Shining Resonance Refrain Reviews
Overall, Shining Resonance Refrain is a good JRPG experience despite its incredibly slow start. If you have the patience to get into the meat of the story, it rewards you with fun gameplay and a pleasing audio-visual experience. Whilst it’s not breaking any ground in terms of character development or storyline, it’s still a solid game that fans of the genre are sure to enjoy.
This will absolutely appeal to the hardcore JRPG fan, those that enjoy deep combat and relationship mechanics, those familiar with the Tales of series, and those looking for an enjoyable story with a likeable cast of characters. For everyone else, especially those who despise fetch quests and quests simply for the sake of extending game length, definitely do some solid research before deciding on whether Shining Resonance Refrain deserves your time.
Taking inspirations from other series, Shining Resonance Refrain returns the long running Sega franchise to the West for the first time in over a decade. Mixing a cliched story story full of enjoyable characters with a simplistic combat system, Shining Resonance Refrain can provide you with hours of fun, but certainly is far from a must play game in the genre.
Considering SEGA meant for this entry to be a reboot for the franchise, this overall is a pretty mixed bag. The lore and overall storytelling they have in place is good. It’s just that they need more interesting characters.How the soundtrack is implemented into the gameplay is a really nice though. Hopefully by the time we get the next entry, some if not all of the kinks will be ironed out.
There are some wonderful aspects to the game that I would wholeheartedly recommend. However, I'd really only recommend the game to JRPG fans, primarily for it's dated approach to story-telling and world design.