Shining in the Darkness

(note: this was originally posted on cohost.org in four different parts, all four parts have been combined into one for the sake of flow but are otherwise presented unchanged)

part 1: contemporary comparison time!!!

the very last game i finished for 2022 was sword of vermillion for the genesis. on my Patented 7 Point Scale (from 3 to -3, best to worst, i give each number a funny little title but it basically boils down to that) it got a 0. i played it without consulting the internet at all, and it scores mainly due to how absolutely relentlessly cruel it is to the player in it's "story", so much so it wraps around into comedy (without spoiling much, it does at least 3 different rug pull attempts just to fuck with you and how comfortable you think you are in standard RPG progression, and one that involves the titular sword should probably be studied on how fucking stupidly obtuse it is)

in 2023, i played the four mainline phantasy star games, i won't go too deep into my opinions (yet), but, as an itemized list:

• phantasy star 1 through SEGA AGES on switch got a 1. especially for the first console JRPG translated for a western market, it was pretty enjoyable, not too clunky, got lost a little bit but not too much, not much grinding after the beginning, definitely will make one of my big purchases this year a CIB physical copy (cause i have the other 3 now, oops)
  
• phantasy star 2 through the "easy mode" on the genesis mini 2 got a 0. i liked the setting (mainly the subtext regarding the society of the game) and the switch from magic to techniques, but fuck those dungeons! goddamn! no wonder this game shipped with a free strategy guide in america.
  
• phantasy star 3 (sean ending) through sonic's ultimate genesis collection on PS3 got a -2, just a completely missed mark. i did not need to grind at all, but i can also count on one hand, besides the final boss(es), the times i needed to use any magic besides healing, in total. 99.95% of fights involved no strategy at all, just mashing A to beat your meat until it gives you EXP and meseta. the story was bad, backtracking was bad. bad.
  
• phantasy star 4 through nintendo switch online genesis emulator got a 3. i accidentally set up an instant kill combination attack turn 1 of a mini-boss and it worked. that was pretty cool. right after i finished it, i got a copy of the game and the manual, inside a VHS case shell that had part of the cardboard box cut off and the rest discarded to fit in the VHS shell and sit on a rental shelf, i reshelled it in a spare empty plastic genesis case and it basically looks like an alternate CIB that didn't come in a shitty cardboard box. looks pretty cool!
  

so. after all that pre-rambling, shining in the darkness chronologically comes after all of these games (except for 4), and outside of some very slight influence from phantasy star 3's battle menu UI, SITD is wholly it's own thing, it seems? a very by-the-books JRPG focused on dungeon crawling with standard attacking, magic spells, equipment and text-based fights, from my base level understanding so far. it has a very similar intro to PS3, though. you're sort of wandering around aimlessly until you inevitably run into The Plot Progression item if you don't keep going in circles (in PS3's case, mieu, in SITD's case, the tiara), in PS3 this early wandering is like an 85% vertical slice of the entire game. just wandering around and battling enemies by mashing A until you win, remove having techniques to use (i.e., free healing) until you wander into your first party member and get your healing magic + secondary damage dealer and receiver, and looking back on it, it's not a very appealing vertical slice. the combat never evolves beyond this, and figuring out rather quickly that Rhys' Quest For GF fucked over literally everyone by the generic big bad that hates you turned the story sour like milk left out overnight.

but with the initial wandering in SITD, it didn't really feel like wandering, despite the labyrinth truly feeling labyrinthian if you aren't using maps. PS3's worlds can feel samey and boring to navigate if you don't know where to go (even if you do, especially after all that backtracking), but SITD is designed to make you feel lost. to tell the truth, i played this for 30 minutes very soon after finishing PS4, and i got RPG fatigue hard and stopped, but it was enough time to tell me "wowee this really is a labyrinth", so i went back in 4 months later with the knowledge that wandering truly aimlessly would be pretty miserable. and keeping with my desire to not use any outside help whenever possible with games that came out before common-place internet where you can look up a guide at any time for free, there was but one alternative to stumbling around blindly in a dark room: make my own paper maps.

surveying and gambling with your life

granted i made this decision without knowing that you get an item and a spell that lets you see a (limited) in-game map at a (very minor) cost, but i still kept it going even after i did realize it. drawing your own maps doesn't seem like an activity that would take too long, but boy it can. i've never made my own maps on paper for an RPG or dungeon crawler before, but i didn't expect it to actually feel as immersive as i did? seeing how much progress i was making with eliminating as many dead-end paths as i could during one attempt with a feeble 50 max health and a shitty short sword i bankrupted myself with very quickly after getting my 200 gold Stimulus Check. it helped at least a little bit to the feeling like i was doing slightly more than "beating up enemies with a stick over and over until you find party members with magic" like in PS3.

pushing my limited HP and bad equipment as far as i could into the maze to chart more of it became a game in and of itself, a game which i won three times and lost three times, clocked to almost 2 hours before i got a second (and third) party member(s) that sped up possible progress immensely. plotting all this map out also lead to the corollary of my MC's stats being high enough to carry Milo and Pyra past the "dead weight treshold" rather quickly, which i appreciated. after getting the new party members up to speed, the answer to "how much of the dungeon can i map on this run before i have to leave?" went from "not a lot" to "about 33-50% of it", and the grind suddenly feels less grind-y, with that much less one-way emergency exit teleports back to the entrance, constantly pushing forward towards the end of the maze on my paper. the act of making paper maps in an RPG made me want to roll my eyes when i got stuck in phantasy star 2, but something about it in SITD has a bit more charm to it. maybe it's just the honeymoon phase, idk.

the point we're at

in all honesty, it feels almost exactly like the dungeons in phantasy star 1, almost half-a-decade earlier, stretched to a much bigger horizontal slice of a game. so, it feels sort of like phantasy star 1 released on the genesis (yes, i know phantasy star 1 got a mega drive-shaped cartridge that boots a mega drive into backwards compatibility mode, it's not what i mean lol)

good thing i liked phantasy star 1, especially with that automapper on the switch SEGA AGES port. i like what i'm playing so far, but i will admit it isn't really doing anything super exemplary yet in my eyes outside of the physicality of the dungeon. the fighting is rudimentary, even after magic partners join up. the setting is coherent, a bit of light-heartedness through the art style of the town and dialogue of NPCs, a contrast to the stakes immediately set up by the villain not being "world ending", but still serious enough. i just hope something extra happens... eventually?

wachunga was good, though.

session 1: ~3 hours
session 2: ~4.5 hours

the orb of truth of the matter

i'm not usually one to drop a game unless i've royally screwed up (softlocked fallout 1 save, i'll restart it eventually) or i reaaaaally do not vibe with it (i can't even think of a recent example for this?). i'll even finish eurojank sludge like indiana jones and the last crusade (genesis) that reminds me of jeremy parish's opening words on kung-fu heroes (NES):

"All video games are worthy of discussion and study, but are all games necessarily worthy of commercial release?

accidentally burying the lead aside, shining in the darkness has entered neither of these camps, and i don't really expect it to. however, the impression of this game that is there was partially self-imposed.

still being the studious surveyor i am clued me in to various things that i'm not really sure would have seen had i not been making paper maps. getting the orb of truth and finding the grimwall weren't too far apart from each other, due to seeing that all dead-end hallways up to this point have had walls in all 8 directions other than the way you came from, except for one instance on the surface level maze.

if i went there after being given the orb of truth and was given nothing in return, i probably would have given up and just googled where the fake wall was, cause i'm not really a fan of trying something on everything when there's a high encounter rate. i want to say this is a cool telegraph! but i'm not sure it was purposeful, because i imagine so many players for this game did not have a full view map to reference at any time, and were content to use the view spell over and over, and could have very easily missed this sort of thing. also, the holes in the map are also a dead giveaway for where the unexplored hallways are, since it appears that every labyrinth has the same dimensions (i wish i knew this when making the maps so that some of them don't have 3 squares in width on the opposite side...)

and that's... really where the cool things that i can say have happened, ended. i like that (some) NPC dialogue advances when you meet progression checkpoints? but there's only so many NPCs to begin with, and they resign themselves to giving the same kind of dialogue that updates to keep itself current, which is helpful for the lost player, but not much else.

greed

everything else is leaving me wanting. the combat is still very "mash the A button until you win", and i've only seen two exceptions to this rule. one is the enemies hiding in chests that will instantly kill one of your party members (rip milo learning the revive spell and then being the only one getting his soul sucked out so it's not helpful), which i am still running into despite this game carrying the torch of old RPG treasure chests having absolutely nothing of fucking value in them! why am i getting nothing but smelling salts, 50 gold, and equipment worth 350 gold when the equipment i entered the dungeon with is worth over 2000???

the other instance is when i run into 6-8 enemies that know mass-paralysis or mass-sleeping attacks, since i've had all three party members get paralyzed in one turn, which resulted in an instant game over. pyra's level 3 blaze spell is pretty handy, and she's not doing much else with her MP most of the time. it's not a difficult scenario to escape, it's just the check to make sure i'm paying attention, i guess.

notice how bosses weren't in the "mash A to win" exclusions? are there even bosses? do the turtle orb and the jessa doppelganger count as bosses? if they are, it's rather anticlimatic to end a dungeon with a huge, imposing enemy that has a unique action to set it up (the animation of a boulder appearing from the hallway, the setup with the false idol), and then have the battle go like this:

turn 1

• pyra casts muddle, spell is effective
• milo casts screen, spell does not work
• enemy attacks, misses
• player character attacks, does 50-60 damage

turn 2

• pyra casts slow, spell does not work
• milo casts screen, spell does not work
• enemy attacks, does 40 damage to player character
• player character attacks, does 50-60 damage
• victoly

very reminescent of phantasy star 2 with it's lack of bosses, although phantasy star 2's dungeons and enemies were constantly attempting to crush you with a hydraulic press, so maybe all but two dungeons having bosses was an understandable decision. although maybe phantasy star 3 is the more apt comparison, since it's bosses were also the equivalent of supporting the backbone of your dungeon with a single toothpick.

a point we're at

i don't want to keep comparing shining in the darkness to phantasy star 3, because i don't really respect phantasy star 3 at all, but it's making it very difficult. all these cool tools to use on enemies with magic and yet nothing that would require it for strategy because everything dies really easily, and the length of the crawl through the dungeons necessitates saving your MP for health restoration as the enemies repeatedly cherry-tap you closer and closer to dying. i can't tell if i'm accidentally grinding too much to make most combat oversimplified, or if this is the natural state that the game will take.

maybe the "boss" is the dungeon itself? having a tile that saps your MP is a cool idea to compliment the most important resource that is seemingly non-renewable without an inn (unless there's a PS4 ataraxia-type item that breaks the game balance completely), although marking where they are on my map usually makes them a one-time hazard, since "the way forward" can have a path that goes around them.

maybe i'm just reaching for a nice thing to say, idk

session 3: ~3.5 hours
session 4: ~4.5 hours

rolling the digital dice

man, right after i said "the game is just becoming a mash-fest" in the previous post, the cave of wisdom comes up and actually makes valiant attempts at trying to knock me on my ass. and the labyrinth proper even more so! which is good! i like a challenge in my video games! i've played all three mainline tetris the grandmaster games for several years! (and, while i can approach an S9 grade in TGM2+, i'm probably nowhere close to getting a GM grade)

so, midway through the cave of wisdom, i'm finding some enemies that either do 2-3 damage to one party member or 30 damage to all party members, at random! oops! later in the labyrinth proper, another band of enemies that do either 8-15 damage to one party member, or 60 to all party members, double oops!

the former comes from Smoke, the latter comes from Salamander, and these enemies can show up in multiples of at least 4 at a time, so that many more times for "the big attack" to proc, i assume. it's better than the alternative of "enemy does 5 damage or rolls to instantly kill you", but there has to be some sort of alternative. maybe increasing the capability of the salamnder, but only letting one or two spawn at once alongside some other enemies? but! at least it's not a simple "select fight every single time until the trial is done", anymore! it has surpassed the shadow of phantasy star 3!

i think the best part of this sort of experience is that it's pushing me to try to use all the tools in milo and pyra's kits. i stopped the most recent session with the thought of "i need to try using sleep level 2 more", because it's cheaper than blaze / freeze level 3, and potentially waaaay more effective than tacking on 30 damage per enemy when milo and the knight do 70-90 per hit and one-shot everything. oh yeah, speaking of which, milo got a mithril axe! it seems really overpowered!

crafting in video games is so 1990s

i've been wondering what the hell the mithril ore was for ever since the alkemist started selling it (alongside all the other items and equipables that milo's vision spell gives an incomplete description of with "blessed with magic power" and "has alternate uses", if it never becomes apparent i'm only looking it up at the end), but when the trader finally showed up and filled the vacant spot in town, i was hoping i had something to spend my 30,000+ gold on, and booooy did i. that mithril axe has made it feel oh-so-satisfying to... mash A to fight things again. hm.

the crafting system in this is an interesting concept, for sure. the mithril ore seems like a one-time use ticket to completely fix one of your party member's flaws, and choosing the mithril axe basically turns milo into half of a ness with less magic points. huge melee damage, huge healing, and expensive all-enemy element-less attack spells, sounds pretty good! maybe just a bit too squishy to count truly as ness, but he is *the* standout party member now. if he gets hit with desoul, it's an instant egress-out.

i imagine giving the knight or pyra a mithril weapon would have basically done the same thing to them, which makes me think (assume?) that you could have a different team "composition" using different crafting loadouts with such limited times you can craft, which, if true, would be quite the way to subvert the expectation that the three members of your team are locked into their roles from day 1. quite the pick to do when phantasy star 2 and multiple other contemporary JRPGs on the NES / super famicom had customizable parties, and most other RPGs with single, non-changing parties i can think of (Ys, sword of vermillion, does wonder boy III the dragon's trap count? probably not) use bump combat, or zelda 2 sidescrolling combat, so it's still action-y and not just walls of text.

i have no idea what to do with the dark block, though. it just seems like a joke item that you waste several tens of thousands of gold on and then it kills you. seeing the doomstaff and the hex whip debilitating my party was funny, but thank god i did not save after crafting the stuff...

keeping up appearances

the labyrinth is as labyrinthy as ever, by the way. no surprise there. also, did you ever know there was a difference between a labyrinth and a maze? i do now! so, sorry for using them interchangably prior, lol. but i don't know if it's because of the graphical style, or the animation of moving around in the dungeon, or that every wall and ceiling is the same, but i imagine i'd need to be using the vision spell a lot if i wasn't making a map by hand. i bet my dollars to donuts that the first google autocomplete result for "shining in the darkness" after the game itself is "shining in the darkness maps". the complexity of the dungeons doesn't really increase outside of adding hidden trapdoors (the tiles that spin you around 270° do not count), so the random encounter and boss difficulty is the sole thing keeping the difficulty curve afloat.

speaking of, are there actually that many bosses in this game? i know the big robot crab holding the tiara, the giant turtle orbs, the doppler, and the sentinels are forced "high powered single enemy" encounters, but are all the other ones (the giant spider, the cyclops blocks?) actually random "bad" encounters? cause they seem to happen at random

the story is... still nothing, by the way. i had no idea that melvyl was actually the bad guy, i thought he ran off into the dungeon and i'd have to find and save him from a part of the labyrinth, that, as a random NPC that didn't do any of the tasks i needed to do to get access to that part, should not have been there. sometimes you just need a no frills game to cleanse your palette after something bad (because prior to this my big "long-term game was sonic unleashed on 360 and that was just plain awful)

session 5: ~5 hours
session 6: ~4 hours

Milo casts a spell.

His eyes glow!
This is definitely for Pyra.
No special properties.
I don't think we'll find much use for it.

after finishing the game, i still have no idea what several items in the game are meant to do. milo tells me that the sun armor, frost armor, magic hood, etc. are embued with magical power, and i have a very general idea that the armors protect against fire and freeze attacks, but no idea about anything else. i never used the magic mirror, herb water, miracle herb, or holy water correctly (i attempted to use them and nothing ever came of it).

i had absolutely no idea that flails or whips attack multiple enemies until i had milo inspect the steel whip, which you get on the penultimate floor of the labyrinth, have him tell me "it's nothing special", see that it's 65 points lower than the mithril rod, went "oh, old JRPG treasure chests, you so silly", went to sell it and saw the price of >10,000 gold and went "wait maybe the video game is silly for different reason" and tried it out for myself! and the steel whip kinda fucks against multiple targets!

i also thought the concept of the dark block (and it's crafting results) were kinda funny, very very "old JRPG that loves to reward your innate curiosity with a punch to the face". it wouldn't surprise me if there was some super cracked strategy using a dark block item, and / or the forbidden box (which i sold as soon as i used it once and cursed everyone in battle, i have sinced learned it has a myriad of effects, but i needed inventory space anyway, that 24 item limit kinda stinks)

that being said, i'm fine with all this, really.

so, what? am i stockholm syndrome'd into a lovehate relationship with jank?

it helps massively that the potential sting of selling "a valuable item that you don't know is valuable" is lessened that you can buy it right back at any time (although duplicate copies seem to disappear), and the ratio of sell value to buy value is rather generous for a JRPG at 75%. very forgiving, especially for 1991.

it also helps that, yknow, i beat the game without using any of them effectively. the heal ring and magic rings helped a lot, though. giving the player character access to repeatable full HP recovery is one of the best things you can give a bulky tank. even if i were to die, the walk back to where i was isn't *that* long? 5 minutes, maybe? and eventually i had so much money (over 400,000 gold) i had no idea what to do with it all!

although this game state comes very, very late in the game. like, midway through the penultimate floor. it helped me alleviate the "grind" by giving you more resources to push yourself forward through the maze, which helps when enemies will start doing 20-30 single target or 60-100 party-wide damage at random. especially after you get the rope and the game makes you travel through higher-level encounters for a little bit (i liked this concept and execution, forcing you to adapt on the fly and account for that in your travel to the gold fountain checkpoint is neat)

actually, good question to ask, what's the popular opinion on this game being "grind-heavy"? i never really had to go out of my way to grind like in mother 1 or phantasy star 2, in that sort of sense. was it because i'm playing on the genesis mini 2? was that version of the game patched with increased EXP / money gains? i just kept filling out my paper maps to path a more optimal way forward, and by the time i had the optimal way forward, i could get a guaranteed run away from enemies. and like i said before, all the bosses besides the dark knight and dark sol didn't really require a lot of tactics, just use boost on milo and the player character and heal as necessary.

and the reveal of the dark knight was sort of just... nothing, by the way. i don't know if i've just been spoiled by 30 years of innovation in video game story telling, or if such a twist combined with the medieval setting came off as trite. the events of the plot itself are probably the weakest part of the game, which is... a shame, i guess. it's not like i can say i prefer a bad story over no story, since it's better to take it on a game-by-game basis.

i like that everything took place in one central location, pretty neat for a JRPG, and the equipment / buying systems take advantage of that. having NPCs come and go, hang around and say different things as the game progresses is a good start, and they even talk to each other pretty frequently, but it lacks because nothing really happens "in town" except for the recruitment of milo and pyra, and melvyl's big talk in the tavern.

the point

there's a lot of good concepts in this game, but i feel like they don't get a proper chance. i've looked up nothing about the development history (or anything about the game at all, really), but it wouldn't surprise me if shining in the darkness had a below average budget and / or time in the oven, sort of like how phantasy star 2 started out on the master system and had to restart for the genesis with a deadline less than 12 months away.

sometimes you just need a by-the-books game, and in 1991 there probably wasn't a "by-the-books" for a console JRPG / dungeon-crawler yet, and i appreciate shining in the darkness for being something that can help build the foundation in an era of phantasy star reinventing the wheel with each entry, the wild differences in quality (or lack thereof) that are the various ultimas on NES / early SNES... drakkhen? lagoon, maybe? i've only ever heard about them. so maybe i'm just a poser for parroting other peoples opinions about the things other than phantasy star.

despite shining in the darkness not being able to shine brightly in the shadow of it's contemporaries in my eyes, it is, at the very least, visible. it was good enough to get sequels across multiple generations of consoles, even into the current day, albeit not holding onto the same style of gameplay, and that's more than you can say about sword of vermillion!

session 7: ~4 hours
session 8: ~4 hours
session 9: ~5.5 hours

STATS

TOTAL PLAYTIME: ~38 hours
FINISHED AT LEVEL: in party order, 54 / 50 / 52
GAME OVERS: 5
(two before getting milo and pyra, two due to all three party members getting paralyzed simultaneously, one to the final boss)
NPCS FOUND: 2/3 (rip dai)

FINAL GRADE: 0

*grades are on a scale from 3 to -3