Shiness Interview – A Mix of Action, JRPG & Manga

Shiness, an action JRPG in production at French studio Enigami, is finally nearing its end of development with a targeted release in Spring 2016. The game was originally Kick-started on May 2014 and now it also has a publisher, Focus Home Interactive.

We reached out to Enigami's CEO Hazem Hawash to glean more details about the game on your behalf. Enjoy!

• What were your inspirations for the storyline and the universe as a whole?
• Samir, the creative director, and I are really huge RPG fans. Our inspirations for Shiness were games like Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, Tales of Vesperia or Chrono Cross. We’re also passionate about fighting games, such as Street Fighter or Guilty Gear.

• Shiness is officially described as a half-open world RPG, can you explain what that means exactly?
• In Shiness, you can explore vast environments, like The Plains of Meonis, which is one of the main areas of the game where you can complete many quests or secondary objectives. Or discover narrow places like the dungeons, which are more similar to those you can cross in the Zelda games. Numerous enigmas and exploration phases await you!

• Will it be possible to level up and upgrade/customize skills RPG style? If so, is there a level cap?
• For sure! Shiness got its own skill system! You can customize all of your characters stats by equipping them with the items you’ll find during your journey. The level cap of each character will be fixed at 50.

• Will there be proper boss fights in Shiness and if so, how many?
• There are different bosses in Shiness, but we’d rather not tell you how many to keep the surprise! One thing is certain: we do our best to make the boss battles as epic as possible!

• On the Kickstarter campaign, you mentioned three possible online modes such as co-op, versus and world challenge. Will these be featured in Shiness at launch?
• For the moment, we don’t know if the online modes will be ready at launch. We do our best to make them available as soon as possible.

• You've mentioned that the world will be affected by the player's decisions. Can you make one such example?
• The choices made by the player may affect, for example, the behavior of some characters. They will later be able to choose to help you or hinder you. It is your responsibility to make the best choices, despite some complex situations.

• How long will it take to complete the game, in terms of gameplay hours, according to your estimation?
• If the players just want to rush the main story, it will take them 15 hours to reach the end of Shiness. However, if they want to collect all of the items, search through all the areas and complete all the side quests, they will need more than 50 hours!

• Can we expect the launch to be in Q1 2016? Also, will the console versions launch at the same time of the PC version? What about the WiiU version? Is it happening?
• Shiness does not yet have an official release date yet, but we are hoping to make the game available for Spring 2016. About the Wii U version, it’s difficult to answer this question. We really love Nintendo’s universe, and we know that many people want to play Shiness on the Wii U, but it would add some production time. If it’s possible, we really want to improve the global game experience by taking advantage of the Wii U Gamepad.

• Thank you for your time.

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