Shining in the Darkness is your typical fantasy RPG when it comes to the plot, but it separates itself from the rest of that genre by offering a unique visual perspective. Everything is seen in the first-person view – the action sequences, the town exploration, the cutscenes. Everything. And it's from that viewpoint that the adventure begins, without even so much as a title screen, as King Drake of the land of Thornwood hands you 200 gold pieces and sends you on your way.
On your own, you're a standard, commonplace RPG hero starting off with no experience points, no extra items, no real clue of how to get started and, as a weapon, a knife. It's the humble point of origin from which a long, involved adventure ultimately flows – but the path to progress is a slow one.
After outfitting yourself with 200 gold's worth of better equipment in town and asking around the local tavern for some information and pointers, you venture into the darkness. The sorcerer Dark Sol's massive labyrinth, which is the focus of the adventure for the entire game. At first you'll be alone and unable to go too far inside. Common, low-level enemies will be too much to handle, and you'll have to grind through some random battles, retreat back to town to heal and save, grind through some more battles, et cetera, et cetera.
So getting started in Shining in the Darkness is an exercise in tedium, unfortunately, and, more unfortunately, the tedium doesn't really end after you've gotten going. You'll eventually recruit two more party members for a fighting force of three, making trips into the darkened dungeon a bit more manageable – but the system of battles popping up randomly as you explore the halls remains pretty well the same throughout the quest.
And, of course, this is a first-person dungeon crawler at heart, so you're going to get lost. It's easy to remember the layout of passageways and corridors in the beginning sections of Dark Sol's maze, as you'll repeatedly journey through them so often. But getting deeper and deeper into the depths requires either a razor-sharp sense of direction, a handy pad of graph paper, or an Internet browser called up to a fan-made map rendered in the finest style of Microsoft Paint.
Though the gameplay and path to progress through Shining's story can be frustrating, there's no denying that this is a gorgeous game. And it's an earlier effort from the Genesis, which makes it all the more impressive when you see how expressive and colorful every character and environment is in the adventure – there isn't a whole lot of animation, and the walls of the dungeon do get repetitive, but standalone scenes like the king's throne room and local town are impressive.