Shining Soul 2 for Game Boy Adv Reviews by Gamers

By the time the original Shining Soul hit the US market last year, Japanese owners had already been enjoying the sequel for months. This had two real negative effects for Atlus: not only did it have to release an aged Sega original well after the import release of the sequel, but it also had to release a game that many gamers knew was going to be followed up with a far improved sequel a few short months later. Shining Soul II offers the same multiplayer focus as the original, but it at least fixes a lot of problem areas of the original game design with a much more involved single player quest, but the storyline drags on with an enormous (and unnecessary) amount of unskippable text.

Features

• Eight playable characters
• Cartridge save (eight slots)
• Link cable support for four players (multiple cartridge)

So as the story goes, the heroes from the first Shining Soul were successful in their quest, eliminating evil and saving the world...the usual fare. Many, many years have passed in Shining Soul II, and the Darkness has once again fallen upon the land...which gives a hero prime opportunity to make a name for himself once again. For this sequel, players have their choice of as many as eight different persona to assume, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Since there are so many playable characters in Shining Soul II, Sega and Atlus give players eight different save game slots to build up their characters...a feature that will certainly come in handy if or when the time comes to take these heroes into the game's multiplayer mode.

The original Shining Soul was only an RPG because of the different character classes and the ability to "level up" the characters in battle through experience. It was weighed heavily towards the action side of things, essentially a Game Boy Advance version of Diablo. For the sequel, the developers tweaked the balance to bring the game more to the side of an RPG adventure, giving players more opportunity to learn about the game's story through conversations with the locals and side-quests outside of the battles. These definitely make the player feel more involved with the Shining Soul universe, but the text (or at least, the localization of the original Japanese) is so poorly written; characters say in multiple paragraphs what could have been blurted out in a sentence or two. Worse, a lot of the text is set in a very slow type setting that's almost painful to sit through...especially if you've already spent the time to read it once before with another character or two. Or seven.

But again, it's all about the action in Shining Soul II, and the developers bump up the gameplay for the sequel by allowing for more "maze-like" areas to hack through. Though the areas are linearly designed to lead to the end boss, there are plenty of "hidden" locations in each sub-area to score treasure, health, armor, and weapons. They've been laid out better to allow for the multiplayer aspect, and they're slightly larger in size so that players can be in more extreme locations off-screen when fighting in the cooperative modes. There's also been much more focus placed in special attacks, giving players the ability to charge up offensive strikes to higher levels...as well as level these attacks up by performing them over and over. The action's more strategic in the sequel, too, since the collision detection's pulled off better and lets players get away from cheap hits from the enemies a lot more efficiently.

The designers still put the player in a "real time" setting, which means levelling up and equipping as the world continues to move. This works in a multiplayer setting since it would irritate the other players if a partner kept pausing the game while he or she accessed the menus. But there's no reason why the game has to keep going in the single player mode, and again there's no "pause" menu while in battle...to take a break players will have to save the game, which immediately kicks them to the title screen. This awkwardness in design is minor, but it adds up as a significant irritation. Dying in battle seems slightly meaningless since you're teleported away to heal up, and have the ability to teleport right back to the spot you died...so saving your coin for a bunch of healing potions doesn't seem like that big of a focus this time around.

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