Do I need to play the previous games?

[Jailbroken]

Is the story tied to any of the previous games? Can I play this without playing the previous games and still enjoy it and get what's going on?

[landman]

It's not tied, the only Shining games that had some references to previous games are the old ones from Camelot, and the first Shining Soul from 2002, everything else after that was either a remake of an old one, or its own story on who knows what place or time.

[Redblaze27]

Originally posted by landman:

It's not tied, the only Shining games that had some references to previous games are the old ones from Camelot, and the first Shining Soul from 2002, everything else after that was either a remake of an old one, or its own story on who knows what place or time.

So....basically like how its safe to assume every Fire Emblem game is in its own universe, unless stated otherwise.

[ingosupercute]

If I have learned one thing from years and years of gaming and countless sequels then it's that you never really have to play older titles just to get the newer ones, unless maybe it's a visual novel.
Game devs are smart, they don't want to lock out potential new customers by making their newest installment of a long time franchise inaccessible. What they usually do it build in many smaller references, that a veteran player will appreciate and get memory flashes from, but a new player doesn't even notice.

All I can say is whenever I entered a series late, I was playing just as usual and found it fun, and later people would start telling me omg how could you do that you were missing out on so much, then I would YT or wiki it and be like... ok that wasn't really much at all. I suppose videogame stories just don't hold a lot of depth.
And if they do, such as in the Elder Scrolls series, the devs make sure to make their new game is diverse enough from the story of the last game to make it feel completely new. And whoever feels like doing research can read about it in one of the countless history books ingame. For example in Skyrim, if you knew it existed, you were able to read about Daggerfall, the Nerevarine, the Oblivion crysis, Sheogorath, relics from past games and so on and so forth.

tl;dr Just jump into a new title without worrying about the past!!

[Wicca-san]

Knowing the series beforehand in this case only gives you some knowledge of the overall *flavor* of the series, but being someone who has played some of the games in the middle, then some of the older ones, it might make you more anticipatory of seeing new games, but you aren't gonna miss out if you haven't. Apart from the fact that they're good games in their own right and worth playing if you can find em :-)

[Adam]

As someone who came up on Darkness, Force, Holy Ark, etc., I specifically recommend you don't play the previous games if you want a fighting chance at enjoying this one. Here's hoping Sega ceases desecrating this poor series's corpse.

[MaximaEnfield]

Shining Tears, Shining Wind, Shining Hearts, Shining Blades and Shining Ark are some what linked. Resonance is not afaik, so you won't miss out anything.

[Qpax ツ]

Originally posted by MaximaEnfield™:

Shining Tears, Shining Wind, Shining Hearts, Shining Blades and Shining Ark are some what linked. Resonance is not afaik, so you won't miss out anything.

Yeah Shining Wind is like a direct sequel to to Shining Tears. The main characters from Shining Tears appear in Shining Wind as well. An anime adaptation of the two games, called Shining Tears X Wind, began airing in early April 2007 too.

Hopefully they dont refer to old games in this game so that we dont miss out too much from the story and references :/