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I'm jumping back in time back to Chrono Cross by Square Enix, formerly SquareSoft. It was made in 1999 or 2000...around the time of Final Fantasy IX so the graphics are still good; even better than some games nowadays. sweatdrop
I saw a preview for it on Cinematech and I loved the song they played first. Then I saw the graphics and looked at who made it so pretty. SquareSoft, of course. They make almost everybody else look bad.
I'm postive it'll be a good little game, old or not. 3nodding

SHINING TEARS

A game review by Jenn 'Karnokoto.'


When shown the cover of Shining Tears, my first thought was, undoubtedly, 'oh no, not another anime inspired rpg.' And, to an extent, I'd be right, because thats what Shining Tears is on a very base level.

The story goes that once upon a time, long long ago, there were 2 people called the Twin Dragon Knights. 2 rings of power, blahblah, guy washes up on the shore mysteriously with a ring, which turns out to be one of the Twin Dragon Rings. Huge surprise there.
You're an adorable sprite who runs around with a sword, and you get one other party member to play with. The characters are actually quite nifty looking, if not completely unoriginal. A huge dragon in plate mail with a battleaxe, a cold-hearted mage chick, a shy yet strong-willed priestess...you get the point. Its all extremely stereotypical.
Conversations happen with portraits and chat bubbles, although there is excellent voice acting. Its voice acting that sometimes you actually want to listen to it the whole way through, if thats any indication. The art is very cute and bright, as is the entire style of the game.

The battle system is kind of cool. Its mostly hack-and-slash, but, depending on what party member you take with you, there is a plethora of area effect massive damage attacks that have cute-looking little graphics, too.
The level-up system is to the point and effective, and is fun to play around with.
The games weapons also have a kind of fusion system like in Final Fantasy, where you collect materials from enemies and imbue their powers into your weapons to give them bonuses and cool special attacks, too.

IMO, where this game really shines is in co-op mode. You can invite a friend to join you, and participate in battles together. They can pick whatever character they want and level them up seperately.
The only downside to the way they have co-op set up is that when you're in town restocking on healies and powering-up your weapons along with talking to NPCs and generally moving around, its only first player that gets to do anything. So second player is expected to do...what?
I think that second player should be able to follow around in town, but disappear when you enter the inn as thats where all the characters hang out while you're out adventuring.

Its pretty straight-forward but it isnt easy the whole time. In fact it gets a bit challenging further into the game, so much so that I had to go back and level up all of my characters a lot just so I could beat a boss.

PROS:
-Nice art
-Amazing voice overs
-Cute/fun
-Simple yet effective
-Can repeat most missions infinetely, as long as they're not too storyline essential.

CONS:
-Insanely stereotypical plot and characters
-No originality whatsoever
-Have to pass controller around frequently while in co-op

Its a simple, cute, fun game, and if you're into the whole anime-inspired game thing, I'd suggest you take it for a test run.


Hope you guys found this useful, I'm not used to writing reviews so if you'd like to see anything in future reviews, lemme know.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg got overlooked><. What about Lost in Blue? There's a lot of games I can think of...