Shining in the Darkness (Genesis/Mega Drive)

The Shining series is one of Sega’s longest running role-playing game franchises that is still continuing to this day, but the name for the series does seem a touch odd. The most recognizable and high profile members of the Shining series are certainly the Shining Force games, but these tactical RPGs were not the games that kicked things off. Shining in the Darkness was the first in this franchise, but it began as a dungeon crawler instead of a tactical role-playing game, meaning that not only did its different naming convention lead to the series title being different, but it also encouraged future Shining titles to explore other styles of RPG since they didn’t have to always be a Shining Force title. However, it is still for the best that these future titles would shift away from Shining in the Darkness’s design, as the series did not really get off to the best of starts.

 

Set in a magical fantasy kingdom called Thornwood, the player gets to name the main protagonist as they set off into one gigantic labyrinth to face the villainous Dark Sol. Dark Sol has sealed the princess and the hero’s father in a dangerous maze and tells the king to relinquish his kingdom or neither will ever be seen again, but the player is sent in to try and save them without handing Thornwood over to evil. This plot does progress slowly over the experience, a few moments and reveals punctuating the journey to the final confrontation, but for the most part, you know all you need to at the start and any conversations between characters will likely be about what you’re meant to do next on your quest. You will have to talk to the king and his court as well as people at the inn from time to time to get important details or items to make progress in the game, but much of the dialogue is utilitarian or boilerplate, meaning that unless you’re able to get invested in a typical fantasy story line, it’s not really offering anything unique to attach to. Role-playing games tend to put some emphasis on plot, characters, or world-building, but Shining in the Darkness is a bit too by the book to impress with any of these elements.

The gameplay, sadly, is not much of an improvement. Most of the game is focused around repeated excursions into one giant interconnected labyrinth, and since movement through it is done through a first person perspective, most of it involves walking forward through many identical corridors. Different segments of the maze will have different colors so you know which floor or sub-area you’re in, but while in one of these places, save for the rare landmark or wall torches, you’re going to mostly see long stretches of plain walls on your left and right until you reach a junction that connects to more bland and barren corridors. There is no in-game map so navigation of the labyrinth will rely on learning its layout. You can eventually get a spell or item that will bring up a low detail map showing areas you’ve explored already, but it’s hardly going to help in the long term, especially with how disorienting turning around and taking corners can be in first person when it’s also being interrupted by random battles. Even if you do cave and start drawing your own map or using an online resource, there’s one thing that still makes maze navigation annoying, and it’s the constant need for backtracking and retreading the same ground. Up until pretty late in the game, every time you enter the labyrinth it will be through the front door, and while different important areas require you taking different paths through the maze, there are hardly any shortcuts and most important destinations will involve multiple trips covering the same ground until you finally reach the end of that portion. Even worse though has to be the many pointless side paths and traps meant to make things take longer and make exploration even more tedious. Spending time going down the wrong path just makes things take longer instead of getting more interesting or challenging, and while you may sometimes get a treasure for your troubles, it’s not really worth the constant fights you’ll have along the way.

 

Almost all of Shining in the Darkness’s fights are random battles that will crop up after taking a certain amount of steps or spinning in place, and while combat could have been a break from the monotony of trudging through identical hallways, the battles are just as basic themselves. Most fights in Shining in the Darkness are handled by holding down the attack button to deal with whatever enemies are on screen. You don’t get full control of who you attack, monsters appearing in groups and the player being able to pick which group they attack rather than an individual target, but the strategy in picking groups is often just choosing to attack a stronger enemy group to get rid of them first if you even want to put that much thought into your actions. The strategy in most every encounter is to attack all the enemies and heal up when necessary, but to the game’s credit, pretty late in the game enemies do start getting strong enough that you might have to use offensive magic spells to overcome their numbers or durability. In fact, when you do face a stronger monster or a boss in Shining in the Darkness, the combat can become quite interesting for a moment. You control three characters in most fights in the game, the main hero only really able to hit foes with a weapon but the two other characters Pyra and Milo both gradually unlocking magical spells to use in combat. The game gets off to an awful start just having you control the protagonist making constant dives into the labyrinth, only able to attack during the many fights and forced to retreat out of the maze to heal up and try again, but once the mages do join your group, you can actually spend much longer sessions in the labyrinth and get a lot more done without worrying about your health so much. The magic injects some thought into how you fight as you can choose to use damaging spells that hit multiple targets, spells that can weaken enemies and actually work on most foes, healing magic, and ones that can increase the power of your characters. A boss fight is pretty much going to be using Pyra and Milo’s magic effectively, the protagonist a blunt instrument you keep hitting the boss with while you strategize how to spend the limited magical reserves of your two mages. These all-too-short challenging fights are meant to be the payoff for all the grinding through regular enemies, but unfortunately, the grinding is far too present and oppressive to make the few interesting battles worth it.

While you do have an option to run from monsters that sometimes will work, it’s not recommended because Shining in the Darkness is so focused on the constant grind. When a monster is defeated, they’ll drop gold and give your characters some experience. Experience goes towards leveling up, characters getting better stats that are certainly necessary as new areas of the labyrinth are designed to hit your characters hard and fast if you are underleveled. Gold goes towards stuff you buy in town, the player able to restore their health and magic by spending a bit at the inn, able to revive characters at the shrine if they fall in battle, but most importantly, there are shops where the player will buy weapons and armor to increase the strength and defense of their three fighters. This is an absolutely necessary part of being strong enough to conquer the labyrinth, the gold distribution in the game making important purchases take a long time to build up to and thus making nearly every battle a requirement to build up the cash to stay competitive with your opposition. You could technically use the magic of Pyra and Milo to overcome some gaps in strength, but magic power is at a premium, it being your primary means of healing in the labyrinth and dealing with the bosses or special enemies. Using it to clear out regular foes will likely force a retreat from the dungeon to refill at the inn, leading to you plunging into repetitive maze design again and facing enemies all over again along the way. Then there are spells like Revive and Egress, Revive being tied to Milo and your main means of bringing back the dead in the dungeon, but this will be taken from you if he is the one who dies. Pyra holds onto Egress, the way to quickly escape the labyrinth from any area, again unusable if she’s dead and both it and Revive have magic power costs that mean you can’t drain the magic users small reserves dry if you want to keep those options on hand. The good news is if you die in the labyrinth with all three warriors, you’ll be taken to the shrine in town to be revived, but you’ll lose some gold as the cost for what could have otherwise been a handy teleport.

 

Technically, you can carry items to make up for the magic problem, but then we hit another snag. Each character in your party has 8 inventory slots, although this should really be best thought of as four armor slots and four item slots as your equipment must be kept in your inventory even when worn. From there, you also need to consider bringing important items like keys into the dungeon, so that’s even less space, and you’ll likely want to leave some room for treasures you’ll find in the dungeon. This leaves a little room for things like healing items, the angel feather that works like Egress, and specialty items like reviving items or antidotes. These don’t stack though, so if you want to have two angel feathers, that’s two slots in someone’s inventory devoted to them. This makes for yet another reason you might leave the labyrinth prematurely, the player maybe needing to stock up or go sell the items they found to make some room. Your inventory, ultimately, is just another factor in making the repeated labyrinth visits tedious and dull as they’re focused less on conquest and more on struggling to make things conducive to progress.

THE VERDICT: The idea of a game where you plunge into the same massive interconnected dungeon repeatedly, exiting it now and again to stock up on supplies to better your adventuring party, isn’t a bad one in theory, but Shining in the Darkness doesn’t execute it in an interesting way. The labyrinth itself is just long and bland branching corridors the player will have to retread on repeated visits, random battles cropping up that are boring to win but necessary to build up the experience and money needed to increase your strength so you don’t have to revisit the same areas again later as you try to push towards your current objective. Limited inventory and few shortcuts to get to newer areas more quickly make most of the game a monotonous crawl through mindless fights with monsters, and while things do start picking up some near the end where the more involved fights start becoming more common, it’s definitely not worth the grind that it takes to get to these marginally better battles.

 

And so, I give Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A TERRIBLE rating. Admittedly, going to town and using the spoils of battle to build up your characters is satisfying in some manner, but it and the boss battles that aren’t over too quickly are like stomping grapes for hours only to get a small sip of wine.  Many RPGs will have plenty of small battles that are easily overcome by holding down the attack button, but they don’t bog down the experience because they include things like interesting locales, story moments, and plenty of more thoughtful fights to make up for the simplistic small fights. Shining in the Darkness has one bland labyrinth that changes its wall design a few times to other generic looks, a story that goes pretty much as expected but must be engaged with so you have to exit the labyrinth from time to time to continue it, and very few of the highlight battles you’d hope for. So much of Shining in the Darkness is repeating the same actions in the hope of a payoff and getting very minor ones that hardly make up for the time investment. If you have the patience for such repetition, Shining in the Darkness’s grind might not irk you much, but there’s still the matter that even at its best, the game isn’t really pushing any boundaries or delivering on anything particularly interesting, its design decisions just too limiting on the whole.

 

Shining in the Darkness has many traits that could work in a properly paced or structured RPG. The plot is basic but could carry a fine battle system and seeing your efforts rewarded with better armor and character strength is satisfying. Unfortunately, what you do in the game is repetitive and uninvolved 90% of the time, and even when things do require more attention, it never really escalates into something worthy of all the effort you put into building up to the underwhelming payoff.