Shining Force Neo

"What might have been..."

It's safe to say I was entranced by the Shining Force series as far back as Shining in the Darkness, at least until I played it. When they came up with the "force" concept it saved the franchise from mediocrity and probably a quick demise, and earned itself a solid place in the hearts of many Sega followers, like me. So when I was in Gamestop not long ago intending to finally pick up a copy of Viewtiful Joe and the friend I was with said, "Hey, don't you like Shining Force?" there was little I could do but lay down fifty dollars to check it out. Sadly, the long-awaited return of SF isn't all I'd hoped for.

Shining Force Neo is loosely adapted from Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention, or "the one with Max and Dark Sol." Max is a young man training to be a warrior under the centaur Varios, I mean, Graham, when he learns that the dreaded Clan of the Moon is beginning to return after being defeated by his father thirteen years ago. Max must become a Force, a warrior with special powers, and gain the aid of a score of other new and familiar Forces to battle the dreaded Man Behind the Mask and cliched plot twists you'll see coming a mile away.

Graphics-6/10
Get the job done but are nothing special. The portraits of the characters remind me of the ones from Shining Force 3, which was released years ago on a weaker system. The game has anime cinema sequences that are fairly well-executed and wouldn't make for a bad Shining Force OAV, but are too sparse and brief to do anything to elevate the rest of the game on a graphical front.

Audio-4/10
The game is, as far as I know, the first in the Shining Force series to have full recorded dialogue. That would seem like a boon for how long the series has been around, and it probably won't seem too bad until the first time you get into a fight with your companions around. I can't tell you how grating I found the repeated lines of "Hot stuff...coming your way!" and "Let the fun begin!" Especially with no way to turn them off. You can turn off the speech in dialogue scenes, but you can't turn it off during fights. Why? Why would you ever set it up like that? The repetitious lines aren't quite as bad as in, oh, the Bibleman video game, and eventually you will get used to them, but they still cost the game quite a bit of appeal. The voice-acting elsewhere is passable at best, and my memories of the BGM in this game are pretty much gone as soon as I switch off the power. Try harder, guys.

Gameplay-4/10
The game plays a bit like a scaled-down Legend of Zelda hack-and-slash-type affair, where pretty much all that's required of the player is repeatedly hitting the attack button, and occasionally the "use healing item" button.

One of the things that really appealed to me about the older Shining Force games was the large party you got to control, with each character having different strengths and weaknesses you had to learn to coordinate with other characters. Well, forget about all that here, as you only have three people in your party at a time and the only one you have any control over is Max. You're still free to mix and match your companions as you see fit, unless the plot requires a particular comrade to be in your group, usually your love interest who might have a dark past. But really, I felt no strategic sense at all when picking my party; they'd just do their own thing and I'd heal them if they got hurt or killed. And with the literal hordes of monsters often coming at you, there's hardly any time to be strategic anyway. It's a bit like the Gauntlet games, where you fight your way through a gang of monsters and then destroy the portal they come through so no more can come out. Pretty mindless.

And speaking of mindless, there's Neo's version of the Egress spell. Back in the old days, your character would have a spell that returned the Force to the last town in the heat of battle, in case you hadn't prepared your party properly or some such, but you had to think before you used because it meant completely forfeiting the current battle and starting from scratch when you returned. Not here. Unless you're fighting a boss, you can (and will) use it more or less any time you feel like it, happily skipping home to refill your healing potions (for free), upgrade your weapons and Force powers before returning to the battle exactly where you left it.

Providing some amount of strategic decision-making in this otherwise mindless affair is the weapon system. Originally you'd have mages, bowmen, knights and the like in your team, each with a specific weapon of choice that had different abilities. In Neo, Max is a jack-of-all-trades who can use any weapon that comes his way, from standard swords to giant swords and hammers that are more powerful but slower and prohibit the use of shields, staves that allow him to cast magic spells, and bows that offer a weak but relatively safe distance attack.

That, by the way, is what the game really means by "Strategize and turn Max into a powerful sorcerer or mighty warrior." Anybody hoping for something like a class-changing system from games like Secret of Mana 3 because of that blurb is out of luck. The promotion scheme of the original game is in place, but that still just makes a character a more powerful version of what they already are.

One last thing: when not cliched, the plot can make you want to tear your hair out, as before many boss battles there's a long, talky part, and if you die and have to try again (and you often will), you have to click through the entire dialogue session each and every time you return to take another crack at the boss enemy. That's not how you keep players coming back for more.

Overall-5/10
What can I say? Shining Force Neo is far from the worst game I've played, but I'll never look back at the battles with Dark Sol and Zeon the same way again after this. What I was hoping to be a revival of a beloved series instead lowered it into the bell curve of videogame mediocrity. All I can do is hope Mitula hears my prayers not to end the series with this lukewarm adventure

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/06, Updated 05/03/06