Strap yourselves in, folks, because this one's gonna be a bummer. Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is one of those not-uncommon cases of an overly ambitious Indie game project that went to Kickstarter for the extra funds needed to realize its vision. The vision, in this case, is a full-sized open-world RPG with an elaborate real-time combat system in a similar vein as Bandai Namco's Tales franchise. However, Bamco's juggernaut JRPG franchise has benefitted from years of small, iterative alterations to its central "LMB System" and growing expertise in crafting bespoke fantasy universes that occupy their own sense of place and logical consistency. It's not always the easiest series to break into as a result, but anyone who has played more of the breadth of the series as opposed to the occasional one that breaks through into the mainstream (like Symphonia and Vesperia) knows that there's a discipline, honed through many instances over several decades, behind each game's construction. I don't say this to demean the developers of Shiness and their decision to shoot for the moon, only that the fledgling studio (French studio Enigami, which sadly shuttered a few months after the game's release) clearly bit off a lot more than it could chew.

Shiness is about a world governed by martial arts and mysticism, populated by various races: the three most prominent of the "civilized" races include standard humans, the towering bestial Shelks, and the diminutive rodent-like Wakis. The protagonist, a bolder-than-usual Waki named Chado, is blessed with the unusual gift of being able to see and communicate with Shiness: elemental spirits that govern each of the world's continents. It's with their assistance and insight that he's seeking the fabled "Land of Life" hidden somewhere across the world, eventually falling in with a mysterious waif and her retinue after an unexpected airship crash. I can't say I know much more about where the plot is going, because after almost ten hours I'm still in the opening areas of the game: part of Shiness's ambition was to equal the length of its RPG influences.

The facet of Shiness that clearly saw the most work, along with the world-building, is the fighter-style combat system. As with Tales, the real-time battles move fast and can overwhelm you quickly, and part of preparation process is to equip combat and magic skills that complement each other. Each of the game's five characters has four main melee skills and a considerable number of magical skills, the latter of which are beholden to elements. Players can choose to prioritize melee or magic with any character - and some enemies are easier with one or the other - but each carries its own challenges. Melee, for example, requires becoming an expert at parrying moves, breaking guards, and closing the distance on magic-using enemies. Magic-users, meanwhile, must carve out moments in battle where they can recharge their mana (called Shi in-game) by noting the elemental bias of the arena at that moment: the walls of the combat arena, which also serve to enclose the battle, will flash between colors intermittently and when it's the same color as your preferred element that element's Shi will charge that much faster. The combat simplifies itself a little by only ever being a one-on-one battle with a Marvel vs. Capcom style tagging system: both you and the enemy can substitute in other team members to give the current fighter a break (they'll slowly regen health while inactive).

I'm sad to say that I despise the combat system, for as much as I appreciate what it's trying to do. I thought the Legaia games, which are perhaps closer to Shiness's combat system than even Tales, were underappreciated for trying to inject some fighter game inputs and systems into an RPG because it made even basic combat against mobs that much more engaging. However, despite only ever having a single opponent to worry about, I found it frequently difficult to track where they were if they left the bottom of the screen, and a lot of the controls are extremely sluggish and unresponsive: absolutely not what you want from a combat system aping a fighter. The "switch character" button in particular would rarely save someone in the midst of an enemy combo, which meant losing that character for the remainder of the fight. The difficulty of the combat fluctuates wildly between sections of the game: upon entering the Meos Forest, the second overworld area, I find myself barely able to scrape through most battles despite whizzing through most normal battles in the previous dungeon. Magic is nigh impossible to guard or dodge, given the speed at which those projectiles are formed and hit especially if you're trying to get in close for melee, and you can lose half your health bar with a single lapse in timing. Parrying is also attached to a gauge named "tension" which rises when you attack normally and can be spent to either parry an enemy combo and leave them open for a counter-assault, use a special technique, or spend the entire tension bar for a "hyper" move: essentially the game's take on Tales's mystic artes or Final Fantasy's limit breaks. If an enemy is too aggressive, it's easy for the constant parries to drain tension completely without you noticing, leaving you to take several punches in the face before you switch to guarding and taking chip damage. Each battle thus becomes this internecine exercise of waiting for a moment when you aren't getting pummelled and can hopefully defeat the enemy team before they wipe you out or force you to use too many restoratives (which, thankfully, are fairly ubiquitous). The enemy aggression and lack of responsiveness have really made fights a slog where I'm at in the game, eliminating much of my desire to continue.

The other problems with the game are a bit more quotidian: it's jank as hell. If you're not getting caught on the geometry or spotting visual glitches every few moments, you're having to deal with a very poorly localized script that is replete with typos, words that should be capitalized but aren't, and frequent turns of phrases that don't sound right whatsoever. The script and localization are often the first to be sacrificed on the altar of diminishing resources when it comes to game development crunch, but it's an unfortunate element to depreciate when so much of Shiness's appeal is in its setting, story, and characterization. It's hard to identify and relate to characters when they all talk like Google Translate, turns out, and I find myself unable to even care about the otherwise strong narrative aspects of the game either. Other fine ideas, which are features I'd probably appreciate more in a superior game, include: a Final Fantasy IX style equipment mastery system where you can permanently learn a weapon's skill if you use it enough; some minor hunting and crafting systems; a Gambit support system where you set coding-based conditions ("if ally has <50% health, then use heal") for currently inactive members to follow; and character-specific overworld skills used to solve puzzles like levitating objects out of the way or summoning rocks to push down pressure plates.

Do not misunderstand: I wanted to like Shiness a lot. I don't see many other games - Indie or otherwise - attempt to make an RPG with the mechanical and narrative size and scope of Tales on a shoestring budget. The setting, where anthro hamsters and bootleg DBZ characters perform elemental kung fu like a cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Avatar: The Last Airbender has potential, and I admire the moxie in every extra system and idea that the developers thought to implement, regardless of whether they had the time and resources to make it work. It's just that nothing functions all that well, including vital core components like the combat, and my admiration for its chutzpah has long since been superseded by my antipathy with trying to contend with its many structural problems and lack of finesse. Turns out it's a lot harder to make a Tales game than anyone outside of Namco Tales Studio knew.

Rating: 3 out of 5.