The first Japanese game I ever played to completion with no knowledge of the language outside a few basic characters was Shining and the Darkness for the Sega Mega Drive, later localized as Shining in the Darkness for North America by Sega of America. It wasn’t mad savant skills that got me through this text-heavy role-playing game, but a spoiler-free walkthrough and plenty of maps yanked from a Japanese magazine that came with the game when I purchased it. I’d played a few Japanese MD games previously, but most were shooters such as Gaiares or not quite perfect arcade ports like Golden Axe or Altered Beast.
I stumbled upon Shining and six of seven other imports at a used book and record store in NYC back around early 1992 and couldn’t pass up buying all of the games at somewhere between eight and ten dollars each. All of those games are still in the library here and some even get pulled out and played on occasion. It took me the better part of the summer to complete SitD because I was only using the walkthrough when I got stuck and was filling in the plot on my own. It ended up being pretty close to what the actual game and English version would be because it was a simple “rescue the kidnapped princess!” story with a few expected and unexpected twists.
What I loved about the game (and still do to this day) was how it simplified the more complex setup of a Wizardry game by paring back the party from six to three members, streamlining the combat even more yet still kept the difficulty high if you went in under prepared. Success at the game required “grinding” levels and paying attention to the dungeon layouts which featured many traps, random battles and some nice as well as nasty surprises. Enemy strength increased geometrically as progress was made on each floor and if you wandered too far too fast you’d soon know about it either by having your party wiped out or near dead. If you didn’t pack a magic feather in your limited inventory, you had to hoof it back the way you came and hope to heck you lucked out and didn’t cross paths with anything too strong.
All this nostalgia popped up because of a new video series on Shining in the Darkness by Jessica “Allaweh” Brown over at her always awesome and informative site. She’s doing a blind play of the game that’s quite enjoyable and fun to watch because I can see myself having that same sense of wonder back when I first played the game. I’ll keep watching these videos until she makes it though the whole game because there’s a lot to discover as those dungeons get deeper and more dangerous. It’s worth tracking down if you don’t mind getting it on PC directly from Sega of America.
As for Shining the Holy Ark? it’s here because I thought I’d sold my only copy years ago but it seems that I had an extra one up in the closet with my remaining Sega Saturn games. Nice. I was lamenting to a few people recently that I missed a bunch of the Saturn games I’d sold off including this one but it seems I can lament no more about this gem. Fortunately I have three Saturns here and they all still work. Which means I’ll probably be replaying that “sequel” at some point later this year once things quiet down to a more normal mode.
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 
Recently, I’ve also fired up a copy of Shining Wisdom (for the Saturn from 1995), which actually makes some references to this game by talking about a “kingdom to the west, across the mountains.” It’s more of an action/adventure title, sort of like Zelda, but they did a really good job with it. I’m only about an hour into it, but it’s very thick on story and dialogue, the gameplay is pretty solid, and it captures that mid-90s adventure feel very well. 🙂
I hear that most of the post-2002 titles pretty much are either remakes/reboots, or just take place in a totally separate continuity from the 1990s titles in the franchise. I’ve tried to piece together timelines of it, but it’s way too complicated once you start talking about the later entries. There’s a clear timeline for the older Shining Force games, including Wisdom, Darkness, etc., but then Shining Soul is a “remake” of “Shining Force I,” but Soul II and beyond don’t seem to have much relation at all, LOL.
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Oh, the timeline is all over the map in this “series”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_%28series%29
Some games are more connected than others, but it’s probably going to be next to impossible to link them all into a cohesive universe without a lot of work. I’m holding off from playing anything in the series for a while because once I start going, that’s that for anything work-related…
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How does this work for you as far as the “main” continuity?:
http://www.shiningforcecentral.com/?p=studies&c=chronology
I think this is based on a timeline once published by Camelot (prior to 2002), since they handled the production of the original games.
I think it stands to reason that Shining Soul onwards are just a separate storyline altogether. I can see the connections of the pre-2002 games and they make sense, however, I’ve not played much of the newer entries, but from all the stuff I can piece together through research on various Wikis and all, their connections are a bit more tenuous. Soul seems to be a retelling of “Shining Force I,” but the other games seem to introduce new, unseen lands and tell completely different tales.
Apparently, though, beyond the reference I mentioned about the “kingdom to the west,” there’s another reference in Wisdom to Shining in the Darkness, where they talk about the “newly founded kingdom of Stormsong to the west.” So that puts Wisdom at least 25 or more years before Darkness?
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Aha. I went to that Shining site, but it wouldn’t load properly yesterday. Thanks for that working link. I like that they make note that the non-Camelot produced shining games are hard to fit into the continuity because they either ignore it or change things up to not fit where the Camelot-created games land. You’ll see once you play them at some point that they look and play differently for a reason. New developers trying out new things (with bits of old tossed in) makes for interesting but very different directions.
Ha. That Shining Wisdom info is interesting as I always thought of Shining in the Darkness as the beginning of the series (at least in terms of what Camelot had done). You learn something new every day! 😀
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