Shining Force (1992)

9/11/2024:

After playing through Majora's Mask together, the boyfriend and I moved onto another series that he really enjoys. Once again, my experience is colored and made more positive by the fact that I was watching him play through something I never would have touched otherwise. I would have dropped this game in less than an hour on my own, gotta be honest, but I had a really great time spectating and collecting the usual trivia instead, and also made good progress on the blanket that I've been working on to send to him.

I'm generally not a fan of SRPGs, and so far in my solo gaming adventures, only Trails has been palatable to me (I've played most of the first game and the "strategy" is barely a factor). It's a combination of how long battles take and not really wanting to strategize for battles when I play games to relax for the most part. I also had like no background knowledge of this series. (I have Shining Resonance Refrain on Switch, haven't played it yet, and had no idea it was related to such a massive series.)

I could take up a lot of space here talking about the "story" (or lack thereof) and how insanely long fights were, but this game is old and I can't really trash the story elements of something that was probably considered hella innovative overall for 1993. I would generally not allow that to influence my criticism of a specific aspect of a game, but in this case it feels appropriate. In any case, the story is wholly generic and there's zero character development, but I can still excuse it more than I can excuse FFXII for being one of the most dull experiences of my life.

My favorite members of the Shining Force were Gort and Domingo, with Kokichi sitting comfortably in third place. From the beginning, Gort was our beloved old man, underestimated and underappreciated by the townsfolk, and once we got Domingo, that was my babyyy. Cue gasps of shock at my boyfriend a few times when he let my child die in battle and just said it was his time to go. Unbelievable.

I really liked a lot of the character sprites, and seeing the new ones after promotion was always a treat. Tao's were probably my favorite, though Guntz's design was so ridic that I can't help but list it up there too. Really, with so many centaur characters and pointy faces/massive chins, there's a lot to say about how unique the characters are, so I appreciate them all in some way.

There were some really appealing enemy and attack designs as well. I loved the color scheme on the ice worms, and I'm a sucker for cool robes on mages/priests. Spell animations were really satisfying, as were the explosions of enemy sprites on the map when you defeat them. Flying animations were also really well done, but goddamn if the evasion of the flying enemies wasn't the bane of our combined existence. The ultimate assholes were the Torch Eyes, though, by far.

When my boyfriend first suggested this, he also mentioned how a bunch of the devs moved on to create Golden Sun at some point, which is a series I'm much more familiar with. I definitely noticed some aspects that are present in GS, like the look of the menu, the yes/no dialogue boxes, some shop options, etc.

We just finished this playthrough last night and started up SF2 right after, so I'm excited to see how the second game improves (or doesn't) upon the first.

Since I played Fire Emblem, I like SRPGs a lot, so I was highly interested in Shining Force. A pretty renamed Mega Drive SRPG... it sounded good.

Shining Force takes has more JRPG elements than Fire Emblem: you have towns with NPCs to talk, save the game in a church, recruit characters by finding them on the map... The gameplay is also more... "static", I would say. There are a lot of random things that can kill you, much more than in Fire Emblem, so the game wisely decides to not have permadeath. Instead, you can lose a battle by losing your entire party or if your main character dies. If that happens, however, you won't lose your progress. You have to repeat the battle, but you don't lose the experience obtained, so you are stronger in every attempt. That's the farming system, too.

Maybe is not as solid as other SRPGs' system, the soundtrack is just fine, the story is simple... but if you like the genre, you will like this game. Is fun, pretty fun.

But what I liked the most were the variety of units. In almost every battle, you will see a new monster to face. And there are so many classes to use that you can't use them all in your party: elves, centaurs, beasts, birds... That's SO cool.

I give it 4/5 stars. Definitely worth to play. People use to say that Shining Force 2 is even better, so I'm looking forward to play it!

Continuing through the Shinings. I’m so glad Sega RPGs abandoned their dungeon crawler roots (although I guess Shining the Holy Ark was okay). Shining Force is a simple strategy RPG with a colorful cast of characters, half of which are centaurs for some reason. It’s your typical save the world fare with hardly any character development (I think the people on your team interact with each other once in the beginning when they introduce themselves, and again in the ending). But it’s super fun! Each battle is a little puzzle, figuring out what combination of healing, heavy hitters, high mobility, ranged, or AOE magic will work to best your foes. Minus the fact that everyone seems to miss all the dang time, it all goes pretty smoothly. Menus are frustrating, having to select from talk or search separately, from a menu, instead of just being able to interact with whatever. I don’t know why, but these old games also only let you do one thing at a time in menus, like you can equip one person, or pass one item.

The fast forward feature in these retro game packs like this are SO nice and save a ton of time, and not having to wait through enemy move turns is huge.

Story (3/5) | Characters (3.5/5) | World (3.5/5) | Gameplay (3.5/5) | Visuals (4/5) | Music (3/5) = 66% overall score

I did not grow up with a Genesis, so I do not have any kind of nostalgia for the games or the games on it. Because of this, I want to try more JRPGs I missed for the consoles. The first game on that list is Shining Force.

The story of Shining Force is pretty barebones and honestly didn't keep my interested in the game at all. I've heard that the US release cut out a lot of the story from the Japanese one which is a shame. However, the variety of characters you could recruit and their unique designs made up for this, even if they had no personalities or much to say. I also like how the game slowly introduces science fiction elements that make the game's world a little more interesting. Being able to explore towns and talk to NPCs is something you don't get to do in a lot of Tactical JRPGs so I appreciated that.

The combat itself is very simple for the genre, yet was usually pretty fun. Various units will have weaknesses and strengths; however, some of the characters are ridiculously overpowered and can make some battles too easy. The game advancement system is very basic as well where you can upgrade your character once they hit a certain level (though it's best to wait so that you can increase their stats even more).

Graphically the game is basic when it comes to the battle and town view. But the battle animations when fighting monsters is big and very well animated. I really liked all of the character designs. The music itself is pretty generic honestly and wore out pretty fast.

Time to Complete: 22.5 hours

Favorite Chill Theme: City Theme

Favorite Action Theme: Battle Theme 4