Together Retro December 2021 - Camelot on the Spot

[MrPopo]

I forgot that everything in Shining the Holy Ark has these epic death screams.

[alienjesus]

So in Shining the Holy Ark I have been wandering around the Mansion for while. I was kinda lost for an hour or so - I am only using guides to find all of the Pixies. I think I leveled up too much while lost By the time I found and had Basso join the team I was level 17 and he was only level 10.
I have all of the items (clock key) and am ready to fight the boss (I think) of the mansion.

You're definitely higher levelled than I was - my party was about 3 levels higher than Basso I believe. Most of the new characters come a bit underlevelled though I think. The 6th character you get was particularly behind my party. In fact, I think they are a lower level than your guys are now and you dont get them for quite a while yet.

I finished up Shining The Holy Ark yesterday. My final party finished around levels 20-25 promoted, and even though I had done all that levelling in the East Shrine I didn't feel hugely overlevelled for the final boss - he was still a threat although my characters having the good mass healing spells took away most of the sting.

I enjoyed the game OK, but I think I preferred Shining In The Darkness as a Camelot dungeon crawler. The first game is more limited in scope and I think that helps it more than it hurts. Shining The Holy Ark has a few too many guide moments (some of the pixies are impossible to find without one unless you check every single wall and floor in the game), and a few too many damage sponge enemies with multitarget moves for my tastes - the strategy remains fairly constant throughout.

That said, Golden Sun is a favourite of mine and you can really see some of the ideas in earlier Shining games that led to the GBA title. It's been fun exploring them.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Flippin' heck, I finally finished Shining Wisdom yesterday, and my goodness that game is *BAD*. It is easily the worst game I've played this year and it is downright impressive just how much it does poorly or wrong when games like Link to the Past came out four whole years before it Xp

At least it's finally behind me now and I can get to other more fun games, like Shining in the Darkness or Shining Force 2! (Via the PS3 Collection~. Very glad I picked that up while I was in the States! So annoying that those never came out here until the most recent Genesis collections Xp).

[MrPopo]

The pixies are definitely a weird mix of "yeah, you would find these normally if you check things that are reasonably checkable" and "holy fuck, what is wrong with you devs?" I also wish you didn't have to select the one you want to use to make a guessing game out of what enemies are in the area.

[alienjesus]

The pixies are definitely a weird mix of "yeah, you would find these normally if you check things that are reasonably checkable" and "holy fuck, what is wrong with you devs?" I also wish you didn't have to select the one you want to use to make a guessing game out of what enemies are in the area.

The correct answer is to select the leprchaun, as at least 50% of enemies in the game seem to come from the ground. From there it's really quick to move to pixies (for covering front attacks) and feels fairly logical to reach Succubus and Incubus for left and right attacks respecively. You can feel fairly confident when enemies will approach from the sides because it's generally at a junction in most dungeons. Fairies are very rarely needed and most enemies who approach from above arent that threatening, so they barely got any use for me.

Some enemies can be hit with multiple fairy types too. In later dungeons there are monsters who slide in from the sides or front as a shadow, then emerge from the shadow. You can hit them with the pixie for the approriate side - or just use leprechaun as regardless of approach they still emerge from the ground and it counts.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I started Shining Force 2 this evening~. I got to the time skip, so I'm still pretty near the start (so far as I can tell). It's sorta neat seeing some faces I recognize make appearances in Shining Wisdom. Granted those characters had a kinda confused presence in the already kinda not great narrative for me in SW, so it's more so the fact that you have returning characters at all that's neat ^^;. It's been pretty disappointing to see how much less well localized this game is compared to the first, though.

Mechanically, I'm not really sure what I was expecting given what y'all have told me about it, but what I should've expected I guess XP. The way certain UI and quality of life elements have been cleaned up is certainly appreciated, but outside of that, all of the major structural problems that the first game have go effectively totally unremedied in this game. At least the game has difficulty modes, and I just picked normal mode. I don't really think I'd be having any different of a time if I were on a harder, grindier mode, so I'm gonna do my best to see where normal mode takes me~.

Then I've got Shining in the Darkness on this PS3 Genesis Collection as well, so I very well may give that a go if I'm still in a Shining mood by the end of SF2. I'm certainly curious to see how it (and it's big brother Shining in the Holy Ark) compare to a contemporary first-person dungeon crawler like SMT, at the very least :O

[SpaceBooger]

Ok, how do you handle item management in Shining the Holy Ark?
Do you sell the items from old dungeons? In the Shining Force games, there was a place to store all of the items.
I keep running out of room for the needed items to finish the South Shrine.

[alienjesus]

Ok, how do you handle item management in Shining the Holy Ark?
Do you sell the items from old dungeons? In the Shining Force games, there was a place to store all of the items.
I keep running out of room for the needed items to finish the South Shrine.

If it helps, the only dungeon item you need to hold on to for a later dungeon is the gravity stone you get from aborigine mansion - you'll want that for more than one dungeon. Any other keys and items and stuff you have from dungeons can be sold to the shop (and rebought if needed from the deals section of the item shop).

After the south shrine the item pressure eases up quite a bit. You're probably at about the worst time of the game for dealing with items overall, due to size of the party, number of important stuff you have to lug about and starting to hoard things like mithril too.

[MrPopo]

I'm guessing I'll need the Gravity Stone for the dungeon I just unlocked (after the shrines). That actually annoys me that they broke the habit of "every dungeon item is just for the dungeon"; if I hadn't seen this note I would have had to bounce out of the dungeon to get it.

[alienjesus]

I'm guessing I'll need the Gravity Stone for the dungeon I just unlocked (after the shrines). That actually annoys me that they broke the habit of "every dungeon item is just for the dungeon"; if I hadn't seen this note I would have had to bounce out of the dungeon to get it.

To be fair, you do need it, but the time you need it is right near the end of the dungeon - but you'll be fairly near the entrance at this point so it doesn't take long to nip outside and grab it. Not ideal, but it could have been worse.