Shining Wisdom

Shining Wisdom is an action-adventure game developed by Sonic! Software Planning and Camelot Software Planning and published by Sega for the Sega Saturn. It was the last game in the Shining series to be developed for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive but was reworked for the Saturn late in development. Because of this, it is more typical of the Genesis library than the Saturn library in its basic approach, rendering characters and backgrounds exclusively in 2D (albeit at a higher resolution than would be possible on the Genesis) and utilizing mechanics which mostly follow the rules of a two-dimensional world. This approach was seen as dated by critics, and it was met with mixed reviews, with some seeing it as a decent holdover title due to its massive length. While the Shining series has flitted across numerous sub-genres, Shining Wisdom remains the only game in the series to abandon the multi-character RPG format entirely. Players instead can control just one character, whose abilities cannot be increased, and gameplay focuses on solving puzzles and navigating the large game world. Though it stands apart from the rest of the series in terms of gameplay, Shining Wisdom is strongly tied into the story continuity of the previous entries and is the last game in the series to follow the saga of the Devil Kings. In North America the game was localized and published by Working Designs.