Shining Wisdom
released on Jul 26, 1996
Once, long ago, a fearsome giant known as the "Dark Titan" rose from the abyss and nearly destroyed all Palacia before being bound by magic. Now, the Black Elf Pazort is scheming to rule the world by returning the Dark Titan from the depths of the abyss! But, there is hope. Mars, the son of the legendary warrior Jiles, begins his service in the King's guard at castle Odegan this very day. Guide him through the terrifying traps and devious dungeons as you struggle to seal the Four Elementals that can power Pazort's scheme! Your journey will not be easy. The Lily Pads of Sudden Discomfort lie near every watery path. Rainbow Stinger Scorpions block critical junctions. And, Pazort himself waits in the dank depths of the Catacomb Marsh, guarding the rising Titan. To succeed, you must wield special weapons, items, and power orbs with skill never before witnessed in the land. And succeed you must, for failure will result in the end of all mankind, and the loss of that important victory smooch from the princess.
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Forgetting that I had ways to play other Genesis Shining games via my PS3 Genesis collection, I went out and found a couple Shining games on Saturn to play for this month's TR. Shining Wisdom was one of those games I found, and I was pretty excited to see that there was a Zelda-like action/adventure game in the series, as I'm a big fan of that style of game. AJ warned me it wasn't very good, but I've never been one to be terribly deterred by how bad a game might be. Hoo boy, was I in for a surprise XD. It took me about 10.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story follows you, the son of the dead dragon-slaying hero Jiles, as you're about to be inducted into the royal knights of the realm of Odegan. However, events unfold on your first day on the job that get you embroiled in the center of a plot by the evil Dark Elf to unseal the evil djinn and revive the great slumbering giant who rests beneath the kingdom and will destroy everything if he's woken up! The game was originally supposed to be a Genesis game, but it was bumped up late in development to be a Saturn game, so there really isn't all that much story. It does a fine job setting the stakes, but there just isn't really enough there to really get engaged with, and what is there I had a hard time getting all that interested in (they really like to flap their gums a lot about not much at all Xp). As a last note on the writing, it's also pretty rough at signposting, with many characters only telling you where to go next a single time, and then not repeating it upon speaking to them again.
The gameplay though, that's where this game goes from mediocre to the worst game I have played all year. The list of things wrong with this game are long, but I'll start with the most important of them all to get right to the good stuff. This is a pretty typical top-down Zelda-like action/adventure game in that you have a life bar, sub-weapons, an overworld to explore, NPCs to talk to, dungeons to conquer, and bosses to fight. Most of the basic trappings will be very familiar to anyone who has even glimpsed at things like A Link to the Past (which itself predates this game by about four years).
What is very not typical about it is how below your health bar you have a gauge with a series of numbers, and that is your running gauge. You need to mash the B button (or the X, Y, or Z buttons) to get up to running speed, and then you can hold the B button to keep that speed, but you'll slow down if you get hit (and the hit detection sucks, your sword's range is awful, and you just know that almost every enemy is far more mobile than you right from the start of the game). That running gauge is also your magic charge gauge, and casting a magic attack also means that your running goes to zero along with your magical charge. This all means that you are constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, mashing the B button for well over half the playtime of this game. It makes the game physically uncomfortable and even painful to play with how much you have to mash it. I honestly have no idea why they thought this was a good idea compared to just holding the button down to charge it or just having it auto charge and running just being automatic (walking is SO slow you'd never want to do it). It makes just playing the game a constant, painful chore, and the playing of the game (as we're about to get to) is not even a great time in the first place.
I already mentioned that your sword's range is awful and hit detection is pretty spotty, but you have tons of sub weapons you can use as well (with many such as the "magic hand" clearly in some way being the inspiration for how games like Golden Sun would design environmental puzzles many years down the road). The main issue with this is that ALL of these weapons are bound to the C button. A handles consumable items, B is the eternal mashing button, and that leaves only C as the button to which everything else (jumping shoes, kicking shoes, sliding shoes, your sword, your magic hand, and much much more) all need to be constantly juggled between the C button. This is really annoying and takes a ton of time to do, and it also means that you're often totally defenseless when puzzle solving because you don't have your sword equipped. Because this was originally a Genesis game and was pushed to Saturn very late in development, those three buttons are all you really get (X/Y/Z only mirror B, and R and L only work in one menu), and it's another thing that makes the game a consistently annoying chore to play.
The game's overall design is pretty rough as well. As mentioned before, signposting is pretty bad on the information level, but it's even worse on the map design level. Very often you'll be told to go to a location with only the barest (if any) indication of where that place is, leaving you to wander around the map until you happen to stumble into it. The game has no world map (such as A Link to the Past does), and the map in the manual is so vague that it's virtually useless, so you're on your own to bump and stumble into where the next area to go is. Dungeon design ranges from mediocre and threadbare to overly convoluted and filled with poorly signposted puzzles.
The game has tons of puzzles where you need to use a magically charged version of one of your many items to progress, but exactly how you do it and with which one is up to you to trial and error your way through, and that's if there's any indication a puzzle exists at all (the goddess statue that only appears when the sand is stone is the worst offender here). Upon looking up the solution to a lot of them (after a ton of fruitless trial and error), it was often a logical solution, but how you'd think to even do that feels like something out of an point'n'click adventure game. The game also has a lot of items that are very easy to miss or out of the way to find (on the way to where you're actually going next), so it's also very easy to get caught up in trying every which'a'way to solve a puzzle not realizing that you don't even have the tools to do it. And this is all while you're being constantly assaulted by infinitely (and quickly) respawning enemies that are very annoying to kill. The only small mercy here is that the penalty for dying is only being sent back to the start of the dungeon you're in. You don't even lose any money, which is a nice silver lining I suppose. The game overall is very forgiving, with the ability to carry TONS of healing items and the bosses being (for better or worse) universally very easy, which is again a nice consolation with how annoying all of the normal enemies are.
The presentation is a mixed bag. The environments are all 2D, but the character and enemy models are this sort of 3D-to-2D look that at times looks alright and at other times (such as on larger enemies and bosses) looks pretty rough. Character portraits when important characters are talking are well detailed and don't look bad, per se, but they often rarely look much at all like the character who they represent, even down to the skin color of the character being clearly different between the in-game model and the portrait. The music is all around pretty good. There are a few dungeons with fairly boring tracks, but overall the music is basically the only part of the game that gets a passing grade from me.
Verdict: Not Recommended. As I said before, this is the worst game I've played all year. At first I was in doubt whether this game was REALLY worse than Maken Shao, but by the end of it I was absolutely positive. This is a game that is simply never fun to play, and is constantly putting obstacles in the way of you enjoying your time with it even a little. The music may be alright, but decent music alone does not a tolerable game make. That just means that you're not having your ears assaulted during the otherwise awful experience. Whether you're a fan of Zelda-style games or the Shining series in general, this is a game to completely avoid unless you deliberately want to give yourself a bad time.
The story follows you, the son of the dead dragon-slaying hero Jiles, as you're about to be inducted into the royal knights of the realm of Odegan. However, events unfold on your first day on the job that get you embroiled in the center of a plot by the evil Dark Elf to unseal the evil djinn and revive the great slumbering giant who rests beneath the kingdom and will destroy everything if he's woken up! The game was originally supposed to be a Genesis game, but it was bumped up late in development to be a Saturn game, so there really isn't all that much story. It does a fine job setting the stakes, but there just isn't really enough there to really get engaged with, and what is there I had a hard time getting all that interested in (they really like to flap their gums a lot about not much at all Xp). As a last note on the writing, it's also pretty rough at signposting, with many characters only telling you where to go next a single time, and then not repeating it upon speaking to them again.
The gameplay though, that's where this game goes from mediocre to the worst game I have played all year. The list of things wrong with this game are long, but I'll start with the most important of them all to get right to the good stuff. This is a pretty typical top-down Zelda-like action/adventure game in that you have a life bar, sub-weapons, an overworld to explore, NPCs to talk to, dungeons to conquer, and bosses to fight. Most of the basic trappings will be very familiar to anyone who has even glimpsed at things like A Link to the Past (which itself predates this game by about four years).
What is very not typical about it is how below your health bar you have a gauge with a series of numbers, and that is your running gauge. You need to mash the B button (or the X, Y, or Z buttons) to get up to running speed, and then you can hold the B button to keep that speed, but you'll slow down if you get hit (and the hit detection sucks, your sword's range is awful, and you just know that almost every enemy is far more mobile than you right from the start of the game). That running gauge is also your magic charge gauge, and casting a magic attack also means that your running goes to zero along with your magical charge. This all means that you are constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, mashing the B button for well over half the playtime of this game. It makes the game physically uncomfortable and even painful to play with how much you have to mash it. I honestly have no idea why they thought this was a good idea compared to just holding the button down to charge it or just having it auto charge and running just being automatic (walking is SO slow you'd never want to do it). It makes just playing the game a constant, painful chore, and the playing of the game (as we're about to get to) is not even a great time in the first place.
I already mentioned that your sword's range is awful and hit detection is pretty spotty, but you have tons of sub weapons you can use as well (with many such as the "magic hand" clearly in some way being the inspiration for how games like Golden Sun would design environmental puzzles many years down the road). The main issue with this is that ALL of these weapons are bound to the C button. A handles consumable items, B is the eternal mashing button, and that leaves only C as the button to which everything else (jumping shoes, kicking shoes, sliding shoes, your sword, your magic hand, and much much more) all need to be constantly juggled between the C button. This is really annoying and takes a ton of time to do, and it also means that you're often totally defenseless when puzzle solving because you don't have your sword equipped. Because this was originally a Genesis game and was pushed to Saturn very late in development, those three buttons are all you really get (X/Y/Z only mirror B, and R and L only work in one menu), and it's another thing that makes the game a consistently annoying chore to play.
The game's overall design is pretty rough as well. As mentioned before, signposting is pretty bad on the information level, but it's even worse on the map design level. Very often you'll be told to go to a location with only the barest (if any) indication of where that place is, leaving you to wander around the map until you happen to stumble into it. The game has no world map (such as A Link to the Past does), and the map in the manual is so vague that it's virtually useless, so you're on your own to bump and stumble into where the next area to go is. Dungeon design ranges from mediocre and threadbare to overly convoluted and filled with poorly signposted puzzles.
The game has tons of puzzles where you need to use a magically charged version of one of your many items to progress, but exactly how you do it and with which one is up to you to trial and error your way through, and that's if there's any indication a puzzle exists at all (the goddess statue that only appears when the sand is stone is the worst offender here). Upon looking up the solution to a lot of them (after a ton of fruitless trial and error), it was often a logical solution, but how you'd think to even do that feels like something out of an point'n'click adventure game. The game also has a lot of items that are very easy to miss or out of the way to find (on the way to where you're actually going next), so it's also very easy to get caught up in trying every which'a'way to solve a puzzle not realizing that you don't even have the tools to do it. And this is all while you're being constantly assaulted by infinitely (and quickly) respawning enemies that are very annoying to kill. The only small mercy here is that the penalty for dying is only being sent back to the start of the dungeon you're in. You don't even lose any money, which is a nice silver lining I suppose. The game overall is very forgiving, with the ability to carry TONS of healing items and the bosses being (for better or worse) universally very easy, which is again a nice consolation with how annoying all of the normal enemies are.
The presentation is a mixed bag. The environments are all 2D, but the character and enemy models are this sort of 3D-to-2D look that at times looks alright and at other times (such as on larger enemies and bosses) looks pretty rough. Character portraits when important characters are talking are well detailed and don't look bad, per se, but they often rarely look much at all like the character who they represent, even down to the skin color of the character being clearly different between the in-game model and the portrait. The music is all around pretty good. There are a few dungeons with fairly boring tracks, but overall the music is basically the only part of the game that gets a passing grade from me.
Verdict: Not Recommended. As I said before, this is the worst game I've played all year. At first I was in doubt whether this game was REALLY worse than Maken Shao, but by the end of it I was absolutely positive. This is a game that is simply never fun to play, and is constantly putting obstacles in the way of you enjoying your time with it even a little. The music may be alright, but decent music alone does not a tolerable game make. That just means that you're not having your ears assaulted during the otherwise awful experience. Whether you're a fan of Zelda-style games or the Shining series in general, this is a game to completely avoid unless you deliberately want to give yourself a bad time.
What if Link... Was a car?
1 star for the music and for them trying something different
I liked nothing about this game. The story sucks, the graphics suck, the hit detection doesn't work half the time, there's zero sense of direction, maps are way too cramped, secrets are so cryptic they go against the fundamentals of game design, the running mechanic is horrible and makes the game virtually unplayable without a turbo controller, and you only have ONE BUTTON for that shares your equipment and weapons, so you're constantly swapping between your sword and utilities.
I only marked this game as complete because my file got corrupt halfway through and took me to the end credits. Literally play anything else aside from this, it's not worth it no matter how shiny Working Designs made the packaging.
I liked nothing about this game. The story sucks, the graphics suck, the hit detection doesn't work half the time, there's zero sense of direction, maps are way too cramped, secrets are so cryptic they go against the fundamentals of game design, the running mechanic is horrible and makes the game virtually unplayable without a turbo controller, and you only have ONE BUTTON for that shares your equipment and weapons, so you're constantly swapping between your sword and utilities.
I only marked this game as complete because my file got corrupt halfway through and took me to the end credits. Literally play anything else aside from this, it's not worth it no matter how shiny Working Designs made the packaging.
Personally I think Shining Wisdom a title to try absolutely, just for the multitude of objects to be used and above all for the great atmosphere that characterizes it and differentiates it from other JRPG of its kind. A title that, if taken in the right direction, skillfully knows how to give hours and hours of healthy fun to all fans of the genre.
Replayed this title after many years - I owned it on the Saturn around the time it was new. A far better experience than I remember, and I contribute that to an extra 20+ years of action adventure experience. The quirks and exploration are satisfying with a fully retro direction - I was reminded of the Oasis titles (Beyond Oasis, Legend of Oasis) besides others. There's also few games that make up for the poor hit boxes and targeting with your weapons, by flat out mutually damaging an enemy when you collide.
It's a relatively short title, felt fluid to control, and filled with some satisfying tunes (that I believe are by the same composer behind Landstalker). After having a softlock issue due to an emulator after 80% of the game, I started over and was able to complete the title <6 hours with 99% of the items (I skipped a certain mini-game for said missing piece). I look forward to 5+ years from now and having the urge to replay this again.
It's a relatively short title, felt fluid to control, and filled with some satisfying tunes (that I believe are by the same composer behind Landstalker). After having a softlock issue due to an emulator after 80% of the game, I started over and was able to complete the title <6 hours with 99% of the items (I skipped a certain mini-game for said missing piece). I look forward to 5+ years from now and having the urge to replay this again.