Sega has released a grand total of twenty games in the Shining series of role-playing games since Shining in the Darkness in 1991. They officially made it 21 today with the first unveiling of Shining Ark, detailed in this week's issue of Japan's Famitsu magazine.

The first preview concentrated more on character descriptions than hard gameplay details. The title takes place in Arcadia, an isolated island, and the story begins when main character Fried discovers an angel with one black wing washed up on the coastline. (This plot means that the game apparently has nothing to do with Shining the Holy Ark, released by Sega for the Saturn in 1997.)

The game is under development by Media Vision (makers of Shining Blade, the 2012 PSP entry in the Shining series), and series character designer Tony Taka has returned to handle visual duties for the title. Ark's also a PSP (not Vita) release, and Sega's penned in a winter release date for Japan.

The Shining series has featured a wide variety of RPG genres since its Sega Genesis debut 21 years ago. The first game was a standard dungeon-crawler, but subsequent titles have covered all styles from traditional console RPG to more action- and tactics-oriented genres.

No US release details have been divulged.