Collection essentials #325: Shining the Holy Ark (Saturn)

The first game in Sega and Sonic! Software Planning’s “Shining” series was “Shining in the Darkness” on the Sega Genesis. It was a first-person, dungeon-crawling RPG that was only decent at best, so I don’t have it in my collection and never have. After that game, they went in a different direction with the “Shining Force” strategy RPGs, a few of which I’ve already covered. On the Saturn, they decided to revisit the foundation of the first Shining game, and made it into something much greater!

The game’s story is…well, I have to confess, the story and characters are very unmemorable. I struggle to recall many specific details to share. The start of the game has you controlling a mercenary named Arthur along with a couple mercenary friends embarking on a mission in a mysterious mine. After something unexpected happens leaving our heroes injured, a few spirits come to save them. The spirits are mostly good guys…but one of them is evil and possess one of Arthur’s companions, and so the remaining characters set out on a quest to thwart the plans of the evil spirit. Story and characters are a big deal in a JRPG, so not having much to offer on that front certainly is a strike against StHA. But the rest of the game is so much fun that it makes it well worth playing. 

Arthur is an “avatar” sort of main character, meant as a stand-in for the player, and so he’s a silent protagonist. The game takes place in first-person from his point of view. Every area in the game is basically constructed like a square grid, so pressing forward on the d-pad will have you advance to the next “square”. 

Dungeon crawling is the meat of this game, and it’s done very well. The game uses a type of random battle system where enemies have a chance to show up when you stop onto certain “squares” on the map, so if you’ve been somewhere before it’s somewhat predictable what enemies will show up and where. When they do show up, you’ll engage in turn-based combat that’s fairly standard for JRPGs of this time, resembling the “Dragon Quest” games very much. Dungeons are fairly complex (though not overwhelmingly so) and feature various pathways and puzzles to solve. 

One reason to explore every nook and cranny in the dungeons is to find “pixies” who will permanently join you, and they provide a neat little unique gameplay mechanic. You see, when random battles happen, you aren’t whisked away to a completely separate battle screen; the enemy will come to the front of the screen where you happen to be looking and the battle will seamlessly begin. And in this window when an enemy shows up, you can fire a group of pixies at them to deal some pre-emptive damage, which also results in more experience points and money earned when the battle is over. There are five different types of pixies, and each group is able to attack enemies that come out of a particular location. So there are pixies that can hit enemies that come out of the left side of the screen, another group that can hit those coming from the right side, et cetera, plus a fifth group that hits enemies coming from the dead center. At any time you can use the shoulder buttons to cycle through which fairy group you have selected, and you’ll have a brief moment to switch to and fire one group of pixies as an enemy is making its way to the front of you. You don’t really need to engage with this mechanic very much to succeed, but it’s a nice and fun little reward for those with good reflexes.

The great composer Motoi Sakuraba did a great job on this game’s soundtrack. This game has one of my favorite RPG battle themes of all-time. And the music for various dungeons sets an appropriate vibe. It’s not the biggest RPG soundtrack out there, but the tracks it does have deliver nicely.

My biggest gripe was that there were difficulty spikes at the beginning and end of the game that made me feel forced to grind. But otherwise, it was a joy to play.

Unfortunately Shining the Holy Ark didn’t make a huge splash in 1997. Americans generally weren’t going to buy a Sega Saturn just to play a JRPG. And if they DID want a JRPG, just a couple months down the road the next big Final Fantasy game was due to arrive on Sony’s big popular console and make a huge splash. And since StHA has never been ported and remade, it’s been a very overlooked and underplayed game, sadly. I was fortunate to grab it in the 2000s and enjoyed playing through it in 2008. I can definitely see myself giving it another go at some point down the road. It remains a treasure of the Saturn library, and a worthy essential of my collection.