Installation size is 10 GB in case you wondering as when I was researching this wasn't listed anywhere.

Pros
- Excellent PC port, with full mouse and keyboard / controller support (using xbox one controller), graphic options and uncapped fps
- Solid musical score (boss music and theme song is especially enjoyable)
- Game mechanics are easy to understand and tutorials can be reviewed again where necessary
- Combat is easy to get into with straightforward but rewarding mechanics
- If you enjoy anime, various well known voice actresses and actors play the main roles
- Graphics are solid for a ps3 remaster. There is a nice mix of 3d anime and visual novel scenes
- There is a nice bonding / dating mechanic (female and male surprisingly)

Cons
- Yuma has some annoying personality quirks. His back story sort of covers these flaws to a degree but it is somewhat trope driven (luckily he doesn't have amnesia)
- A mechanic known as the bond diagram (basically a buff team system mechanic) is poorly explained in the tutorial
- Whilst I enjoy the central hub / capital mechanic, it sometimes can appear lifeless, i.e. some npcs you can't interact with, could have opportunities to make it more lively / opportuntiies to explore inside town buildings more

This is clearly a game made on a relatively modest budget, but it has quite a few things going for it that you wouldn't necessarily expect:

• A surprisingly fun ARPG battle system.
  
• An excellent PC port that ticks all the boxes.
  
• All DLC included in the release.

Some of the sidequests and party characters are also pretty good. The overall game could be great if the player character wasn't such a walking trope, and the main story was a bit more interesting.

A fantastic PC port of a JRPG with a very bland story, good combat with a parry mechanic for thrill seekers, far too easy of a difficulty, an enjoyable dub, too much grinding, an entertaining randomized set of dungeons, a boring dating and relationship mechanic, and one of the most busted characters I've seen in an RPG in the form of Rinna.

Honestly, I only recommend it for JRPG fans, and for everyone else I advise against buying. The fights and the English dub were my favorite parts, but even the combat needed some tuning since the fights degraded to "Spam the same attack" over and over. Mechanics such as perfect blocking at precise times and a breadth of options to tailor party members to different roles unfortunately don't make up for the simple fact that I could win 90% of my fights by pressing L+A without even looking at the screen. I guess you could do challenge runs such as soloing the game...

40 hours for me to beat the final boss... then another 30 for Refrain mode. For the interest of time, I'd advise playing in Refrain mode to begin with even for a first time player, as it simply isn't worth it to replay the whole game just for two characters.

Edit: There's a buncha small post game stories and "dungeons", so try to at least check them out after beating the game. They basically lampoon the rest of the game and were honestly my favorite part with how hilarious they were.

Shining Resonance Refrain is a completely shameless and incredibly campy JRPG that I thoroughly enjoyed.

If you have been inundated with so much anime BS that you can chuckle at all of the completely predictable plot developments and cliched characters and everything-is-a-dragon syndrome, the moronic AI and the occasionally nonsensical design- then you might be able to enjoy the game as well. However, since I don't think it's particularly good on its own merits, especially not enough to justify a $50 price tag, I can't really recommend it to other people.

The game is a laugh riot from the start, with the baffling decision to make your introduction to the whole thing listening to Guard A shouting while you look at a still of a generic castle. Then there's bosses whose pathing can be broken by standing on a slight gradient, terrain that's impassable because of a few ankle-high roots, friendly AI that has no concept of not standing in fire, completely ridiculous backronyms like the super buff mode B.A.N.D (which drains your B.P.M. gauge), a model viewer that specifically lets you look at female character models from a lower angle, doing THAT, a hackneyed dating sim mode, skimpy DLC fetish outfits (that are included for free in this version), default outfits that are skimpier than any of the DLC ones, and more.

To better demonstrate what we're dealing with I'll describe some of the characters:

Yuma: The game's protagonist. He has low self esteem and is pretty cowardly (at least in cutscenes) but is important anyways because he's the vessel of the most powerful dragon.

Sonia: the princess knight character. Her Designated Character Trait is eating a lot. The game finds this to be incredibly funny and uses it as the punchline for numerous joke segments.

Kirika: the dignified elf priestess. Literally worships the wimpy MC from day 1 because of the dragon inside him. Her Designated Character traits are disliking carrots and secretly being childish.

Rinna: the teasing older sister type. She's the self-aware character, which means she's actually funny in the way the developers intended most of the time. You put her in your party because she has a ludicrously short skirt and her basic attack combo involves backflips, then keep her in because she has effectively infinite MP and very powerful spells.

Marion: the kuudere. She actually has a decent intro segment, but most of her best moments are her saying things that Rinna told her to.

Jinas: The morally-ambiguous, super-powerful edgelord who is extra amusing because you can hear his voice actor struggling to take his lines seriously.

There are enough archetypes for everyone to find their favorite guy or girl for the romance segments but that's what most of them boil down to: an archetype.

As for the gameplay, it's decent enough. It's not super deep and some of the boss fights are pretty broken, but it's kept fresh enough by having several different types of random encounters you can get, as well as the ability to turn into a dragon occasionally.

In summary: 4/10, I had a blast. You probably won't. Especially not for the price.

From a port perspective, this is a very faithful port to the original... even to a fault.
The translation and Dubbing is top notch - I almost always plays my JRPG with Japanese voice, but I would actually recommend the English dub here. Choice of voice actors and their voice acting match their role very well, some are even better than their JP counterpart.

The story is fairly decent. In fact, I find the VN dating component to be a hinderance... It is randomly picked from a generic list... followed by a walk around town that is getting in the way of the story. It makes sense to do this for some of the main characters... but to do this for the entire cast became a tedious grind and felt really forced on some of the characters... Having said that, the original intended audience are the Japanese gamers, who demands such interaction. So I can't really fault the developer for going this route. I wish they had move some the character development into the main plot and implementing the bonding/dating element more nautrally... rather than putting up a sign saying we got dating sim in this game.

Combat wise, it is simplistic and intuitive... especially if you are used to Banco's Tales of series. Thankfully it doesn't make you grind skills by skill usage either. To maximize your combat capabilities, crafting the various Aspects (aka materia from FF7) comes into play naturally, which also encourages you to explore and hunt down the mats. Minor warning/spoiler: Those who simply rushed thru the game without taking advantage of the Aspect system and crafting the Image Training aspect to level the passive members of your party is in for a rude awakening near the end.

My only complaint is the lack of explanation of the bond system. It just gives us various bonds in games without explaining how the bonds (e.g. what special effects it triggers, etc.). Need to google translate the Japanese wiki for this. However, the combat is too simplistic and easy in this game that it really doesn't matter. *cough* (This game could benefit from harder difficulty than normal) *cough*

Overall, Shining Resonance Refrain is an unpolished gem. Did I have fun with it? Yea.

This is an extremely shallow game.

Nothing about this game is remotely entertaining, but the gameplay takes the cake. Combat is an absolute joke. It is action combat for sake of being action combat, with a single route combo system that can only be described as clanky at best; you use normal attack 3-4 times, use a single strong attack, use a Force to recover AP, then repeat. It has a multiple combo indicator that serves no purpose other than to tell you that you are following the command inputs that game wants you to follow. Should you try something outrageous such as using a strong attack (of which there is only one variation) before normal attacks, the game punishes you by locking you in an annoying animation freeze.

Speaking of animation freezes, the game for some reason removes collision detection after battles when the game show the rewards window. This means that if there is another monster nearby, you cannot immediately engage in battle and have to wait for the rewards window to disappear. This more often than not causes accidental "risky battles" where the game locks your controls out, giving the enemies about 15 seconds of head start as the game passes judgment that you've allowed the monster to engage you from behind. Even when you take a monster head-on, the game's clanky detection system sometimes throws you into a risky battle. This is unadulterated garbage.

There is no sense of adventure in this game as there is only the starting city, which you venture out to story points from. The general flow goes as follows: story takes you to point A, you engage in a boss battle or two, you return to starting city, sleep, story takes you to point B, rinse and repeat. There is no teleportation so traveling is done via walking. This would not be so agonizing if the game did not force you to go through the same areas literally dozen of times. Ignoring mobs is out of the question as enemies gain levels exponentially, and no amount of grinding will put you ahead as the game is designed in a way so that you are always out leveled by enemies, usually by at least 10 levels. This also gives this already chore of a game inconsistent difficulty level. While at one moment you are cutting through enemies like a hot knife through butter, other times you find your party is about to get annihilated because you were unlucky enough to run into a case of simultaneous enemy castings by dozen of mobs that take away half of your life in one hit.

There is also an extremely shallow dating elements to this game. You can romance a girl or a bro of your choice to gain "Personalities" that will give you various bonus effects in battles. There are night scenes where you have a conversation with characters (typically once between story points), and go on a date. Date allows you to walk to three points of interest with a character of your choice to see special events. Running is disabled for some reason. Problem with this is that there are only handful of events prepared for each character so you will be seeing many repeats, and worst of all, NONE of this has any bearing on story or how characters interact whatsoever. The only difference comes in extra ending sequence after you beat the game, which ends with a specially drawn CG by Tony Taka.

Story is boring, predictable, has many plot holes, lacks any kind of deep drama and leaks of amateur fantasy novel reject. To call this game story based RPG does disservice to many excellent titles of the same genre, such as many Final Fantasy titles, Trails of Cold Steel series, Tales titles, or even its own predecessors.

The coveted Refrain mode lets you use two extra characters, Jenas and Excella. The downside is that you will have to pretend like they are not in your party during story sequences because they were too lazy to make any change to the story. Yes. There is literally NO difference in story or dialogues, despite two of the MOST prominent antagonists being in YOUR party. I don't know what genius let this idea slide, but this is so full of money milking mentality that it's genuinely astonishing even in this day and age.

Everything about this game is a chore. The game suggests first time players to play the original mode first, but I suggest different--if you absolutely must play this game even after everything I've said, play Refrain mode once to save yourself agony of having to play this lazy excuse of a RPG more than once.

Shining Resonance Refrain is a part of the famous Shining series, which are role-playing titles developed by SEGA. The good thing is that each game in the series has a standalone story, so you do not have to play the previous ones.

Two things I should mention before starting the actual review: first, I use a keyboard, so I cannot say much about the controller support; second, I played with Japanese voices.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438125618

Story. Long time ago there was a holy island called Alfheim, which was said to be the home of a divine force known as Deus. There high elves lived in harmony with dragons and used Rune Songs to talk to them. However, Deus did not like the current state of affairs – he wanted to build a new world, and for this, he needed to destroy the old one. Some high elves supported Deus, but others preferred to stay friends with dragons and protect what is dear to them. The war starts bringing a lot of chaos. Even though dragons won and sealed Deus, high elves had to leave their homeland.

But the story does not end here. Alfheim was brought to life again by humans who came to the land and now there is a huge kingdom of Astoria. Still, we all know that nothing good lasts for long, and one day Evil Forces come back to get what they think is rightfully theirs. There is only one person capable to save the world - Yuma Ilvern, a simple young man who has a soul of the Shining Dragon within him.

Now, gather your party and venture forth into the midst of battle. Glory is waiting for you!

Characters. There is a great cast of people and each one has their own personality. Let us start with the main character Yuma. Well, he is extremely shy and indecisive at the beginning of the game, mostly due to the fact that he was in prison for too long. Sometimes I even wanted to smack him upside the head to knock some sense into this guy. However, later he will become more of a man he should be, so just wait a bit.

Speaking about the Light Side, here we have Sonia Blanche, the brave and pure crown princess of Astoria and the leader of the party, Kirika Towa Alma, a reserved but kind Diva Magica, Rinna Mayfield, an easy-going and cunning elven mage, Agnum Bulletheart, a passionate Dragoneer who controls fire, and Lestin Serra Alma, Kirika's older brother and an ice mage.

The Dark Side includes Excella Noa Aura, the Imperial Princess of the Empire who wants to catch Yuma at all costs, and a group of Beowulf warriors. And do not forget about Jinas Aion, a lone warrior who can cut dragons into half with just one swift strike of his sword.

Gameplay. Refrain can be described as a traditional JRPG (not all other titles in Shining had this genre), so be ready for some spectacular battles with a lot of grinding, cute girls (not obligatory, of course, but a quite common element), sadistic villains, and other great stuff that will eat away hours and hours of your life. I think this game can be compared to the ones of Tales series, so if you have played any of them before, you will easily get into Shining. There are various types of attacks and each character has their own unique style. I think there is no need to describe each move because you will get all the necessary information from the Tutorial in the Prologue.

The tutorial parts look great and are easy to follow. I also appreciate the fact that they used keyboard icons instead of gamepad’s ones like some other games do when ported to PC. I never had any problems to understand what the game wanted from me. There is also a Dictionary in the game that has information about all main parts of the world, as well as characters and items. It is extremely useful if you want to know everything about the story and the current events.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438070438

There is a lot of interaction between the main character and party members: you can talk to them while resting to learn more about their life stories, to initiate some scenes and even to start dating – yes, there is romance! You can also talk to other characters in cities, and almost every NPC will react to you in some way.

The only thing I did not quite like was that you cannot save any time you like. You have to find a special Save Point to do it, even outside of battles. Oh well, it is more a problem on my side than on the game’s one, while this is a common feature for JRPGs, so I think this will not be an issue for most players.

Music and Voices. The music is awesome! Just the perfect combination of modern tunes and folklore ones. I absolutely loved the flute motives; for example, listen to the song in the main menu – it is an ideal part of an almost ideal world and creates the perfect mood before you even launch the game. I was ready to go and deal with any bad guys in the most SSStylish! way (see what I did there? ^^) possible just after listening to it. Other tracks are great too. If they ever release a soundtrack collection, I will buy it immediately.

Voices are soooo good~! I loved each and every character and can say for sure that voice actors did a great job. Also, there is quite a lot of singing and playing various instruments due to the nature of local magic; I should admit that all songs were beautiful and they really acted like spells to create the right atmosphere.

My only complaint here is that not all NPC have voices. I understand that it would be too much to ask to voice each and every person in the game, but that would make them more…alive, I think?

Art. All anime, manga and, em, hentai spirits know how much I love Tony Taka’s art (the only artist I admire more is Carnelian). Usually I am quite against any forms of fan service, but Tony is too awesome for me to complain. A lot of love went into characters’ design, so all of them are well-drawn and have distinct appearance; I am sure you will not mistake one person with another one. There are lots of details in equipment and items, and even NPCs look good. I do not think I have to say anything about CGs – they are gorgeous, as one could have expected. The same goes for backgrounds – even the every first places impressed me with how well-drawn they were (the inn was particularly good).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1438008921

Characters’ sprites are fully animated, so they will move not only during battles and when you take control of them, but also while they are speaking. All UI parts are very neat and are also partially animated (look at the party menu, for example); the dialogue zone is particularly lovely, if you ask me. The animations are smooth; characters move and battle easily and there are no freezes.

And again, only one complaint here: they overused the same sprites for NPCs. You will find at least 2-3 same people in the first city. That somewhat spoiled the initial impression, to be honest.


Shining Resonance Refrain is a high-quality JRPG title that offers a fascinating story, gorgeous art, well-developed characters, harmonious and melodic music and songs, and a superb gameplay. I have not encountered any kind of technical issues so far, so there is nothing to complain about as far as the PC port is concerned – everything runs smoothly. I am just at the beginning of the game and I am already quite impressed with how good it is. To be honest, each part of it is so beautiful that I barely stopped myself from taking screenshots every single scene.

To sum up, an awesome game and a very good PC port. And while you do not need to play other games of the Shining series before starting this one, you are not missing anything story-wise. So, are you ready for this adventure? I am for sure!

This game is not AS BAD as some people wanna make you think, I 100% the whole thing and had no issues or crashes, and the keyboard/mouse controls were perfect.

Here is a few pros it has:
-Top tier waifus/artstyle by a known hentai artist
-Addicting battle system
-Tons of build customisation (you can make some extremly OP builds by end game)
-Main character can turn into a big dragon and pwns everything

That being said, the plot is very cookie cutter and I barely paid any attention to plot or any of the male characters and it definitely does have its flaws.

The first one is even on the title screen, you are given two options when starting a new game, and the second one "Refrain" makes it seem like its a side story or a completely different plot, in reality both "Original" and "Refrain" are EXACTLY THE SAME, except Refrain Mode adds 2 characters that don't join your party until post game in Original cause it considers it spoilers... but come on. Now if you dont care about stuff like trophies or 100% the game, its not a big issue, but locking literally just 3 trophies and about 30 minutes of extra dialogue, forcing you to replay game to get them, is one of the dumbest things I heard, and I can see why some people would be angry..bear in mind this is a "remaster" of sorts so they had time to fix this.

The other "issue" this game has is that there is no fast travel, however this personally did not bother me as the map is fairly small, you get one from one corner of the map to another corner in a few minutes, but lots of people consider this "backtracking" and the whole plot revolves around you travelling around the same few areas (you can buy item to instantly go back to town), monsters do scale and sometimes even completely change tho so you will never be too OP, unless you decide to invest time in the optional "Grimore" dungeons that are available at any camp, which are 3 floor randomly generated dungeons that always have monsters around your level.. you can literally just grind on them until you hit level cap, tho its recommended you wait for post game since you unlock really high level boosters. However... its still just the same few repetitive dungeons and 4 of them are just pallete swaps.

The last minor issue that I had with this game, is that you can date your party members, and after 4-5 dates you are able to unlock their "ending" by choosing them before the last boss, the problem is that "dates" involve you very slowly walking around town and locating 3 randomly generated "date spots" (that almost always have the same dialogue) which unlocks the actual date scene. This was super annoying, and what is worst is that some party members are in the second screen out of 2 that comprises the town, so you have to load to go talk to them, then load again to find date spots. I have no clue why they made you walk super slow, when your character is obviously still jogging, why they placed half of the party members on a separate screen, and why they made you do the same task over and over...you already need to talk to them before you go to "Rest" to have repetitive night conversations with them until they agree to go out with you, and to make matters worse, there is one character that wont date you no matter how much you talk to them until a certain chapter of the game, but the game never tells you that! I wasted a few hours trying to get her to go out until I gave up and then realised my "mistake". Basically the whole "date" thing is a huge annoyance and time sink that is just meant to make you waste as much time as possible...however its optional.

So overall I really enjoyed my time with this game, specially since I grabbed it during a sale (definitely not worth full price btw), at most I would pay 10-15$ CND for this game.

Also... why they hired a hentai artist to do the artwork for a game where you "date" your party members, and have no sex scenes the whole game, I will never understand.

Runs flawlessy with the frame rate uncapped
Looks beautiful for a remaster of a PS3 title
Combat flows well without being overly simple

Shining Resonance Refrain is a JRPG remastered version of the Japanese exclusive "Shining Resonance". The story plot revolves around the main protagonist Yuma Ilvern, a teenager who holds the power of the Shining Dragon, who ventures off on a journey with his fellow comrades to stop the Empire from utilising and abusing the ancient dragon's power to achieve their selfish goals.

The game's story plot is a bit cliche, where you have the main protagonist who progresses throughout the game, learning about the "bad guys" and their goals, gathering and helping strangers who later becomes your comrade that shares a common goal to defeat evil. Character development for the main protagonist is well written, as the more you progress through the game, the more you learn about Yuma's "Shining Dragon" powers and how he acquired them. On the other hand, character development for the other playable protagonist is a bit subtle in the main story, however you do get to know them better throughout conversations and chats in side-quests, dates and skits.

Gameplay wise, it's pretty identical to the "Tales of" JRPG franchise that utilises the Linear Motion Battle System, unlike the conventional JRPG games where in battle it's mostly turn based. One of the biggest downside to Shining Resonance Refrain's battle system is the clunky movement mechanics. I felt like I have to punch the buttons twice in order to initiate an attack. Yuma's Shining Dragon form is honestly the hardest to control with this mechanic. Likewise, the sprinting mechanic is just horrible to control outside of battles, especially when you want to take a sharp turn. Additionally the stopping slide animation just doesn't really help with the experience.

Side quests are almost useless towards the progression of the main story. Although they do help you gather some specific and unique rewards and monster datas, the side quests do tend to repeat itself every once in a while after you take a rest at the inn. This can be a nuisance to manage given that you also have other side quests to do.

The game's world map isn't all that big, which can be pretty boring to explore especially given the fact that there is literally only one big city and the rest of the maps are just "dungeons" with monsters. It took me around 10-12 minutes to sprint from the city all the way to the end of the map without any enemy engagements. Not to mention, the city itself is pretty small and generic as well with not much to interact with. Heck, you can't even enter any of the houses nor buildings! But hey, at least on the bright side you can date your favourite waifus and husbandos, and have cute skits afterwards. kirika best grill

Pros:
- Great character development for main protagonist and some of the other playable characters.
- Each playable characters are unique and all have their own personalities, which can provide some pretty memorable moments.
- Amazing and quality 3D models and animations.
- Amazing voice acting that really do bring the characters into life (especially for the Japanese version).
- Beautiful soundtracks.
- Lots of skits both within the story, side quests or just regular conversations with other protagonists in the city. Which can produce quite some memorable moments.
- Restartable boss battles. So when you die, you don't have to restart from the last save file.
- You can control other characters as well, to suit your RPG gaming style.
- Tutorials will always be given out whenever you play as another protagonist in the world map, as well as readily available at the Inn.
- Post-game bonuses and dungeons, as well as additionally post-game skits.
- You can date your favourite waifus and husbandos! Which can also determine your story ending outcome given that enough affection points is gather.
- Free DLC costumes, so you can make all your waifus run around and fight monsters in swimsuits. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- Rinna's beautiful and thicc thighs.

Cons:
- Cliche story plot.
- Clunky battle mechanics and sprinting animations.
- Grinding extreme, which can discourage a lot of people from progressing this game.
- Small city and world map, makes for boring exploration.
- Repeating side quests, which causes management problems with other side quests. Especially given the fact that completed quests aren't marked at all in the menu.

Although there are several complaints that I have about this game, overall I really do enjoy playing and finishing this game. Heck, I even went for a second playthrough in Refrain Mode just for some of that additional character content. If you enjoy playing the "Tales of" series franchise, you can definitely give Shining Resonance Refrain a go as well. But just don't expect it to be nearly as good as the recently released Tales of Berseria in terms of gameplay mechanics and story plot.

Overall, I would give this game a 7/10.


Also additional notes: There is no difference between the Original and Refrain Mode in terms of story plot. If you don't want to play the game for a second time but want to get achievements and additional content, ignore the game's warning and play Refrain Mode. The only difference is that you'll be able to play as Excella and Jinas, have access to their unique skits, as well as having the ability to date them.