I truly enjoyed my time with Shining Tears. I thought that the game was fun, the characters were adorable, and the art style was unique and beautiful. So, you the reader might be wondering why, if I enjoyed the game so much, I did not give it a higher score?

The answer is hard to explain. Shining Tears is a good game, but it has many shortcomings that seriously detract from the game play experience.

I'll start at the beginning. As soon as you put the disc into your PS2 you will be greeted with a screen you should become very familiar with, as you will see it very often. It's a load screen, and you will see it between nearly every screen transition, between large segments of exposition, and you may as well see it as you try to access the menu screen because that too takes quite some time. The load screens are frequent, and while some show you artwork, others are simply blank white screens with the word "Loading" flashing in the middle. At some points in the game I found myself staring at a blank white screen, wondering exactly what had happened. Two times this occurred, and I was unsure whether or not to reset my PlayStation 2 or clean my game disc, but fortunately the game loaded, and I realized that it was just another in a long series of load screens.

After the initial load screen, you are greeted with a rather nice anime sequence which shows you all the characters in the game, and some action sequences. This sets the tone of the graphics in the game perfectly, as the whole game seems like it was hand drawn. The sprite-based characters are full of emotion, and nearly all of the major characters have a large anime portrait to accompany dialogue. These portraits change to show the character's mood and reaction to what is being said. The enemies are also very well done, and all the characters, enemies, and everything else that moves, moves in a flowing motion that makes the world truly come to life. If anything bad is to be said about the graphics, it is that they don't seem to fully take advantage of the PlayStation 2 hardware, but that is a minor gripe, as the graphics are perfectly stylized so that even though they aren't groundbreaking, they will garner very few complaints.

The story of the game fits the sprite-based game play, as it is a classic RPG storyline. A character with amnesia (Xion) washes up on shore, to be found by an elf. This character possesses two rings with power to enhance the wearers' fighting abilities, and allow the wearers to take on onslaughts of enemies. However, there may be a terrifying side effect to these rings, as they may be the rings of legend which are known to corrupt the wearers, so Xion is warned to use the rings carefully. Fortunately for us gamers, there are many mysterious happenings in the world, and monsters are growing in abundance and becoming hostile, and while all this is going on a war is brewing! Could something more sinister be lurking below the surface, manipulating all of these things? Yeah, probably, and if you've played any role-playing game with an amnesiac character, you'll find the story predictable and a little trite. The story is not the game's strong point, and although it does present some very interesting (although extremely underdeveloped) characters, it fails to do anything original with the material. In fact, most of the game revolves around this tired story, and features more exposition than should be necessary. The game should simply have focused on its real strength, and that is handing out hundreds of beautiful monsters in gorgeous locales and letting the main character hack, slash, and spell cast his way through them.

This brings us to the game play, which is easily the best feature of the game. The game is done in a semi-overhead perspective, and lets you wander around towns and through battlefields with ease. The main character, Xion, will select a partner before entering a battle, and this partner will affect the way the battle takes place. This is because the rings that Xion has allow him to take the opposite attribute of his partner, so if his partner is a "light" character, then Xion will become "dark" and his personality will be much more malicious. However, if his partner is a "dark" character, then Xion will become a "light" character, and will be much more approachable. This has little bearing on game play, as for the most part you'll be hacking and slashing through most of the monsters regardless of whether you are "light" or "dark," but Sega has made some alterations depending on your alignment. A "dark" character is more adept in physical attacks, while a "light" character is more skilled with magic. While you may choose to exploit this, I rarely gave the alignment any regard, and simply fought in battle the way I wanted to, and came out victorious every time.

As you fight through enemies you will gain experience points, and when you gain enough experience points you will level up. Upon leveling you are given three status points and one skill point. Your status points are assigned to your base parameters (Strength, Agility, Intelligence, and Constitution) and your skill points are assigned to either teach you a new skill or level up an existing one. Anyone who has played the Shining Soul games for the GBA will be instantly familiar with this system and feel right at home, and for the most part, it doesn't require much getting used to.

What does require getting used to, however, is the way weapons and armor are treated. You can buy new weapons or armor in stores, or possibly find equipment in the battlefield, but the game insists that you upgrade your equipment at a blacksmith. Throughout the course of your travels you will find materials which can be used to improve your weapon. However, most of this improvement is done with simple blind guessing and will come out with mixed results. There are very few ways to get the best equipment in the game if you do not want to check a FAQ or player's guide, other than blind guessing. Sometimes this works and you will come out with a much stronger weapon, while other times you will end up with the same weapon you had with one more attack point. This was not the best system to place into the game, as there should have been more logic than luck to weapon and armor forging.

There is a fun friendship/relationship system in place that allows for some depth. Depending on how you defend characters around you, and who you choose to take into battle, your relationship with them builds. This is a fun addition as it also has some bearing on the ending sequence and allows for a little more replay.

The music and sound effects in this game are decidedly average. Some musical tracks are peaceful and tranquil, while the battle tracks are energetic and urgent. There is minimal voice work in the game, and the characters will say maybe one or two phrases throughout the course of the adventure. Voice work would have been nice, as it would have helped with the overall animated feel of the game, and could have breathed some life into the stilted and mundane dialogue that we are presented with.

Unfortunately for Shining Tears, there are some other problems plaguing it that cannot be overlooked. The game begins very slowly, forcing you through some very dry dialogue and dragging you from one battle to the next. These beginning battles were there to ease the player into the game, but most of them have too few enemies and so little challenge that they are downright boring. Fortunately, later in the game, the enemies become much tougher and the battles far more frenetic. In regards to the written dialogue, much of it lacks any depth and feels very dry. Characters are hardly developed, unless it is in a key storyline sequence, and although many of the characters could have turned out to be very interesting, they simply become another party member. I did enjoy the characters, for what it counts for, and all of them are very interesting on a base level, but I cannot help but wish more had been done with them. The written dialogue also contains many mistakes that will not go unnoticed to most players, and tend to make the already boring written speech even harder to bear.

The lack of voice acting is a minor quibble, but it could have helped to spice up the game a little bit, as had been done with February's Ys: Ark of Napishtim. Also, the game is rather short in length and aside from a bonus dungeon and some additional difficulty, there is little to experience after you complete the game, unless you want to see alternate endings involving characters you did not spend as much time with in the initial game. In this respect, the game's length is beneficial, since you won't have to play for very long to reach the ending. Unfortunately, you will still have to play through the boring opening battles which offer very little fun at all.

A positive aspect of the game is the two-player feature. Two players can join up, either with two memory cards playing off of their own save file or off of one game file, and fight through missions and levels together. This certainly adds some value to the game, and the multiplayer is fun, but it only shows how much the single player lacks, as the ally AI in the one-player game does not match up to the cooperative experience that the two-player mode offers.

Your experience with Shining Tears is exactly what you make of it. It is a game that excels most with its hack-and-slash game play and its beautifully stylized graphics. Unfortunately, it has some pitfalls that cannot be overlooked, with its mundane dialogue and trite story. The game harkens back to a time when RPGs were much simpler, and in this respect, it has a charm that cannot be overlooked. Unfortunately, it does very little to be anything more than a nice trip down memory lane, with fresh faces and nice graphics. Had it brought something new and original to the table, upped the difficulty, and tried something new with the story, Shining Tears could have the same appeal that Ys: Ark of Napishtim had, but as it remains, Shining Tears is simply an average RPG that aspires to be something greater than the sum of its parts.

Final Grade: 65%