The Shining Nexus

Welcome to the Shining Cartography series. In this series I will be mapping out selected games in the Shining series:  Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force, Shining Force 2, Shining Force CD and Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict. I've decided to include SitD because of its first-person dungeon crawler design, which makes good practice to improve and standardized my mapping aptitude. Also, its story is closely tied to the Shining Force  games and finishing these games are on my bucket list. I'm a huge Shining Force fan and these games are the reason why I'm obsessed with strategy RPGs. Mapping out video games is an interesting and enjoyable hobby of mine and I genuinely look forward to drawing and playing these wonderful games. This is a huge project to embark on, which will essentially take me quite a bit of time to finish, especially with my limited free time. The plan is to work on this project a couple of hours one day per week and update this blog along with it.

Good year, good games, good times. Here's a list of my favorite games of 2018. ---- Octopath Traveller A JRPG that returns to it's 16-bit roots, Octopath Traveller is a wonderful adventure that hearkens back to a SNES era of sprite based graphics and turn based combat mechanics. There are many components about this game that just breathes nostalgia and improves upon them. Its cast of eight playable characters offer unique talents to build team compositions with and it becomes important to build thoughtful compositions as the difficulty ramps up. And boy does it ramp up. Bosses are fierce and unforgiving that punishes the player for making the slightest mistake. The turn base combats are fun, complex, and rewarding. Mashing the "A" button won't take you very far, that's for sure. The story was good and I enjoyed all the individual character arcs, but it's lack of significance in the overall scheme and an absence of meaningful interaction between