Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom lands on PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One with a premise that sounds like a pitch for a much bigger game. You play Chado, a traveler who crash-lands on one of the most hostile islands in the Celestial islands and finds himself in the middle of a conflict between multiple kingdoms.
His way out is a strange one: he can perceive and communicate with the Shiness, a mysterious spirit full of magic. Enigami built a half open world around that idea, with five playable characters from different species and a realtime dynamic battle system. Focus Entertainment published it in 2017. The game reaches for a lot. It does not always hold what it grabs.
Trailer, via Focus Entertainment.
Chado and the Shiness
The hook is the language. The five characters speak in a tongue created specifically for the game’s universe. That is not a small thing to attempt. A made-up language running through a full role-playing game asks the player to sit inside a world that does not explain itself in familiar words, and Shiness commits to it. The result is a game that feels sealed off in a way few role-playing games bother to attempt.
The Shiness itself is the second hook. It is not a weapon and not a party member. It is a spirit, and Chado’s ability to perceive and communicate with it is the thing that might turn a volatile situation across the kingdoms into a peaceful outcome. That framing matters. Shiness sets up a war story where the hero’s power is not force but contact.
Five Species, One Flying Ship
Chado and his companions travel the Celestial islands on a flying ship. They are five characters from different species, and the game lets you play all of them. The ship is the spine of the journey, and the crash on the hostile island is what drops the group into the kingdoms’ conflict.
The cast is where the ambition shows most clearly. Five playable characters from separate species is a lot of design surface, and Shiness spreads its story across them rather than locking you to one hero. The storyline is affected by your choices. That combination — multiple species, a shared language, branching outcomes — is the game’s real argument for itself.
A Realtime Battle System
Shiness runs on a realtime dynamic battle system, and that is the piece most likely to decide whether you stay. The game is tagged as fighting, role-playing, adventure and indie, and the battle system is why the fighting tag is there at all.
| Element | What Shiness offers |
|---|---|
| Battle system | Realtime dynamic |
| Playable characters | Five, from different species |
| Language | Created specifically for the game’s universe |
| Story | Affected by your choices |
| World | Half open, across the Celestial islands |
| Perspective | Third person |
| Mode | Single player |
The table is the whole pitch in one place, and it reads well. Every row is a promise. The trouble with Shiness is not the list. It is what happens when the list has to run at the same time.
A Half Open World
Half open world is an honest label and a limiting one. Shiness moves you through the Celestial islands on a flying ship, but the world does not open the way a full open-world role-playing game does. You get structure, not freedom. The islands are a route, and the kingdoms are stops along it.
That is not automatically a fault. A game can be linear and excellent. But Shiness advertises the open half loudly, and the gap between the promise and the route is where the game starts to feel smaller than its own description.
The third-person perspective keeps you close to Chado and the party, which suits a story built on a personal ability rather than a grand campaign. You are not commanding armies. You are one traveler who can talk to something nobody else can.
What the Kingdoms Add Up To
The conflict across multiple kingdoms is the setting’s best asset and its most underused one. Shiness gives you a war with several sides and a hero whose power points toward a peaceful outcome. That is a strong frame. It puts the game’s magic in direct tension with its politics.
Shiness is offering an unique experience that you won’t forget!
That is the game’s own line, and it is the right standard to hold it to. A role-playing game with a custom language, five species and a choice-driven story is asking to be remembered. Shiness is memorable in pieces. The language stays with you. The battle system stays with you. The kingdoms, the war and the choices blur together more than they should.
The Verdict on Shiness
Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is a game built from good ideas that never fully combine. The realtime dynamic battle system works as a centerpiece. The invented language gives the world a texture most indie role-playing games never reach for. Chado’s link to the Shiness is a genuinely different kind of hero power, and the choice-driven storyline gives the journey weight.
But the half open world is more corridor than country, and the multi-kingdom conflict that should be the emotional engine of the whole thing reads as background rather than stakes. Five playable characters from different species is a promise of variety that the game does not always cash. When a game asks you to learn its language, its world has to earn the effort. Shiness earns part of it.
The published critical score is 6.8 out of 10, drawn from an aggregate of 12 outlets. That number is fair, and it lands where our own read lands. Shiness is not a failure. It is a near miss with a distinctive voice, and near misses with distinctive voices are worth more attention than clean, forgettable successes.
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