Shining Wisdom

Shining Wisdom is not a great game by any means. The story is decent enough, but the characters are bland. The challenge is huge, but the enemies and bosses are easy. The lack of a real world map within the game makes exploring a little harder, but that could be a good or a bad thing.

The game doesn't shy away from the Zelda formula to much. Puzzle solving is similar, the world map is similar, you even go into similar locations, you have to find 2 upgradeable swords (like the Master Sword, blah blah blah). It has the classic top-down view of a classic Zelda, and similar fighting system. Heck, the game even starts out like Link to the Past. The world is fairly open ended like Zelda, but you have to open up road blocks with new items. The only thing that separates this game from Zelda is the mixing of Magic and Items to create new items. Shining Wisdom just comes off as a poor Zelda clone.


----------Battle System----------
Shining Wisdom is a straight up, no questions asked, Zelda cloning Action RPG. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well this happens to be one of the worst of the bunch that I've played. The Saturn has 6 face buttons, 4 D-pad buttons and 2 Trigger buttons. Shining Wisdom only uses 3 Face Buttons (3 useless ones are repeat functions of the B button) and the d-pad. The Triggers are not used. So what, it doesn't utilize the whole controller is what you're saying? Well, think of it like this. In a Zelda game, let's use the original one for an easy example. You have two inventory slots, which means you can use your A or B button for whichever item you want to use at any given moment. You can keep your sword attached to A through out the whole game, but if you find a puzzle that requires a bomb, then you have to go into your inventory and switch with the bomb and then switch back, no big deal. Shining Wisdom has the same basic concept but it takes a HUGE leap backwards in terms of functionality. You have to Switch between items ALL the time in this game. The biggest problem I have with this game is it requires you to use items with button A, thats like healing leafs or Angel's Wings. It requires you to use Magic with button B, which is actually a useless button in this game because all magic is fused with your Action Button (button C). And it requires you to use your action items with Button C. Button C is your most active button because you have to solve every puzzle with this button. This is also the button that uses your sword. So if you come across a puzzle, you have to de-equip your sword to switch to a pair of shoes or something silly like that. So you're practically defenseless while trying to solve a puzzle, and the regenerating monsters don't help one bit either.

Now imagine if you was playing the original Legend of Zelda, and you could only use the A Button for everything, that includes the sword. Imagine how frustrating that would be if you have to switch out your only real weapon for some item to get by some obstacle over and over again for 13 hours straight? It's the most annoying thing about this game and it's a huge huge flaw. Working Designs even mentions it in the booklet, but said they had no time to fix it. But that doesn't make it any better.

Ok, rant over.

To run in this game you have to charge up a meter that's below your health bar, by tapping the B button (or most likely the 3 Button) you can charge up your speed by levels 1 through 4. Once you reached the top, then you can hold down on the 3 button to keep it at that speed until you let go or get attacked. Once you gain a new item, you'll gain a 5th level on your charge meter. If you charge it all the way to 5, and then tap the C button, you'll emit a special attack.

The coolest thing about this game is how you can mix and match your special attacks by switch your magic orbs in and out. If you have a Fire orb equipped and have your Magic Hands equipped with C, then you can throw a Fire Dragon, or if you have your Stone Shoes equipped, then you can stomp a Fire pit around you. So it leaves a HUGE variety of puzzle solving. It all gets dragged down with the lame inventory switching though.

The game is rather difficult in some ways. The dungeons are short, but very hard at times. The puzzles are unforgiving and generally a pain in your side, but you can figure it out if you tough it out. Finding what to do next is usually difficult aswell. They don't give you very many hints. They don't even give you advice on what items you have found do, so you have to explore and expierment to find your next dungeon or item. This can be pretty hard at times.

You don't gain experience or levels in this game, but rather you find blue and red crystals, similar to Zelda's heart pieces. Blue crystals bump your HP up half-a notch, while the Red Crystals fill up a meter, and once that meter is full you can gain an extra HP. There's no magic bar so you can use as much magic as you want. You upgrade your sword a few times in the game though.

----------Characters / Story----------
The game starts with your main character, Mars being awaken from a nightmare. It's Mars first day to Knight training and he's already late. So your grandparents shove you off to the castle, where you learn by a screaming homeless person that doom is coming. Nice.

Mars is the son of a famous knight that saved the land from impending doom, so he has a legacy to preserve, this also gets him flack from his fellow knights. It's Mars first job as a knight and he has to guard a sealed cavern next to the castle. That's when the castle is hit with a magic fog that puts everyone to sleep, but Mars.

We soon learn that theres a group trying to use the four Elemental orbs across the land to resurrect the evil Pazort. Mars is sent on a quest to seal the four orbs, gain the Shining Sword and to kill Pazort.

I thought the first half of the game was nice and light hearted but in a goofy way. I liked it, the second half of the game is when the story really started to slow down and get almost non-existent. After the first few dungeons you could always go back to town and get some more dialog scenes and the NPC would say different things, but after that first half of the game nothing changed until the very end.

The dialog was written by Working Designs, and most of it is off the wall goofy stuff, which I enjoy because they took an otherwise lack luster game and made it worth playing to get to the next scene. It's mostly the NPC that say stupid stuff though, for example, when you to go save your game at the church the Priest will ask you if you want to keep playing or if you want to quit. If you say you want to quit, then he'll say "It's wise to take a break from adventuring, we wouldn't want you to become a fat little pig now would we? now go get some exercise and I'll see you later". I like games that don't take themselves to seriously.

----------Graphics----------
The game opens up with a CGI cutscene, pretty good for 1995 standards. It looks a bit condensed, but the cutscene is long and uses the entire screen atleast. This is the only cutscene in the game, so get use to it. The rest of the game is standard top-down 2D cartoony game. I like the character models, because each character has a real rich black outline, that makes them standout, but outside of the uniqueness of that, the character model themselves seem kinda boring and forgettable. The enemy models are especially forgettable and bland. Even the boss battles are boring, sure they're big enemies, but that's about it.

Shining Wisdom features a bit of pseudo-3D here and there, but it mostly still looks like a Genesis game, there's very little about this game that tapped into the Saturns power. The only thing I really enjoyed about the graphics was the picture avatars that would appear in dialog scenes. The mouths would move along with the words and other facial ticks would appear, it's nothing original, but it gives dialog scenes a little extra kick.

----------Sound----------
The music isn't horrible or anything, but I just don't think it fits this type of gameplay. It's very upbeat, silly 16 era music, there's nothing special about it at all. The sound effects are good however.

----------World Map----------
The world map plays out in a very similar fashion to Legend of Zelda, almost to much. The world is fairly open ended until you reach some sort of road block that requires an item to advance with. Dungeons are scattered all around, you can enter most of them in any order, but they usually give you warnings telling you to leave if you don't have "so and so" item, so you're usually forced to play out everything in a linear fashion, despite the fact that the King tells you to find the Orbs in any order.

After you get a few more skills you can start burning down trees and find treasures or secret shops (hm... sounds familiar). There's alot of secrets in the game, but you can't do most of them until get all the good items, so I eventually didn't bother looking until near the end.

The world is actually small once you unlock everything, there's only 2 towns in the game, and a handful of dungeons. Most of the land is pretty generic looking too, there's a desert, forest, water and mountain area, that's about it. The worst is the repeating patterns of the lands, there's nothing special in the backgrounds, so everything starts to blend together.

----------Time to Complete Game----------

Total Playing Time:
13:11

Item Collection Ratio:
63%

The final boss was simple, but the ending was long and fantastic. No ending cgi cutscenes though.