Shining Force

"Grace is gone"

I like Shining Force 2 about ten times as much as I do Shining Force 1, and I'm not ashamed of it. It handles better, reads better, plays better, and even looks and sounds better. Incontrovertibly I think it is a total overhaul of its decent predecessor. Shining Force is full of flaws, most of which its sequel irons out, but that's not to say that it's without merits as well. What this game does best is serve as an adequate foundation for one of the best SRPGs of our time, and for that you can't fault it too heavily.

On its own terms, Shining Force is a difficult game to dislike. It takes the impermeable Fire Emblem formula and makes it forgiving. Your characters don't vanish forever if they die on the field of battle, your weapons don't break, and money is generously given to you. It may piss off strategy purists, but to more casual fans of the genre these are godsends. I do love challenging games, but there's fun to be found in the SRPG field outside of blistering difficulty, and the Shining Force games prove it. Stuffed with addictive gameplay, colorful characters and great combat, this is a difficult game to turn away from once you get started.

Unfortunately, Shining Force's primary downfall is that it's a first-generation Sega title. There are parts of the gameplay that are incredibly clunky when they really don't have the right to be. Tasks as minimal as talking to an NPC or opening a treasure chest become kind of hateful when you have to first bring up the Action Menu with a push of the button and then select what you want to do once the menu is open. The lack of a context-sensitive A button is really frustrating, and although you do get used to it, one has to wonder why Sega didn't think to make things more convenient to the player. Another such bothersome mechanic is that any items your party attains automatically go to the main character's inventory, but if he doesn't have any room then you just don't pick up the item. This prompts you to open the Action Menu and go through the rather cumbersome process of giving one of his items to another character. There are a few other minor quibbles I have with the construction of Shining Force, like the fact that you can't tell if a store-bought item will be stronger than the character's current weapon and the inability to check their status outside of a Headquarters. When Shining Force 2 rolled around they were intelligent enough to remedy these problems, but that doesn't really help this title, does it?

The whole game really handles a little awkwardly. Affairs such as battles, which generally run quite well, become unnecessarily bogged down with the introduction of terrain mechanics. While the developers had some good ideas with the type of terrain affecting a character's defense, it also slows them down profoundly to walk across mountains or forests. This wouldn't be so bad, but it seems like literally every other map is coated in adverse terrain, making some of the battles exhausting affairs to slug through. I really can't think of why they'd introduce this, except for a shortsighted inclusion of "strategy" that doesn't actually enhance the experience at all.

Fortunately for Shining Force, its battles are exciting and enjoyable; they are the crux upon which the game rests. I've always found Shining Force to have much more captivating, original characters than those in Fire Emblem, what with its centaurs and its dog clerics and its magical jellyfish. They're the kinds of people that creative gamers instinctively ascribe personalities to, simply out of love of the game. They fight as diversely as they pose, employing a wide variety of weapons and spells with which to dispatch their opponents. You can have twelve in your team at a time, allowing you quite a bit of berth in selecting your own Shining Force.

A small problem does rest in the balance of these characters. Quite simply, a large amount of them are crap. Either they join your party deeply underleveled, or they simply aren't worth using in any circumstance. On the flip side, there are also a handful of characters who straight-up demolish anything in their path; the enemy won't even see what hit them. Unless you feel like challenging yourself by using some of the more wimpy warriors, your final parties are all going to look pretty similar. Even more unusual is the growth rates of certain characters after you promote them - expect to see some incredibly bizarre statistical increases. Some of them can be downright game-breaking, as Mages shouldn't be gaining twelve points of defense in one level up. In my most recent playthrough, the main character Max got a fourteen point increase in Attack and pretty much one-shotted every enemy that fell into his path for the rest of the game. It's kind of funny in a way, but also very disappointing. Such unusual rates of growth really offset each character's natural advantages and disadvantages.

Outside of the battle system, the rest of the game is admittedly kind of mundane. The plotline is just about as generic as you'll ever find, and really poorly told at that. Shining Force shamelessly railroads you from plot point to plot point, and at each chapter break, you'll find that you never have the option to return to a previous area again. The game is unbelievably linear - not a sidequest to be seen. It wouldn't be such a problem if the game aspired to do anything outside of a hyper-dull "darkness versus light" clash. The main players in the plot are equally dull, which renders the narrative aspect of the game completely uninvolving. Shining Force 2, again, makes great improvements on this problem.

My final issue with the game is the totally underwhelming aesthetic presentation. The graphics are decent for this game's age, and the battle sprites look great. But the game totally lacks inspiration. Who still remembers what Dark Dragon looks like? I just beat the game again last week and I don't. Everything you run up against in this game is pretty interchangeable "fantasy baddie", sadly. And the sound is truly heinous. The Genesis's sound chip deserves all the hatred it has garnered throughout the years.

If it seems like I've spent most of this review lauding Shining Force 2 while deprecating its sequel, it's merely reactionary. I know that my personal experience with the title has something to do with how dismissive I am of its problems, but I think the first game is a pretty above-average entry in the Sega library that is REALLY coasting on its nostalgia. The problems that exist in this game never really should have in the first place. To me, it makes SF2 all the better of a game to see that it had such obstacles to overcome in its creation and it avoided them all with flying colors. To me, that's the greatest value Shining Force has - though it is a highly playable strategy RPG in its own right, it best serves as a sounding board for its infinitely superior sequel. There's no shame in that.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/19/08

Game Release: Shining Force (US, 03/19/92)