Topic: 2021/11: Shining Wisdom (Saturn) - Jackster

[JonLeung]

Shining Wisdom

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Jackster's Shining Wisdom (Saturn) maps.

The dark elf wizard, Pazort, threatens to destroy the world with his intention of summoning the Giant, Seeega.  An orphan named Mars stands in his way.  As Mars, you will travel across the continent of Parmecia to find a way to thwart Pazort's schemes.  Unlike past Shining games, this is a solo action-adventure, instead of travelling with a party in a turn-based RPG.

Though published by Sega in Japan and Europe, the North American version of Shining Wisdom was published by Working Designs, who did not have the rights to the names of characters and locations that Sega Japan had copyrighted.  Therefore, Parmecia, as it is known in Japan and Europe, is called "Palacia" in the North American version.  Whatever you call it, it's a large world that has been fully mapped here on VGMaps.com, thanks to Jackster.

Jackster's maps include both marked and unmarked versions.  The marked maps are more than just having items and stairs indicated, but also have helpful notes to help you through this Zelda-like adventure.  The unmarked maps allow you to fully appreciate the graphics, which are 2D, unlike most games on the Saturn, since the game was originally intended for the Genesis/Mega Drive.  As it is on Sega's 32-bit machine, they are in higher resolution than they would have been if they were on those 16-bit platforms, and these maps are also the first Saturn games to be honoured here.

So to recognize this "shining" example of thorough mapping, Jackster's Shining Wisdom (Saturn) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for November 2021.

[Jackster]

Hi, thanks so much for the Maps of the Month again, and it's funny too as this not only marks the first year that I've joined the forums, but also the first year I started work on my first maps, which was for this game.

It actually all started when I had interest in playing through all of the Shining games that Sonic Software Planning/Camelot had worked on before moving on to Nintendo games. After playing through the Genesis and Game Gear games I finally moved on to the Saturn games, with Wisdom being the first entry. Almost immediately, I was lost; this game had no navigation, no in-game map, and to make it worse hardly any walkthroughs or maps online. The only thing that came close to a map walkthrough of this game was this Japanese guidebook:



Considering that I didn't want to fork out money for a game guide that I would not use anymore after finishing the game, I decided to make my own maps instead. Which is why I am now here. It sure was a hefty journey, relying on the only Youtube longplay walkthrough I could find and GameFAQs only text walkthrough of the game, as well as postponing work on this game for a while so I can work on other maps for other games, but either way it got done and submitted and I learned quite a lot since then. But even after beating this game, I never did get around to playing the later Shining games after that. Someday I will though.

I don't know when I'll be back to making maps again. I had to stop back in March after I strained myself from working too hard, and I'm now in the middle of working on a personal project of mine not related to this site, but I do plan on picking up where I left off eventually.