Shining Force

"The proud beginning to the tactical-RPG legacy"

This game is one of the two reasons I still have my Genesis... and the other is its sequel.

Shining Force takes you back to when video games were all about style. It didn't matter if you'd played other games with the exact same plot. It didn't matter if you could name every plot twist a mile before it happened. All that mattered was that you played the games, and enjoyed them, and found everything. So many people fondly remember this game, and I’m included, but not without good cause. Though the plot may be generic, and the characters under developed, the gameplay was revolutionary, and even today it still captures my attention throughout even the final boss battle.

Many games learned from this early gem. Pieces of this puzzle are still cherished in other games today. Think of collecting loads of unique and hidden characters (a la Suikoden) while battling your way across expansive territories (like Final Fantasy Tactics), all while trying to rescue the world from destruction, (any RPG). That is what this game is all about. Completeness is the key, as simply getting through this game is only a challenge to the inexperienced.

When you first pop in this cartridge (or rom, depending on how legally correct you are), you won’t notice a breathtaking cinema, nor will you be shocked by the musical score. Even when you get into the game itself, the dialogues are pretty bland and the plot is typical. Boy trains with mentor to be a hero, but mentor dies, so boy must join with as many cool and complete strangers as he can find to eventually destroy the root of all evil. At least until the sequel. Not much out of the ordinary, right? Nope, wrong again.
It is only after you get into your first battle, and by that time you could have already recruited a hidden character (how cool is that?), you will get to feel the real draw of this game.

The battle system was ingenious for its time. Instead of turn-based combat, or active time battles (which wouldn’t come out for a little while still), you had a group of characters that all appeared individually on a battle map. Through creative positioning, which relied heavily on their attack range and speed, you could draw enemies into traps, or surround them, or just outright charge into an intense melee. It was all about the tactics in this game, and boy did it work wonders.

Shining Force is the original tactics game, at least for those who never played the Fire Emblem games. It brought into the mainstream the uncanny ability to mix role-playing character development with the importance of positioning. It was the precursor to the 3D-ish models like Tactics Ogre, and later Final Fantasy Tactics. It literally made owning the Genesis worthwhile - one of the few RPGs capable of competing with what Nintendo had to offer. However, all was not so completely perfect...

True, the battle system is spectacular, and especially thought provoking when your parties begin to face increasingly difficult odds or overpowering enemies (damn you, laser eye!), but sometimes things just got too easy. After playing long enough, you’d realize that enemies had specific zones programmed into them, and until your party members broke over a zone line, they wouldn’t react to you and charge. This was easily exploitable, and made many battles simpler than the casual gamer would realize. Still, this was a minor flaw, and it took about 3 plays through to really come to grips with where all the lines were.

This game, unfortunately, has a few major flaws in its structure. Unlike its predecessors, a “chapter” format is implemented, which also lends itself to a vastly linear gameplay. This basically means that you better navigate the entire world available to you at any time and find everything, because after a certain event or battle, you’re moving on, with or without the most badass character you’ve never seen. Oh, and might I suggest you not forget to locate Zylo. This also makes it slightly difficult to get everything on one play through. Even if you know exactly what you’re doing, it’s still relatively hard to remember exactly what you need to do, and where you need to do it. Some of these characters are NOT meant to be found unless you are (1) very lucky, or (2) reading a walkthrough. Still, it makes it all the more exciting when you do get it all.

There is no ‘over world’ map at all. Nowhere will you be able to navigate between everywhere that you’ve been. At times you will walk between towns and across plains, but there are always limits to your movement, imposed to keep the chapters intact, which are very highly annoying. Perhaps even worse is the fact that never once did they get truly unique with the background textures, or even the landscapes. This can probably be written off to the inexperience of the programmers working with a mostly-untapped hardware. Besides, no one had ever done what this game was going to do, so why worry about unnecessary graphical tidbits?
In all honesty, it’s very hard to think of something bad to say about the gameplay, which ought to say something in itself.

The graphics in this game were not spectacular, but the gameplay greatly overcompensated for it. Sure there aren’t that many 3-D elements... like any... but that doesn’t make this game any less fun, or wonderful. Also keep in mind the age on this game, as it came out toward the beginning of the 16 and 32-bit era. Back then, just seeing the characters eyes was improvement, and they did that very well. I mean, we even got to see individual strands of hair during the fights! Though the battle animations were obviously minimal (taking great character designs but only a few frames of different poses to show an attack), it didn’t matter, as they all accomplished what was intended. Besides, the fact that every character was designed to be very different from the norm made seeing exactly whom you just recruited (or promoted) that much more fun.

One possible down side is that this game suffers from long battles with music that loops over and over again, but it always seems to be up beat and strangely appropriate. I often times catch myself humming along (of course, I have heard the songs so many times now that I would know them even without the game playing them). They are by no stretch of the imagination great, especially when compared to the ‘orchestral masterpieces’ that populate today’s games, but for its time, and for its style, this game has great sound. You can even tell the mood by what’s playing, which might I add is the minimal requirement. ;)

This game is one of the two reasons that I can name off the top of my head why I kept my Genesis. You know what the other was? Shining Force II. This game took the best the Genesis and current technology had to offer and surpassed everyone’s wildest expectations. It opened new ground with the tactics-RPG hybrid, and what was even more amazing was that it really worked. There have been so many titles that strived for something new, but in focusing on that, they lost site of the game itself and caused it to suck. Luckily, the quality control over at Sega caught someone and wouldn’t let them go until this game was a wonder both of ingenuity and gaming goodness. While I still prefer the sequel (its updated graphics and somewhat deeper characters still hook me), there will never be a game that I will remember more fondly. I mean, when else can you have a floating jellyfish cast Ice4 on your enemies? Or how about, when would you have ever expected to see an armadillo wearing a steamed suit of armor and charging with a spear? These types of things are priceless, and my memories of them will forever live on, at least until I try to ‘forget’ them in my next play through.

You think it’s hype? You think I’m casting a rose-colored light on the game? Play it, and you’ll see just why it’s so adored. Watch out, though. Once you play it, there’s no guarantee that you will want to stop until you’ve found everything, and everyone.

Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 8/10
Replay: 9/10

Overall: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/27/03, Updated 03/27/03