Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

A fantastic effort that mostly delivers on the promises made during its funding campaign. [June 2017, p.71]

Likable characters, exciting battle mechanics, and interesting colorful locales kept me engaged throughout my roughly 25 hours with the game. It doesn’t set a new bar in any of its many disciplines but it’s clear a lot of care and love has gone into Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is a reach too far for a small indie studio to handle and it shows. While the game plays well and looks fantastic, the lack of a decent story shows that the developers were under tight budget and time restraints. If they would have had more time and money I believe that Shiness could had easily been a better game. While Shiness has some positives like the overall design and the combat, the lack of a compelling story ruined the experience.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is both an amazing nostalgic trip to an older generation of gaming as well as a breath of fresh air with its fast paced and solid combat mechanics. It's rare for a developer to take martial arts and really try and do the philosophy and flow of them justice in a game, and for that Shiness is a most welcome addition to the RPG library.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is a rare gem that captures the feeling of early PS2-era RPGs such as Dark Cloud and Grandia II while bringing it’s own brand of modern to the table. The game certainly isn’t perfect and the technical cracks most definitely show, but the things it tries to do well, it succeeds.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is an action RPG with a split personality. There is a joy in the simple and easy adventuring aspect here, but the difficult and deep beat-em up inspired combat is a startling step change. Whilst it looks lovely these visuals will only get you so far, and before long the forgettable plot and generic quests stop this from being a truly memorable game.

This game won't surprise any RPG lovers, it's not a must. But Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom has that feeling of cornerstone for the small french studio that has dared with this IP. Its price is all you need to know if you need more colourful hours, magical plots and dungeons, with bold combat mechanics that sometimes fails and it is not that enjoyable.

Shiness the Lightning Kingdom is an action-RPG that offers very good RPG elements, but poor action elements.

A great RPG and a remarkable beat'em up that sometimes is too ugly for being excellent due its indie (and low cost) roots.

Overall, Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom isn't that bad. The story is good enough, if a tad generic, while the characters are likeable if you can get past their odd dialogue and exaggerated reactions. Outside of a pretty finicky magic and parry system, the combat is done well for those who crave real-time action over menus, and some of the other systems bring some depth to that. Presentation is decent, but the camera can be enough to put off some people. If you're craving a game that sticks to some JRPG standards, Shiness isn't a bad one to check out once you're done with the heavy-hitters on the system.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom combines the classic JRPG adventure format with fighting mechanics. Well knowing this is from a small french indie team, Enigami, we can see all the passion and the work behind the game, but we can also see all the limits due to the smallness of the project itself. All these problems afflict the gameplay, on the technical side, and mostly the combat system, the one who should made this videogame really shine. In the end, we can see a great potential from Enigami team, but we can't deny that Shiness is a good game with many problems.

Truth be told, you can get along fine with Shiness even if you skim through the text-heavy narrative. It's a serviceable story, but I found the lovely (albeit inconsistent) art direction, pleasant music, and engaging combat system to be the game's true motivating force.

The result is a charmingly clunky yarn that doesn’t wow, but has more to offer than clichés alone. [July 2017, p73]

Draws intelligently from numerous influences, yet fails to craft an identity of its own. A snack-sized RPG that's a serviceable side-quest to tackle between epics. [June 2017, p.83]

I enjoyed my time with Shiness but it’s not hard to see the faults in the game’s façade. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to the game but the dozen or so hours I spent with it were enjoyable in a Saturday cartoon kind of way. Shiness is a serviceable action-RPG with a distinct look that will probably make any fan of the manga or PS2 action-RPGs smile.

Shiness teases us with an adventure that is pure fun. The developers bring back much of the style from the early 90s games that inspired them, while successfully infusing the game with modern gameplay elements and mechanics. The world is engaging and the story presentation is great, complimented by a competent soundtrack, vivid visuals, and stylish manga-like cutscenes. The ideas behind the battle system are carefully architected and work wonderfully together to offer variety of play, action, and battle planning. Unfortunately the game seems to be a case where the realities of the world caught up with the developers' fantasy too soon. As a result, it fails to follow through on both its story and the promises of its combat system, and is marred by a lack of technical polish and bugs, leaving players with a distinctly average experience.

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom could have been a great RPG but each strength is countered by an even stronger flaw which inherently makes the overall game quite bad. Perhaps the studio was too ambitious for its means.

There are tons of minor issues with almost every part of the game that combine to make Shiness a more frustrating experience than it should be.

Despite its issues though, Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is overall, an enjoyable experience.

Shiness doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, and its style and execution are designed to evoke memories of your gaming past. Come for the pretty world, stay for the fast, if slightly messy combat.

While not perfect, Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is fairly impressive to look at. It has a beautiful and intriguing world, so it's a bit of a shame that you don't get to learn more of the history behind it. Still, there's a tough but fun battle system to get to grips with and plenty of puzzles to solve. If you prefer your RPGs to be more relaxed and serene then you may struggle with this one, as the fast-paced combat system means that button mashing your way through it will quickly lead to the game over screen. But for as much as we enjoyed our time on Mahera, a poor combat camera and plethora of bugs let it down – here's hoping for a quick patch.