Shining Hearts is billed as a turn-based RPG, but it’s more like a slice-of-life game with random battles. In my last post I called it a cross between Rune Factory and Atelier Iris. It’s not an exact analogy, but that should give you some kind of idea of what this game feels like to play.

Story: Rick washes up on the island of Windaria with (you’ll never guess this)… AMNESIA! A girl finds him, takes him into her home and gets him a job baking and delivering bread. Giving people bread or doing other nice things for them makes them release “hearts”, which you can collect and use for baking bread or pulling off special attacks in battle.

And so your days go. Wake up, deliver bread, bake bread, gather bread ingredients. Every once in a while something happens and the story moves forward a teensy little bit. For example I found a girl named Kaguya washed up on the shore (apparently this happens a lot in Windaria) and after curing her with my magical bread powers, I now have to find some special herbs to complete the cure. I’ve also gained the ability to sail to other islands where I can gather more ingredients as well as materials for a blacksmith I have yet to meet.

This is a game that effectively moves by questing and crafting. Which is fine by me because while I can take or leave quests, I love item crafting. The only catch is that there have to be items worth crafting and so far Shining Hearts has failed to deliver on that front. The only thing you can craft is bread. As we all know, all bread contains the same basic ingredients: flour, yeast, salt. Maybe milk, maybe fat, maybe eggs, maybe sugar. Then you add some extra ingredients and control the amount of heat and presto, bread! Sure, there are lots of different types of flour, eggs, fat, etc. Sure, it’s fun to go around collecting ingredients. Sure, the resulting bread inevitably looks delectable, but in the end bread is bread.

I don’t have a problem with the actual bread-making process though. It’s a little tedious to start with, but once you make something good, you can save the recipe so you don’t have to pick out individual ingredients the next time. Plus the advantage of playing a game that’s 4 years old is that there are tons of FAQs out there to simplify things. As a bonus, this also makes getting new recipes a cinch. Maybe once I have a few more recipes in my repertoire and a few more sources of ingredients things will get a little more interesting. It’s early days yet.

Apart from baking bread, the rest of your time is spent giving bread to others, walking around, collecting stuff and interacting with your party characters and NPCs. A breakdown would look something like this:

The same bread. The same fish. The same people. Every day. That’s why I compared it to Rune Factory, but RFs at least have more interesting characters, seasons, farming, cooking, festivals and (relatively) fast-moving storylines. The developer’s heart is in the right place, but the baking, fishing and fighting they came up with isn’t fun, and I don’t like any of my party members at all. Same goes for the townspeople, except the little tsundere elf girl and the little girl on the beach.

But again, it’s early days yet. Only 13 hours in (wait, is that early?) with only 2 islands uncovered, so I won’t make any hasty decisions just yet. They could still add a lot of gameplay elements and flesh out the characters some more, and the story could turn out to be really good so… yeah. I’ll be back at the 30 hour mark.

Related posts:

Shining Hearts – Much better now Shining Hearts – Glad it’s finally over Shining Blade – Confusing for Shining Hearts fans (spoilers) Shining Ark = Shining Hearts’ atmosphere + Shining Blade’s battles