Shining Resonance Refrain Demo Impressions – Nintendo Switch

Shining Resonance Refrain is an expanded and remaster of the Japan only PS3 game, Shining Resonance. It will release on July 10th on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One and Windows PCs.

Introductions

The demo released on the e-shop this week. It starts with the knight Sonia storming a prison to rescue someone. This someone turns out to be a young man named Yuma, who isn’t too thrilled to be rescued. After they make it to the roof it switches to Kirika who was providing the diversion. Finally they meet when the Imperial Princess attacks them with her dragon. Yuma in between these portions speaks to a voice inside him who persuades him to join combat. When hope seems lost the voice convinces him to use his dragon power. At which point, Yuma transforms into a dragon and flies off. After that the demo ends and plays a trailer for the game.

Just a hint of game play

In between portions of dialogue are some game play moments. As an action game there is the normal attack, plus break attacks which do unique things for each character. Either of those use the action points which show as a gauge around the character. There are also force abilities which do different things and they use magic points. The game advises to mix them up so you can recover your action points. It didn’t tell me but I also seem to be able to do a small dodge. The games PS3 origins are certainly felt and seen, I found Sonia was the most comfortable to play as. Yuma was a heavy attacker and Kirika’s ranged attacks don’t seem to be very useful in a closed area. It didn’t teach me the swap button in the “boss” fight either.

Impressions

This demo seems to be the starting portion of the game which I feel mightn’t have been the best choice. While it already has the tutorials put in, it also has a lot of dialogue. It took me less than forty minutes but most of it wasn’t combat. There’s also a lot of references to locations and concepts I’ve never heard of.  There are black bars on the top and bottom of the screen at times so it seems not a lot of effort was put into this version. Outside of the visual novel style dialogue there was some subtitled cutscenes with a very standard caption font. However there is extra content in this game, a new side-story called Refrain will be in the full version. All the over 150 pieces of DLC (presumably mostly comestic) are included.

I feel that this demo won’t be very good for encouraging people to play. On the Switch it will also have to compete with YS VIII and Octopath Traveler arriving within the same couple of weeks. Controlling dragons with music is an idea that still intrigues me. I also like the design of some characters like Kirika. I just think that the heroes trailer probably does a better job of enticing someone to play it.

You can also check out their website for more details on the concepts of the game. I’ve also placed my game play video of the demo here if you are unable to play it.