Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

My honest first reaction to Shiness was mild disorientation, and I mean that as something close to a compliment. This is a game rooted in a manga universe its creative director, Samir Rebib, reportedly began imagining as a child, and that unusual origin gives the world of Mahera a handmade quality you rarely find even in games with ten times the budget. You play as Chado, a furry Waki who crash-lands on a hostile Meteora alongside his companion Poky, stumbles into a multi-kingdom political conflict, and discovers he alone can perceive a mysterious elemental spirit called a Shiness. The setup reads like half a dozen other anime-inflected RPGs, and that familiarity is both a comfort and a warning. The combat is what divides people, and it will divide you too. Fights are one-on-one, fought inside small arenas whose walls cycle through elemental colors that directly affect how you channel Shi energy into stronger skills. You dodge, parry, combo, fire magic projectiles, swap party members mid-fight to match the current element, and eventually pull off hyper moves with quick-time flourishes. On paper, it reads like a fighting game hybridized with the Tales series. In practice, the parry window is stingy, the dodge input can go unread, and enemy difficulty spikes arrive before the game has properly taught you to use the advanced tools. Players who grew up eating execution in Street Fighter III or who genuinely enjoy learning hostile combat systems will find something worth grinding here. Everyone else should set their expectations accordingly and accept that the early hours are deceptively gentle. Outside of combat, the world holds its own. Each of the five party members carries a unique traversal ability: Chado summons a rock to activate pressure plates, Poky manipulates magnetic fields, Kayenne uses telekinesis. Puzzles require juggling whoever is in your active three-person party, and there is a low-key Zelda-like satisfaction in returning to earlier zones with new abilities. Side quests, bounties, and wildlife-catching give the Celestial Islands a lived-in texture that the main story, generic by almost every reviewer's reckoning, never quite achieves on its own. The world building is the game asking you to trust it; the dialogue is the game failing that ask fairly often, with translation roughness adding extra friction. A handful of technical bugs, including a notorious invisible-wall trap near the ten-hour mark, confirm that this was shipped with polish still owing. What keeps Shiness worth discussing nearly a decade after release is the sheer specificity of its visual language. The cel-shaded environments are genuinely lovely, reminiscent of CyberConnect2's work at its most vibrant without quite reaching that studio's precision. Story beats arrive via semi-animated manga panels pulled from Rebib's original book, and those sequences carry an intimacy that the voiced dialogue cannot match. The soundtrack, singled out repeatedly by players who landed on the positive side of the ledger, drives the anime-action mood with real conviction. Steam user reviews sit at roughly 67 percent positive, and that split feels accurate: this is a game half its audience will quietly love and the other half will abandon at the first frustrating boss.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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