BLADE ARCUS from Shining: Battle Arena is a neat little brawler with a decent cast and enjoyable mechanics, but it’s too limited in too many ways to be anywhere near a… shining… example of the genre.

Blade Arcus from Shining is one of the best games to pick up if your interested in learning or teaching someone how to play a traditional 2D anime fighter. The simple mechanics and beautiful visuals are enough to keep someone enticed long enough to feel adequately comfortable to move onto more popular and complex fighters. But the bare-bones content and uninteresting story/characters certainly won’t keep most around very long outside that.

It's really nice to see that, finally, SEGA decided to localize one of the fighting games from Blade Arcus from Shining; that's something that hardcore fans from the series will thank. However, that doesn't help the fact that the game seems a little lackluster when compared with other great fighting franchises. It is a really good fighting title, but one that will be enjoyed, mostly, by the followers from the original RPG series.