m supposed to spend even more time with my favorite character so I can get an individual end, then the game will finally be over. Aha. Ahaha. And that was it for me and Shining Hearts.
But seriously, 52 hours. Where did it all go? I remember making a lot of bread deliveries and baking a lot. And I explored the world pretty thoroughly and did almost all the character quests. I probably spent about 10 of those hours on random battles as well, especially when sailing from island to island. I’ll never understand why developers create a interesting world and invite you to explore it and then ramp the overworld encounter rate up so high you can’t even enjoy it.
Final random thoughts on Shining Hearts:
1. I liked all the bright colors and cute monsters and stuff. I like games with an overall cheerful mood. That just made all that weird crap with Pandora’s box and evil robots and two worlds and goddesses stand out all the more.
2. The major antagonists show up out of the blue around the 40-hour mark and are completely gone by the 50-hour mark. They come out of nowhere and go nowhere and the story is largely irrelevant. This would have been better off as a pure simulation game, since they obviously shoehorned in story elements as an afterthought.
3. Baking bread was fun, but quite useless otherwise. You’ll be distributing the same 10 or so types throughout the whole game to the same 10 or so people. It would also have been better if you could experiment freely instead of always having to follow a recipe.
4. Battle system balance is bad. 90% of the battles are too easy. 9% are just right. 1% are too hard. Too hard as in, can’t get a single move in kind of hard. There’s also an Auto-battle system (with rather bad AI) which I used pretty much all the time, thus defeating the purpose of the game even having random battles in the first place.
5. The encounter rate is pretty high for a mainly-sim game. And I never did find an item/bread that would lower it.
6. On the plus side, there were a lot of good, useful active and passive battle skills. Useful passives included Counter, Evade, Finish Off (follow up attack on a low-HP enemy), Critical, Cover, etc. Plus there were character combos with varying degrees of usefulness. If the encounter rate wasn’t so high and the pace of battle wasn’t so slow and the enemies weren’t such pushovers, the battle system would have been really good.
7. I didn’t think too much of the character designs. The guys had these weird, twisted faces, and the girls were trying too hard to show off their chests. Are gamers who care for cheap fanservice the same ones who want to play bread-making RPGs? Can’t help thinking they’re a different demographic.
8. My main character and his partner never regained their memories, and we never found out where he washed up from or why. If that’s a sequel hook, I ain’t biting. Speaking of sequel, it seems Shining Hearts is a ‘spiritual successor’ to a Playstation bread-delivery/village-life sim called Dokidoki Poyacchao so the idea wasn’t even original to begin with.
Overall… I didn’t not enjoy Shining Hearts. However, while it did have its good moments in the middle, I didn’t care for it in the beginning and actively disliked it by the end. I can’t even say “it was all right” now. The most I can muster is a quiet “meh.” I don’t really recommend it, and I’m not particularly glad I played it. The End.
7) – I think it goes something more like this – a game company isn’t confident on selling a game based solely on selling bread, but if we mix in the “likes tits” crowd, which is one of the most reliable markets in terms of what they will buy, then with good math skill and budgeting we can at least ensure the game won’t completely bomb if it turns out no one likes to bake bread.
I see. That would also explain why they added “Shining” to the title, even though it has very little in common with other Shining games I’ve played so far.
…Not that the Shining series is a coherent whole or anything, come to think of it.
I read a couple of Japanese reviews and it seems people do like to bake bread – or at least don’t really mind it. The majority of complaints were about the high encounter rate, the nonsensical, forced-in story and the slow pace of battle, the same things I had trouble with.
I found this post while trying to figure out when this game ended because seriously it didn’t need to be this long! I am currently working towards a character ending…probably Xiao-mei’s since I just triggered her last quest. I pretty much agree with all of your final thoughts.
I do think, as a relative beginner in my Japanese learning, that this game was pretty easy to understand, so in that sense I don’t regret the purchase. And I got it after the price drop so it wasn’t too expensive either.
Yes, it was pretty easy to understand, all things considered. And the bread looked delicious, I’ll give it that. Let me know if Xiaomei’s ending turns out to be anything noteworthy. I got most of her events but lacked the stamina to get her ending.