Genre: RPG
Developer: Camelot
Publisher: Sega

Like its excellent predecessor Shining in the Darkness, Shining the Holy Ark takes an almost Western approach to the RPG genre by making use entirely of the first-person perspective. Except this time around, the dungeons and towns are all texture-mapped polygons, with ultra high resolution, superbly animated sprites making up all of the characters and baddies in the towns and dungeons. The presentation is high resolution and very crisp.

For Shining the Holy Ark, the developers chose to use MIDI (or mods, I can't quite tell) for all of the music. This proves to be both blessing and curse, as while the samples are of outstanding quality and the music of excellent composition, there are several times where samples in the songs are interrupted by a sound effect, or get "hung", a sound driver bug frequent enough warrant mention in this review. Perhaps Red Book cd audio would have been a better choice, but in the end, this game delivers a nice sound track and decent enough sound effects.

Like Shining in the Darkness, this title features difficult yet rewarding enemy and boss battles and superbly designed dungeons with the correct ratio of puzzles versus flat-out dungeon crawling. And, as an added bonus, this title also introduces an auto-map, which can be accessed without use of a spell at any time. There is also a cool feature which allows you to collect "pixies", which can be used to attack enemies right as they appear before a battle. From a gameplay vantage point, Shining the Holy Ark only improves on what was achieved with the previous game in the series.

Buggy sound drivers and sometimes stuttering framerates aside, this is an outstanding RPG. And outside of the addition of auto-map, this game also improves on the first title by bringing forth a much greater variety of towns and dungeons to visit, making for a perhaps less drab or uniform experience. On the other hand, I don't feel that this game is anywhere near as atmospheric as the original, and seeing as how ambience was the first game's greatest asset, I rate Shining the Holy Ark just a half a score lower than I would rate the original. Yet in my roughly 36 hour play-through the game was more than just engaging from beginning to the very end.