Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom First Impressions
Recently I acquired a game called Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom through Steam which looked interesting. At first glance, Shiness had an interesting appeal as it featured a cast of anthropomorphic animals and humans, bright and colorful cel-shaded graphics, and a positive standing among the user base in Steam. But, was it worth the purchase? After trying it out for an hour... I have to say not really; Shiness is definitely not for everyone and while critical reception places it in a slightly above average score category, I don't quite feel the same.
Disclaimer
Small spoilers ahead, and also a reminder that I only played for two hours as it became unbearable for me to continue.
Shiness was funded by Kickstarter and developed by the independent company Enigami. Beating their goal of 100,000 USD by an additional 39,865 dollars, the developers crafted a fully fledged game of 15-50 hours worth of gameplay. Truly a lot of effort went into creating the world of Shiness and in many aspects of the game it shows. The voice acting is good, the character designs are interesting, and the world of Shiness appears to have some solid lore behind it. Yet, the game is flawed in many ways and none of those are due to faulty programming, but rather the design choices made by the developers perhaps weren't the best alternatives.
The player begins the game as Chado (which sounds like shadow), an explorer/adventurer who can communicate with spirits that only he can see/hear. After crash landing from his airship and his friend Poky jumping ship; Chado sets out to rescue him from the midst of the jungle. While exploring his new surroundings you learn the controls, solves puzzles, and fight battles. The controls in Shiness are pretty basic and shouldn't be too difficult to master, but combat can be a completely different story.
Combat in Shiness is essentially a mixture of fighting games and RPG's. When a player enters combat they can do a multitude of attacks including: combos, magic, dodges, counters, and blocks. All battles are one versus one with characters in the sidelines waiting for a character/enemy to be downed before joining the brawl. Chado is a fighter-type and is one of the two characters I was able to use in my first two hours, his fighting style is fast and fun with lots of combinations available to the player right off the bat. But, when it came time to play as Poky it was a completely different story. Poky is a magic-user type character and right of the bat he's given a spell, you would think he'd stand in the background and provide support to the front-lines, but instead as battles are 1v1 he's actually supposed to fight monsters himself. Playing with him was an exercise in annoyance as I constantly kept dying at the hands of my enemies who could teleport to me as I tried to fire magic. The difficulty spike when controlling him (around the 45 minute mark) was too much, and it became a chore to play as Poky. Which only became worse when I found out how his puzzles worked.
I personally did not enjoy the puzzles in the game, and while the first ones with Chado were a simple switch pressing mechanic, all of the characters (5 total) are eventually required to solve a few of the latter ones. This wouldn't be a problem in other RPG's as many of them feature simplistic puzzles, but Shiness has puzzles that feel more at home in a Banjo-Kazooie game than here. All of the characters have a different type of puzzle they can solve and when you unlock all of them, you best be ready for some heavy puzzle solving. Poky on the other hand has to solve node connecting puzzles, which involve linking nodes together to power up nearby devices. In essence Poky would pick up electricity from a crystal and link them from point A to B using mini-nodes that were on the path towards each other. But, it couldn't be done with any element as it each requires a specific one which is identified by their color. Needless to say this did not redeem the game or Poky in my eyes in the least.
But, trust me when I say that Shiness needed that redemption. As a Kickstarter game, I'm willing to forgive some aspects and I did. I didn't mind it when my character clipped through certain elements such as water. In fact when I saw that happen, my initial reaction was to laugh, I also didn't mind the combat being spammy and requiring a heavy usage of items on some hard hitting enemies. Collecting wild critters for random drops (a collectors nightmare) was also a small aspect of the game that wasn't really attractive to me, but I didn't mind any of these as I truly wanted to enjoy Shiness. Yet, the mixture of elements didn't sit well with my taste in RPG's and perhaps the developers tried to mix-up the formula too much to make it enjoyable. It's not a terrible game by any means, but if I had to give it a score I'd say a 4/10 would be my opinion.
While the consensus seems to be the game is a 68% on Metacritic, I have to disagree on the stance and say that it's not worth the purchase. Shiness had grand ideas, which could have use more polishing and I'm not the type of player that will continue playing if the game doesn't attract my attention within two hours. Even Monster Hunter with it's 30 minute to one hour single-player tutorial picks up speed and can be played right off the bat, with the right teams on multiplayer. However, Shiness is a strictly single-player game and doesn't offer much besides what's already there. I hate to say it, but people are better off not buying it. You could try renting it, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a die-hard furry wanting to play an RPG with anthropomorphic beings.