Shining Resonance Refrain is an action JRPG in the long running Shining franchise.
It’s also a port of a game - Shining Resonance - that only came out in Japan on the Playstation 3 and contains additional features! Shining Resonance was developed by Media.Vision while Refrain was developed by O-Two; and both versions were published by Sega.
I played the Xbox One version. There are two modes you can choose from, Original and Refrain. I chose to play on Refrain due to the fact that I usually only play games once and because it has enhanced features that the port added in it; such as being able to build bonds with characters, going on dates, and adding a couple of additional characters to my party. I consider it a new game plus mode, because It was weird starting out with the additional characters in my party even though it didn’t make sense at that point in the story, totally my fault though - but I actually think this is a neat feature.
It was a well-polished experience without any bugs, glitches, or graphical issues. The controls were mostly straight forward, but unfortunately I suffered an issue because a couple of inputs shared a button. To elaborate on that, there is an ability that you gain where you have to fill up a gauge and press R1 to activate it; it’s called BAND. There’s also a very spoilery ability you gain that makes you super powerful that you activate by pressing L1 and R1, but sometimes when I’d try to activate that, BAND would activate instead. It wasn’t too bad, but could be mildly infuriating when I was getting my butt kicked in a boss fight and needed that small extra boost.
Speaking of the controls, I’d say that gameplay wise it plays sort of like Tales of Berseria, in that you and the enemies move around in real time in a small enclosed area and you press buttons to do what attack you want until they are dead, whilst dodging so that you don’t end up dead. Each character in your party gets a variety of attacks/spells that can be chosen from and mapped to a button, but only 4 can be chosen at a time for each character. Characters can also be equipped with items called Aspects, which is what gives them additional stats and effects. Only a few of those can be held by a single character as well. That said, this does pave the way for some broken builds, if you so choose to pursue them!
I think the combat is both the best and worst part of the game. It can be super fun and engaging (which is why this game keeps creeping back into my thoughts) but it can also be a drag because of the huge difficulty spikes that some of the bosses have. Seriously, regular enemies are thoughtless encounters, but some of the boss fights are… well, they are something.
Regular enemies you encounter in the field will level up with you as you progress in the game, which is sort of good because of grinding (something I’ll get into in a minute) but what sucks is that you cannot figure out what level you should be to fight a boss until you engage that boss. The first boss in the game (disregarding the prologue) is level 14, I grinded on my way there for the fun of it and encountered it at level 7; naturally my party wiped in two hits. From what I recall, the highest leveled enemy in the area was level 6? To make things more confusing, some areas will have a super powerful enemy that’s like twenty or so levels above you, blocking the way - the game world is separated into modules by the way, ala games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Dragon Age: Origins - when you come across an area you aren’t meant to go into yet. But then they’ll have disappeared when you are ready to tackle those areas for the sake of the story.
Other than the worry of being underleveled, another thing that comes into play when dealing with bosses is the fact that you can only carry a certain number of each item. For example, you can only carry twenty healing potions, ten high healing potions, and ten revives at once. I get that they did this so you couldn’t just chug your way to victory, but I still hate it. Especially when it’s one of those instances where you have to fight bosses back to back and you had to use most of your healing stuff on the first boss.
Some of the boss fights were fun, but some were poor and it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the boss, but rather the party AI. So…….. from what I can recall, there are two bosses in the game that can do area of effect damage, one would cast a straight line of fire and another a cone of lightning, well, my allied AI companions would run straight through that and die EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Therefore, I ended up having to fight each of those boss fights one on one. Luckily those two bosses had super easy to read movesets, so it wasn’t much of an issue, but there’s still something really annoying about seeing the rest of your party dying through no fault of your own.
This is one of those games where leveling helps immensely, and thus that was my strategy for overcoming the harder boss fights. By the time I finished the game, the protagonist, Yuma, was level 71. Yuma… not the entire party… just… Yuma. And here’s where I’m going to point out a really lame and glaring flaw in this game, your inactive party members do not level. You have to regularly rotate them out and level them all up, which is where the vast majority of my playtime with this game went. Now, yeah, most of my party was high 60’s, early 70’s when I finished, but it was a struggle to get them there. Side tangent before I get back to the main point; there’s one point in the game where you are forced to play as two specific characters and only have those two characters in your party, and if you didn’t grind them by that point in the game and don’t have a spare save file on hand, then you are totally screwed. I got lucky and managed to come across a post that warned me of that, so I was able to prepare in advance.
There are sidequests that are infinitely repeatable, which you might think would be a good source of experience, except that for whatever reason, they don’t reward you with exp. Usually you just get an inconsequential item as a reward. All the sidequests are either collecting a certain number of things like carrots or killing a specific number of a certain enemy; so there’s not much to be gained by them unless you want to do them.
And for the sake of transparency, you remember those Aspects that I mentioned earlier? There is allegedly one that you can get which will level up your inactive party members, but I found out about it super late into the game and never figured out how to get it.
Back on track, so, a lot of my playtime in this game came from grinding dungeons over and over on repeat, using a very specific method, to level my characters quickly. I’d estimate that I spent 15 - 20 hours of my 40 hour playtime doing this. Either I’m a masochist, have Stockholm Syndrome, or this is genuinely the case, but I found the dungeons to be well executed!
Dungeons are accessed through a thing called Grimoire. Throughout the game you can get different items that you can use to change what enemies, items, and characteristics there are, in dungeons. Dungeon map layout is also randomized each time for a unique experience, plus you can choose from different skins for the dungeon (beach, volcano, school, etc). So that did help break up the monotony a bit, but it also goes to show that the developers knew that grinding in this game was going to be an issue.
I thought that the environments, while generic, were pretty; you’ve got your snow area, your grass plains area, and your desert area. The music and singing in this game was well done - as it should be considering the title alludes to music and music being a main theme of the game; to the point that all the weapons have instruments built into them.
Another strong point of the game was the voice acting. I played with the Japanese acting, so I don’t know about the English dub, but some big names were brought in like Kazuya Nakai (Zoro from One Piece/Hijikata from Gintama). It’s just such a shame that the characters are bland and… characterless.
Character wise you’ve got Yuma - the protagonist - who acts like the overly generic shy guy caught in the middle of a harem anime, which is an apt description here because all of the women characters in the party give off harem vibes. Truly, it feels like all the women party members solely exist for Yuma to date. They all have moments (regularly) where they get super blushy around him and all look up to him even though he’s unconfident, whiny, and unassertive which makes the whole situation strange and feel all the more harem-y. Also, I couldn’t figure out where exactly to mention it, but pretty much all of the women in this game have big chests, or to lean onto this a bit more, one body type, so that’s kinda weird.
The first character you see in the game is Sonia, Princess of Astoria. She’s endowed with shining armor and is normally a calm, level-headed person, but around Yuma she’s often a stammering, blushing mess.
Next you’ve got Kirkia, a Diva Magica and elf who has a cool disposition, but often fawns over Yuma because of a power he possesses.
Then you’ve got Excela, The Imperial Princess of the Empire, and one of the lead antagonists of the game, she too, obsesses over Yuma because of plot reasons.
There are more, but this is the last one I’m going to mention in regards to how most of the women in the game pretty much solely exist to obsess over Yuma; Rinna. She’s my favorite because there’s an inkling of backstory to her that gives her depth, but I only ever saw it mentioned in passing and never explored/shown, and that is the fact she is something of an Archaeologist. I wish they had expanded on this with some cutscenes or side quests, it would have been a great way to build on her character and make her more memorable. Rinna often acts carefree and flirty, but has a lot of intellect that she likes to routinely keep under wraps. As previously hinted, she likes to routinely flirt with Yuma.
A few of the guy characters have important bits in the story, but they felt like they were mostly there to just move the story along and I never really got any extra background information out of them, other than how they relate to other characters in the party. So basically they were plot devices, not characters… And I think that’s my big problem with this game. Everyone in this game has an inherent function whether it be for the player to date as Yuma, or to just move the plot along. I mean, yeah, that’s a story, but there’s no window dressing to it, it’s all just very straightforward so there’s no getting invested, and that’s a real shame.
An even better example of this is, light spoilers ahead, a large chunk of the game revolves around one of the antagonists trying to find a way to make their dying emperor immortal; and you know what? I find that a pretty compelling hook. But then they fumbled it. How? They never showed the Emperor. He had no lines, no model, no sort of presence at all; and then he’s murdered off screen and we are expected to feel something, but how can we? A paragraph at best, that’s all the dude was.
To piggyback off that with another point, how can I be expected to care about the Empire falling apart or Excela’s struggle to try to keep it afloat when all I saw from it were antagonists? Seriously, the game would shift back and forth between where our heroes were to the antagonists which are always shown in a desolate building. That’s all well and good, but what of the rest of the Empire? What of its people? I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the capital, some citizens, or at least a small town. But nope, the Empire itself was also nothing more than a paragraph. No wonder its soldiers were so weak.
Between the lack of any Imperial Holdings, Emperor, or citizens, the small cast of characters, the fact that cutscenes are made of models with barely any animation behind them, and the fact that the game has only a single city/village you can visit, I got curious and tried to look up the budget for this game, but I couldn’t find anything. Still, I’m led to believe that it must have been low.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind another installment being added to this long running series, just with a bigger budget and better writing to back it up; because like I said before, I do feel that the combat is fun; so there are pieces here that work.
It’s also a port of a game - Shining Resonance - that only came out in Japan on the Playstation 3 and contains additional features! Shining Resonance was developed by Media.Vision while Refrain was developed by O-Two; and both versions were published by Sega.
I played the Xbox One version. There are two modes you can choose from, Original and Refrain. I chose to play on Refrain due to the fact that I usually only play games once and because it has enhanced features that the port added in it; such as being able to build bonds with characters, going on dates, and adding a couple of additional characters to my party. I consider it a new game plus mode, because It was weird starting out with the additional characters in my party even though it didn’t make sense at that point in the story, totally my fault though - but I actually think this is a neat feature.
It was a well-polished experience without any bugs, glitches, or graphical issues. The controls were mostly straight forward, but unfortunately I suffered an issue because a couple of inputs shared a button. To elaborate on that, there is an ability that you gain where you have to fill up a gauge and press R1 to activate it; it’s called BAND. There’s also a very spoilery ability you gain that makes you super powerful that you activate by pressing L1 and R1, but sometimes when I’d try to activate that, BAND would activate instead. It wasn’t too bad, but could be mildly infuriating when I was getting my butt kicked in a boss fight and needed that small extra boost.
Speaking of the controls, I’d say that gameplay wise it plays sort of like Tales of Berseria, in that you and the enemies move around in real time in a small enclosed area and you press buttons to do what attack you want until they are dead, whilst dodging so that you don’t end up dead. Each character in your party gets a variety of attacks/spells that can be chosen from and mapped to a button, but only 4 can be chosen at a time for each character. Characters can also be equipped with items called Aspects, which is what gives them additional stats and effects. Only a few of those can be held by a single character as well. That said, this does pave the way for some broken builds, if you so choose to pursue them!
I think the combat is both the best and worst part of the game. It can be super fun and engaging (which is why this game keeps creeping back into my thoughts) but it can also be a drag because of the huge difficulty spikes that some of the bosses have. Seriously, regular enemies are thoughtless encounters, but some of the boss fights are… well, they are something.
Regular enemies you encounter in the field will level up with you as you progress in the game, which is sort of good because of grinding (something I’ll get into in a minute) but what sucks is that you cannot figure out what level you should be to fight a boss until you engage that boss. The first boss in the game (disregarding the prologue) is level 14, I grinded on my way there for the fun of it and encountered it at level 7; naturally my party wiped in two hits. From what I recall, the highest leveled enemy in the area was level 6? To make things more confusing, some areas will have a super powerful enemy that’s like twenty or so levels above you, blocking the way - the game world is separated into modules by the way, ala games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Dragon Age: Origins - when you come across an area you aren’t meant to go into yet. But then they’ll have disappeared when you are ready to tackle those areas for the sake of the story.
Other than the worry of being underleveled, another thing that comes into play when dealing with bosses is the fact that you can only carry a certain number of each item. For example, you can only carry twenty healing potions, ten high healing potions, and ten revives at once. I get that they did this so you couldn’t just chug your way to victory, but I still hate it. Especially when it’s one of those instances where you have to fight bosses back to back and you had to use most of your healing stuff on the first boss.
Some of the boss fights were fun, but some were poor and it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the boss, but rather the party AI. So…….. from what I can recall, there are two bosses in the game that can do area of effect damage, one would cast a straight line of fire and another a cone of lightning, well, my allied AI companions would run straight through that and die EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Therefore, I ended up having to fight each of those boss fights one on one. Luckily those two bosses had super easy to read movesets, so it wasn’t much of an issue, but there’s still something really annoying about seeing the rest of your party dying through no fault of your own.
This is one of those games where leveling helps immensely, and thus that was my strategy for overcoming the harder boss fights. By the time I finished the game, the protagonist, Yuma, was level 71. Yuma… not the entire party… just… Yuma. And here’s where I’m going to point out a really lame and glaring flaw in this game, your inactive party members do not level. You have to regularly rotate them out and level them all up, which is where the vast majority of my playtime with this game went. Now, yeah, most of my party was high 60’s, early 70’s when I finished, but it was a struggle to get them there. Side tangent before I get back to the main point; there’s one point in the game where you are forced to play as two specific characters and only have those two characters in your party, and if you didn’t grind them by that point in the game and don’t have a spare save file on hand, then you are totally screwed. I got lucky and managed to come across a post that warned me of that, so I was able to prepare in advance.
There are sidequests that are infinitely repeatable, which you might think would be a good source of experience, except that for whatever reason, they don’t reward you with exp. Usually you just get an inconsequential item as a reward. All the sidequests are either collecting a certain number of things like carrots or killing a specific number of a certain enemy; so there’s not much to be gained by them unless you want to do them.
And for the sake of transparency, you remember those Aspects that I mentioned earlier? There is allegedly one that you can get which will level up your inactive party members, but I found out about it super late into the game and never figured out how to get it.
Back on track, so, a lot of my playtime in this game came from grinding dungeons over and over on repeat, using a very specific method, to level my characters quickly. I’d estimate that I spent 15 - 20 hours of my 40 hour playtime doing this. Either I’m a masochist, have Stockholm Syndrome, or this is genuinely the case, but I found the dungeons to be well executed!
Dungeons are accessed through a thing called Grimoire. Throughout the game you can get different items that you can use to change what enemies, items, and characteristics there are, in dungeons. Dungeon map layout is also randomized each time for a unique experience, plus you can choose from different skins for the dungeon (beach, volcano, school, etc). So that did help break up the monotony a bit, but it also goes to show that the developers knew that grinding in this game was going to be an issue.
I thought that the environments, while generic, were pretty; you’ve got your snow area, your grass plains area, and your desert area. The music and singing in this game was well done - as it should be considering the title alludes to music and music being a main theme of the game; to the point that all the weapons have instruments built into them.
Another strong point of the game was the voice acting. I played with the Japanese acting, so I don’t know about the English dub, but some big names were brought in like Kazuya Nakai (Zoro from One Piece/Hijikata from Gintama). It’s just such a shame that the characters are bland and… characterless.
Character wise you’ve got Yuma - the protagonist - who acts like the overly generic shy guy caught in the middle of a harem anime, which is an apt description here because all of the women characters in the party give off harem vibes. Truly, it feels like all the women party members solely exist for Yuma to date. They all have moments (regularly) where they get super blushy around him and all look up to him even though he’s unconfident, whiny, and unassertive which makes the whole situation strange and feel all the more harem-y. Also, I couldn’t figure out where exactly to mention it, but pretty much all of the women in this game have big chests, or to lean onto this a bit more, one body type, so that’s kinda weird.
The first character you see in the game is Sonia, Princess of Astoria. She’s endowed with shining armor and is normally a calm, level-headed person, but around Yuma she’s often a stammering, blushing mess.
Next you’ve got Kirkia, a Diva Magica and elf who has a cool disposition, but often fawns over Yuma because of a power he possesses.
Then you’ve got Excela, The Imperial Princess of the Empire, and one of the lead antagonists of the game, she too, obsesses over Yuma because of plot reasons.
There are more, but this is the last one I’m going to mention in regards to how most of the women in the game pretty much solely exist to obsess over Yuma; Rinna. She’s my favorite because there’s an inkling of backstory to her that gives her depth, but I only ever saw it mentioned in passing and never explored/shown, and that is the fact she is something of an Archaeologist. I wish they had expanded on this with some cutscenes or side quests, it would have been a great way to build on her character and make her more memorable. Rinna often acts carefree and flirty, but has a lot of intellect that she likes to routinely keep under wraps. As previously hinted, she likes to routinely flirt with Yuma.
A few of the guy characters have important bits in the story, but they felt like they were mostly there to just move the story along and I never really got any extra background information out of them, other than how they relate to other characters in the party. So basically they were plot devices, not characters… And I think that’s my big problem with this game. Everyone in this game has an inherent function whether it be for the player to date as Yuma, or to just move the plot along. I mean, yeah, that’s a story, but there’s no window dressing to it, it’s all just very straightforward so there’s no getting invested, and that’s a real shame.
An even better example of this is, light spoilers ahead, a large chunk of the game revolves around one of the antagonists trying to find a way to make their dying emperor immortal; and you know what? I find that a pretty compelling hook. But then they fumbled it. How? They never showed the Emperor. He had no lines, no model, no sort of presence at all; and then he’s murdered off screen and we are expected to feel something, but how can we? A paragraph at best, that’s all the dude was.
To piggyback off that with another point, how can I be expected to care about the Empire falling apart or Excela’s struggle to try to keep it afloat when all I saw from it were antagonists? Seriously, the game would shift back and forth between where our heroes were to the antagonists which are always shown in a desolate building. That’s all well and good, but what of the rest of the Empire? What of its people? I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the capital, some citizens, or at least a small town. But nope, the Empire itself was also nothing more than a paragraph. No wonder its soldiers were so weak.
Between the lack of any Imperial Holdings, Emperor, or citizens, the small cast of characters, the fact that cutscenes are made of models with barely any animation behind them, and the fact that the game has only a single city/village you can visit, I got curious and tried to look up the budget for this game, but I couldn’t find anything. Still, I’m led to believe that it must have been low.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind another installment being added to this long running series, just with a bigger budget and better writing to back it up; because like I said before, I do feel that the combat is fun; so there are pieces here that work.