So I played the first hour or so of Shining Resonance Refrain because I got it as a Christmas gift and I uh... that was certainly an RPG my eye witnessed.

I have seen things with shakier worldbuilding, but never one that felt this much like someone was making shit up on the fly.

The fact that the main character has, in the span of five minutes, two separate conversations with an inner personality about unsealing his long sealed powers, and they're two different powers entirely, is honestly hilarious.

hysterically even the title sounds like it was just kind of thrown together in five minutes

Because it might as well be.

What is this game about? I would be fucking lying to you if I told you I knew.

Dragons? Kingdoms at war? Magical weapons that're actually instruments?

A really eh action RPG? Something that wanted to be a classic RPG and also wanted to do Persona time management but doesn't include the time management so really this is the story of a boy who is a dragon kind of just grinding up his relationships with everyone in a system that is basically eroge without porn?

I mean points where it's due, apparently you can romance literally the whole party, man and woman.

And why not? You're a noodly anime boy with anxiety problems who is also secretly a holy dragon you might as well sleep with everyone.

It's not like your life can get worse.

Also the hilarious part about Refrain is that it just deadass dumps two of the villains in your party.

No real explanation.

The day-to-day slice-of-life stuff acknowledges them but like, the plot doesn't.

Our hero like "with just the three of us, I'll have to use my dragon form to fight this monster!" ignoring the dark princess magical girl and the katana-wielding dragonslayer dude just slightly out of frame apparently.

this is about what I expect from a game with a title that sounds like it was made up

To think that this is where the Shining series has gone…

The Raƶe I know, right? Shining in the Darkness was one of the fist games I ever stayed up all night playing, mostly because it was a friend's house and I didn't own a Genesis.

Having read up on it some, the base PS3 game apparently got two DLC chapters that were postgame and made them recruitable, but that meant you didn't really get to play them much or romance them so the solution for Refrain was to just dump them into the cast early and let players handwave it all.