Happy 2024 shining fans!

We obviously didn’t make the aim of a December release. Knight and I both had projects come up with more critical deadlines as well as dealing with some real life events. So you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

The good news is V25 is going to be an extra special release with the new functionality it provides, so it will be worth waiting for. You will be the first to know when it is ready.

After a little breather, Special T and I have continued our work on the SF3 World Book Translation. You should see profiles starting to flow again, including Pappets who will be released very soon.

Keep Shining!

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Hello again shining fans!

We are looking forward to V25 and wanted to give you a brief update. My apologies for not posting more this year! We have healthy discussions on Discord, so join us there if you seek more. https://discord.gg/yWnUVCr

A couple of issues were identified with V24 and those will be fixed with V25, along with quite a few surprises. More details to follow as we approach release.

With V25, we are shooting for December, but will have to release “when it is ready” due mainly to a change in structure for the wizard. The plan is to provide selectable options and mods during the patching process which should allow everyone to play the way they like. This will give us (and advanced users) flexibility for adding fixes and mods moving forward even between official releases. Thanks in advance to Knight 0f Dragon and Rikapso for all the great updates.

As for the SF3 World Book Translation Project, Special T and I have released the last of the Shining the Holy Ark main characters and will continue to release pages at a measured pace. (after V25 is in your hands 🙂 )

Can’t wait to share (and play) V25!

legalize freedom!

The time is finally here, shining fans!

V24 is ready and is available using the button to the right.
Please let us know in the forum HERE if you have any issues or feedback.

Lots to share about this release, so I’ll get right to the patch notes.

Patch Wizard

• Debug mode has been added as an option during patching. Ask in the forum or Discord about its use.
• The view mod has been removed as an option during patching. It was causing all sorts of issues in various places. Adventurous souls can still hunt it down and apply it separately.
• Patched images now provide the build date as a consistent checksum date

In-game:
All Scenarios

• The order of difficulties “Difficult” and “Hard” have been fixed. Previously they were swapped such that “Hard” was to the left of “Difficult” in options. Now they are properly in order of difficulty from left to right and “Difficult” has been renamed for clarity. They are now Standard, Hard, Harder, Insane.
• The Status screen headers were previously skewed to the right. They have been centered in all scenarios.

Scenario 1

• The Moogie Arrow was placed on the empty mountain top in Battle 16. Previously a game shark only item which enables the special attack Goddess Charm, which has the effect of a Charm spell. The Moogie Arrow was, of course, named after our Goddess Moogie and this addition to the game will be accompanied by her inclusion in the lore, specifically in the SF3 World Book Translation Project. This is a fitting tribute to everything she has done for us over these many years.
• Weapon second and third bonus effects have been fixed. This is a bug in the original game where only the first weapon affinity bonus worked. Now all intended Holy, Demon, etc. bonuses will be applied.
• Hagane MP gain bug fixed. Previously, Hagane would get little or no MP when leveling up between levels 21-30 (he joins already promoted). Now he gets the proper gains.
• Ratchet no longer gets healer XP. Previously, Ratchet would get XP like a priest for healing and curing status effects.
• Previously it was seemingly impossible to save Irene in Battle 6 on Insane difficulty. Now she will heal herself exactly once when her HP is low. In addition, a 15% land effect was provided on the tile where she stands her ground to provide survivability. This will happen on other difficulties as well.
• {spoiler} Previously when the Elbesem Orb was returned to Synbios and Kahn’s inventory was full, the version of the Orb given was non-working. That has been fixed.
• The fix for the Storich Chicken bug provided in V23 introduced a bug where Benetram would show up as the advisor in Vagabond on revisit instead of Palsis. This has now been corrected.
• {spoiler} After the Titan was made defeatable in V22 a bug from the original game came to light where if the Titan’s HP landed exactly on 5000 or 4000 his arm wouldn’t die (which also caused the water cutscene not to fire). This has been fixed. To be clear the Titan has 6000 HP total. The first arm should die after 1000 damage and the second arm should die after 2000 damage. After that the Titan will have a dark barrier that must be removed by using the Elbesem Orb. Then his remaining HP can be damaged.

Scenario 1 and 2

• Previously there were force members who received enemy weaknesses because they shared IDs. The devs fixed this in Sc3. Now it is fixed in Sc1 and Sc2. Force members will no longer suffer these undo Magic, Holy and Demon penalties.

Scenario 2 and Premium Disc

• {spoiler} Due to the difference in characters between the Japanese and English, the secret of JuMeSyn was coming out JuMSy in-game. The correct number of letters is now used when creating this name. This was implemented for Scenario 3 in V23.
• {spoiler} Effect of Support and Slow were restored for the Kraken’s head and arms. Previously, those enemies weren’t properly affected by Support and Slow (even though the legs were).

Scenario 3

• {spoiler} Edmund redemption scene enabled! If you spare Stella in Sc2 and defeat the Masked Monk boss in Battle 12 while Edmund yet lives, his redemption scene will fire.
• The Ruins of the Wise (commonly known as the Sc3 hero’s test) previously wouldn’t give boss/floor reward items if the boss died on its turn (counter attack or poison damage). If that happens now, the reward item will go to the hero.
• Some of the less popular final promotion portraits have been replaced with the more popular portraits from the Premium Disc. Portraits replaced: Synbios, Dantares, Irene, Julian, Medion, Edmund, Jane, Bulzome?. Campbell had an issue and will be coming in the future. Note these portraits do not have moving mouths when talking, but this is in the works. If for any reason you wish to preserve the default portraits, before patching delete all the files that begin with KAO at this location: SF3PatchWizard\Patcher\GS-9203

Scenario 3 and Premium Disc

• Irene now gets proper healer XP. Previously Irene would not get XP like a priest for healing and curing status effects after her final promotion.

Premium Disc

• Image viewer crash fixed. Previously the game would crash when choosing next image viewing Campbell.

Text and Dialog:
All Scenarios

• Many corrections across all scenarios.
• Pyra’s Wand (game shark only) description now reads: Wand – Special Attack, Spark L3
  It doesn’t regen MP as the previous description noted.
• Alchemy Rod special attack is now called Midas Strike. Previously Change Gold which was an oddly worded translation.
• Zero Wing special attack is now called T Minus Zero. Previously Zero Count
• Removed the use of “Earth” as a proper term (but not as a general term for dirt/ground)
• Removed the use of the term “superhuman” and replaced those instances with the term “supernatural”

Scenario 1

• Cybel join dialog tweaked to reconcile with the information discovered in her World Book profile.
• {spoiler} Spelled out in the advice for the Titan battle that the Elbesem Orb is required to defeat it outright.

Scenario 2

• On the title/splash screen the subtitle has been updated to read: Target: Godchild
• {spoiler} Mother dragon in Battle 26 (Aspinia volcano) is now known as Arch Dragon.
• The music note character from David’s singing easter egg has been restored. Keep knocking on his door on the Stump Skywalk to trigger this scene.
• Ilia’s dialog clarified at the end of Ch5.

Scenario 3

• {spoiler} Dialog surrounding Thousand’s fate at the end of Battle 6 and in Foothill village cleaned up. Previously the dialog wasn’t correct for all three of his fates (talked to and joins, defeated by Cyclops and joins or killed).
• Thousands final class is now Sacred Dragon.
• Dragonman Claw special attack now known as Dragon Soul. Previously Change Dragon which was an oddly worded translation.
• Rollie’s ultimate special now known as Virgo. Previously Change Virgo which was an oddly worded translation.
• Maya and trials dialog cleaned up.
• Irene now properly speaks in broken English in her Sc3 HQ dialog.

Lots of nice new fixes and improvements. On behalf of Knight 0f Dragon and Rikapso, we hope you enjoy V24!

So excited to finally have the Moogie Arrow in the game! Moogie has meant so much to us shining fans for so long, it was only fitting that she have her own bit of lore in the shining world.

It’s always exciting when the translations come in from the World Book because you never really know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it is a big reveal and sometimes it’s a bit disappointing in its lack of development. When the story of the “First Mother” was a blank slate, it seemed like a perfect fit for a tribute to our own First Mother, the Goddess of all things Shining.

As a part of the World Book Translation project, I’m beyond happy to share that lore with you HERE.

V24 features the Moogie Arrow icon to celebrate its inclusion in the game. This icon has also been added to the icons included with the patch.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and support as always.

Until next time,

legalize freedom!

Greetings SF3 fans! We are in the lead up to V24 and it is time for a quick update.

We are planning to release V24 in a couple of months with a few nice updates that I won’t spoil just yet. We’ll see what all we can get in.

The re-review of 19 game files in Sc2 is underway and it appears your donations have it completely funded, so I will shut the link down. Thank you for all your support! It makes the extra effort an easy decision.

The World Book Translation project recently released the first (originally designed) Shining the Holy Ark profile. Check out Arthur if you haven’t already. We will likely focus mainly on the StHA characters until they are complete.

Next time you hear from me, it will be announcing the release of V24! Until then, Keep Shining!

legalize freedom!

Hello all you shining people! Exciting things are happening and I wanted to give you a (past due) update.

On the in-game fixes side, a couple issues have been fixed from the previous patch and a couple of new fixes are being worked on for V24 along with the normal slew of text updates.

One unfortunate finding. One of our volunteer translators from some time ago appears to have done sub-par work. In many cases their translations have proved to be inaccurate. This will require a review of all their work included in 19 game files in Sc2. I’m planning to ask Switch to review these and I’ve re-opened the Paypal Me link for anyone who would like to help pay for his services. I was apprehensive about a paid translator, but Switch has been very reasonable and has done stellar work for both the SF3 and World Book translation projects. Any donations for this review are much appreciated!
https://paypal.me/sf3translation Link Closed

Some amazing folks have been doing great things on the hacking side for SF3. Editors and Mods are starting to be developed. To be clear, these are separate from our patch, but are compatible with our patch by design. To hear about these things as they are happening, you can join the SF3 Discord:
https://discord.gg/yWnUVCr

And now K0D officially has some company. Rikapso has joined our team to help with the various fixes we have planned. Having crafted a ton of game editors and mods recently… it’s really great stuff. Here is a list of what is currently available:

SF3 Chaos (randomizer) – CirrusAF and Rikapso bring you this mod (compatible with the translation patch, but check the known issues) that randomizes character joins, hidden items, haggles in shops, boss drops, ruin items and what friendship bonuses that characters provide. Quite an impressive feat. I’m happy to announce its 1.0 release is coming soon. This will be hosted on the FTP under the new Mods directory just as soon as it is ready.

Editors from Rikapso:

• Items/Spells
• Special Attacks/Friendships/Crit Rate/XP Cap
• Enemy/NPC stats
• Battle Placement
• Item/Spell Icons
• Character/Starting stats
• Disable Curse Battle Paralyze (how-to guide)
• Edit Enemies/NPCs in Battle

https://forums.shiningforcecentral.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=48376#p825388

Mods from Rikapso:

• No More Haggles – Puts all haggle items automatically into the deals section.
• Donhort Playable – Allows the player to control Donhort in scenario 2.
• Premium Disc Galm Battle – Adds a battle against Galm to the PD. (work in progress)
• Permadeath Mod – No Reviving Characters (work in progress)
• Difficulty Mod – Inspired by suggestions from SFC member Sinful Force, this edits the difficulties

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wrWDra18B2hsqLvykVKpjsx353RYUzDn7xMKgqdFdxs/edit

Wow… is all I can say. Pretty easy to see why we wanted Rikapso on our team. 🙂

The SF3 World Book Translation effort continues to make good progress with relatively steady releases. We’re ever so close to finalizing the Holy Ark character profile page and we can’t wait to share those profiles with you. However, some effort has been allocated to the new SF3 Guide Project which has recently been moved to a front burner due to a volunteer emerging to help with the html aspect.

For the uninitiated, the SFIII Guide Project, born during a Jumesyn site outage, started as an effort by Special T to back up the Jumesyn site for posterity and ultimately share a modernized and updated guide. SFC member eddebaby has stepped forward to help with the finer points of html. Thanks for volunteering, eddebaby!

With our new html developer on board, this has become an effort to create the ultimate guide for SF3. Three different versions are planned. A website, a stand-alone website to be packaged with the Translation Project patch, and a spoiler-free version (that is planned for a bit later) that starts with basic information, but reveals more details the more you expand it. The website is in early stages now, planning and making templates, but eddebaby is doing some nice work!

Lots of exciting things happening with our favorite game!

legalize freedom!

Campbell’s replaced portrait was causing a freeze in Sc3.

The “bad” portraits from Sc3 were replaced with the “good” portraits from the PD in V23. This is something that was done, but not documented or shared properly. It will be documented for the next version. But there is an issue with Campbell’s PD portrait working in Sc3 so the currently posted patch walks back that particular replacement.

So before playing Sc3, please grab the updated patch and re-patch Sc3.

There is talk of V24 in the near future. Mainly for fixes, but a couple of new things may pop up. We shall see.

Talk to you soon!

legalize freedom!

Hope everyone is enjoying V23!

There was an issue affecting Eldar in Sc3 which resulted in the force flying far above the battlefield. This would affect Battle 24 and when you brought Eldar into the Sc3 hero test.

It has now been fixed, and the patch updated, so please download and re-patch Sc3 with this update.

Keep Shining!

legalize freedom!

Grab V23 with the button to the right.

Please report any issues or feedback in the forum HERE.

There are some great improvements with V23 which you will see below. It’s not the usual timing, but we wanted to get these fixes out to you asap. The list of items remaining to be fixed is shrinking, but there are still several items Knight 0f Dragon is working on for future release, so stay tuned.


Here are the updates in V23:

Patch Wizard

• Corrected an issue with different date formats in different parts of the world.
• Implemented improved compression – the same compression as the developer used.
• ISO export option added to replace Isomaker (note ISO is not the recommended format to use).

In-game
Scenario 1

• Conrad’s health set to 3 HP in battle 20 to reflect his dire situation.
• A bug with the Elbesem Orb was corrected. Previously if Kahn’s inventory was full when Zero took the Orb initially (Sc1 Ch4), you get back an unequipable version of the orb (verified working by Kaz on Discord).
• A bug was fixed which caused the Chicken to appear in Storich even when it hadn’t been befriended on the train. It wouldn’t hatch Penn’s egg, it just caused confusion.

Scenarios 2 and 3

• The Biographical Encyclopedia (commonly known as the bookcase) in HQ is now in alphabetical order.

Scenarios 2, 3 and Premium Disc

• On the main Status Screen scrolling left and right at the character select screen, LCK and MOV are no longer overlapping one another.
• On the Status screen the box bounding the Cure area was enlarged so when an Effect is present, the cures, such as the lengthy Antidote Herb, do not flow outside the box.

Scenario 3

• In a few places an emoji with a Japanese kanji is used to signify embarrassment. This was replaced with an image of an uncomfortable face with red cheeks.
• {spoiler} Due to the difference in characters between the Japanese and English, the secret of JuMeSyn was coming out JuMSy in-game. The correct number of letters is now used when creating this name.

Premium Disc

• In the Model Viewer, the name box was enlarged so no names run out of the box.
• The models in the Model Viewer are now in alphabetical order.
• In the Image Viewer, many of the images were cleaned up. Some contained Japanese text that was unreadable due to the resolution, so the text was removed and other minor edits to make the images more presentable. (Special T)
• In the Image Viewer, the “Controls” images were translated. This includes the small image which shows that the Start button is used to see the controls as well as the Controls image itself that shows all the controls for the Image Viewer. (Special T)
• In the Video Viewer, the ending video labels (the bottom two in the left column) are now hidden as they should be if a completed save is not present and appear only when a complete save is present.

Text and Dialog

• Many minor corrections, primarily in Sc3.
• On the main Status screen it previously listed “LOSES”. This has been changed to “DEFEAT”. Can’t quite get the S in there due to space, but I suspect this will be further improved in a future patch. No one is going to have more than 1 defeat anyway, right? 🙂
• In Sc1 and Sc2, Dialog from the first hero meeting tweaked to reflect that Dantares and Campbell actually faced off in the fabled battle at the border. An event that was toned down in the English release.
• In Sc1 and Sc2, Garosh’s winged friends are now consistently referred to as pigeons as opposed to a mix of pigeon and dove. Not a huge distinction, but consistency makes things roll a bit better.
• {spoiler} In Sc2 Ch5 Governor’s Mansion, if you don’t find the room with the four chests before battle 21 (Saraband Prison battle), the message at the door now provides a clue about needing to find them during the previous “stealth” sequence.
• In Sc3, In light of the details discovered about Isabella’s backstory during the World Book translation effort, a few lines were tweaked to better represent Isabella’s perspective. For example, she now consistently refers to Melinda as Aunt Melinda. A name that she fondly uses due to their special bond. See link below for some tidbits that the World Book translation has provided.
• In PD Model Viewer, once you have a model up on screen, pressing Start will bring up the controls (different from the Image Viewer Controls image, this one is text). These control descriptions have been greatly improved including adding arrows and improving the clarity of the descriptions.
• In PD Image Viewer under Drafts, changed the village in the trees description to Amity Village, see tidbits link below.

Not bad for a mid-year offering, huh? We’ve marked four more items off the Known Issues list. There are only 2 items left on that list. The very rare frozen feet bug (when specific enemies’ feet thaw, the message names the hero) which we are working on and the text ghosting on the status screen which I believe we could also cross off since we have fixed all known instances of that. Feels good.

We’ll have to see what December brings. It may be while we are coordinating these in-game bug fixes and enhancements, the release schedule will be a bit more flexible than usual.


Notes about using the view mod option…
This option adds a few pixels of resolution, but comes with a couple of side effects.

• On 2D screens, including the title splash screen, the image will be slightly stretched.
• In the PD in particular there is likelihood for weirdness. To begin with it has many 2D screens which will be slightly off.
• In the PD Image Viewer, the Controls image does not appear correctly when using the view mod on certain emulators. It does work correctly on newer versions of emulators and on Saturn hardware.

It’s probably reasonable to recommend against using the view mod for the PD and purists may opt to not use it at all. Your mileage may vary.


Notes about the older patching options:
The patch wizard detects your exact game version and patches it specifically. The older patching options did not which made them complicated to maintain alongside the patch wizard, especially trying to provide all the bug fixes and enhancements enabled by the patch wizard. We are happy with the stability and reliability of the patch wizard, so the other patching options are being phased out. We kept them around for a backup during the patch wizard development, but they are no longer a good option.


Speaking of tidbits gleaned from the World Book translation effort so far, I’d like to share a few things we’ve discovered that I find interesting. A forum post/discussion seems most appropriate. Check it out HERE.


The World Book Translation effort continues to make good progress. The only thing that has been missing from our profile output to this point is the overworld sprites. We have been using those from the scans up until now and it’s something we knew we would be going back to update when the sprites were acquired and we worked out the process of sizing, etc. K0D has since provided us with a game rip of all the sprites and Special T has been working behind the scenes to find and prepare the needed overworld sprites for the profiles. We are now revisiting all the previously released profiles to add the crisp new sprites and moving forward with the queue of sponsored profiles. Look for releases in the near future!


We hope you enjoy V23! It will feature Kahn’s icon in celebration of his bug being fixed. As always, let us know if something isn’t working for you.

Until next time,

legalize freedom!

Hello Shining Fans!

Knight 0f Dragon has continued to be busy fixing issues and making improvements, so we have a special mid-year release planned. There was an issue with the Patch Wizard that needed to be fixed (due to differing date formats in various regions) and the list of what could be included has grown.

I’ll save the full list of fixes for the actual release, but it is pretty impressive. Lots of boxes resized to fit, the Jumesyn romanization corrected, the HQ bookcase and PD model viewer reordered to alphabetical and the long-time issue of the LCK and MOV text overlapping in the Status dialog fixed. If you would like to get a sneak peek as we continue testing and work to finalize V23 for release, you’re welcome to join us on Discord. https://discord.gg/yWnUVCr

The Patch Wizard now supports ISO out in addition to BIN/CUE, so we will be removing the former third option, the original patching option. Our old friend ISOMAKER2.exe is retiring after many years of service. ISOMAKER was overheard saying “If I make one more ISO, I’m going to throw up!”

More on the V23 release soon!

The Voice Translation effort is on the back burner at the moment. The ability to replace voices in-game is a reality, but that is actually the easy part. : – ) We will return to this effort in due time.

The World Book Translation effort has been a tremendous success so far! All profiles have been sponsored and we appreciate the ability to do the World Book Translation without having to pay out of our own pockets for the translation services. Switch with Phantom River Stone continues to do an excellent job, not only in the translations themselves, but also his willingness to check other references for info and work things out with us. This process is really working well.

A couple of the profiles ended up with large blank spaces and we wanted to do something special. For Leon, which is yet to be released for this very reason, we had some other art laying around. It was different in color and saturation, but we’re making it match and hoping the style doesn’t clash too much. It’s better than a big blank area. Frank was quite a bit more involved and rewarding. Unlike most of the other characters, there is surprisingly no additional art of Frank that we could find, so I worked with a young lady named Yayabeanz on a head sketch design based on his third portrait. It is a bit more detailed and cleaner than the other line sketches included in the world book (or the PD images section), but since it was done specifically for this world book translation effort, we thought it appropriate. We really thank Yayabeanz for volunteering to do this and for her dedication to making a really nice sketch. You may know her as the niece of long-time SF3 fan and supporter ChinagonUK. He posted some Ratchet work she did here:
https://forums.shiningforcecentral.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=45865

As with the in-game translation, we aim for the highest quality, so we appreciate your understanding with how long it takes us to deliver these profiles. Special T is putting forth a lot of effort getting these looking great. We have also been known to make further improvements to profiles that have already been released, so check the dates on the FTP when grabbing updates.

Talk to you soon!

legalize freedom!