Shining the Holy Ark
is a first person role-playing video game released in 1997 for the Sega Saturn. It is a part of Sega's Shining series of video games, and marked a new direction for the series, utilizing polygons as well as sprites for the visuals and a story targeted more specifically towards an adult audience. It introduced the saga of the Vandals and the Innovators, abandoning the saga of the Devil Kings which was followed by the previous installments of the series. In contrast to the action-adventure format of the first Shining game on the Saturn, Shining Wisdom, Shining the Holy Ark revived older RPG elements such as extensive first-person dungeon crawling and turn-based combat. It had greater critical success than its predecessor, with praise going to its unique graphical style and engaging battles. Gameplay Gameplay is most similar to Shining in the Darkness; the player explores towns and dungeons in the first-person view, with battles almost exclusively taking place in dungeons. Exploration uses traditional node-based movement rather than the continuous, free-form movement used in most first-person games at the time Shining the Holy Ark was released. The player controls a party of up to four characters, but additional characters can be kept