Shining Force

"What Sega had that Nintendidn't."

It appears that I have been neglecting the Genesis, to my own shame. Therefore, I present to you a review for yet another one of its greatest games. Shining Force was probably the first game ever to have the famous ''Strategy/RPG'' layout so common to games like FFTactics and Vandal Hearts. Of course, this was in 2-d, but what did it matter? We were having too much fun to notice...

GRAPHICS: Earlier Genesis, but still VERY nicely animated sprites and backgrounds. You never really got the feeling of sparseness with regard to the backgrounds, they were generally full of the detail required to make the fighting area seem real. Sprites, while not even really ''animated,'' were hand-drawn and cool to watch. (Good old Zylo...sigh...) And the spell effects were top notch, always a plus with these games!

MUSic: Really, I think this was done a lot better in SF2, but the tunes definitely don't slouch. However, they did show how inferior the Genesis was as far as sound quality compared with the Super Nintendo. The only way for the sound designers to hold interest in the music was to come up with good, catchy, inspiring stuff, and unfortunately they only did this about half the time. Still, it's not BAD, just a little too repetitive toward the end. But who cares about music when you have such awesomely innovative

GAMEPLAY! YES! Innovations like these are a rare, rare thing, and the fact that such a cool one came out on the GENESIS, of all consoles, was enough to convince my RPG-loving friends to get the console. Once we saw how the battle system went, we were hooked. Being able to move your characters around the playing field like chess pieces was such a huge draw that whole afternoons were whiled away on this awesome title! And when me and the other friends had left, the aforementioned owner spent much of the night searching through every nook and cranny for all the items and characters he had missed. Not to mention gaining experience for his HUGE list of charaters. You get at least 30 companions throughout the whole game! This is a BIG game, like all RPGs of this sort should be, and promises hours and hours of enjoyment(a rare thing for RPGs back in those days.)Definitely emulate, buy if your Sega still works!

Sega Logic: Hey! I thought that mages and healers were specifically banned from wielding anything more powerful than a Battle Stick! Too many of your magic-users can have weapons that do (gasp) SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE. This evil new feature actually causes you to FORMULATE TWO DIFFERENT STRATEGIES. Clearly, the rules of RPG logic are being broken. Somebody will pay for this oversight...

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/23/00, Updated 03/23/00