"The third and possibly last chapter in the Shining Force series takes several steps back but takes makes one giant leap forward."

Camelot, formerly known as Sonic Software Planning, whose name was changed to avoid confusion with Sega’s other development team, Sonic Team, had yet to match it’s efforts on the Genesis in the 32-bit era of games. Turning out dud after dud on the Saturn and Playstation, they never replicated their success with the Shining series that they produced for the Genesis. Shining Wisdom and Shining the Holy Ark were OK at best, but there wasn’t a “true” Shining Force game until the end of the Saturn’s lifespan. For all the game’s great merits, Shining Force III is a step down from previous games in the series.

Shining Force III blends 3D background graphics with character sprites. The effect is done well and it works to the advantage of the Saturn’s processing capabilities. The camera can be rotated 360 degrees around the characters and has 3 levels of zooming. The game runs at a smooth framerate with almost no slowdown. The graphics can be somewhat simplistic at times, and buildings in towns can look so much alike that it causes confusion. During battles, it can be hard to properly judge the placement of your characters, especially along hills and other uneven terrain. When your characters attack, defend, or perform other in-battle actions, the game switches to an all-3D perspective. The characters are extremely well detailed and animated, and are beautifully light sourced and shaded. The backgrounds during these battle cinemas also change depending upon the battle terrain. The dynamic camera during these cinemas makes the battles exciting and as interesting to watch as it is to play. The battle cinemas have almost no load time and run at a high frame-rate. The spell effects are also worthy of mention, although most of the graphics from them are lifted right from Shining the Holy Ark. Otherwise, the characters are very well animated, the trademark Shining Force character portraits are very well drawn, and the introductory and ending cinematics are excellently rendered.

Shining Force III is an old game, and it really shows it’s age. The in-game sprites are small and poorly detailed; it’s often difficult to distinguish them. The towns are extremely simplistic and buildings and background objects consist of only a few polygons each, and those are polygons that lack any kind of polish whatsoever; they are not anti-aliased, they have muddy and blurry textures, and they suffer from the glitchy “wobbly” polygon effect that so many other 32-bit 3D games do. The landscapes are extremely bland and lack any kind of variety. It’s often difficult to properly determine the position of your troops, something crucial in battles. The cinematics that play during battles are OK at best, with good use of light sourcing and shading, but character models consist of maybe several dozen polygons at best, and lack variety in color. However, they do run at a very smooth frame rate, 30FPS or so, and are well animated. As mentioned earlier, battle cinematics load instantly and don’t take too much time to play out that it doesn’t become tiresome to watch them. In fact, the entire game has almost no loading times, except for when the game starts up. Moving from town to town, initiating a battle, and entering houses all happen almost instantly. This keeps the pace of the game moving very well, and it’s quite odd for a 32-bit 3D game to run so quickly. The graphics are old, outdated, and simplistic, but they are fast and work well enough to move the game along.

Music is just as much at the heart of a Shining Force game as the graphics are. There’s the good, the bad, and then there’s the ugly. The good is that the various sound effects in the game are excellent and are of Camelot's above-standard quality. Everything from walking to entering houses to even menu selection sounds exactly like it’s 16-bit brethren, only ramped up and played through the Saturn’s excellent sound chip. The bad is the music; while it’s not hard on the ears, the problem is that there’s no real variety in the music and with battles lasting an hour or so, it can really wear on the nerves. The ugly is the voices; it was a nice touch of Camelot to include voice acting that plays out during various parts of the game, even though the samples are only several seconds long, but they are so poorly acted that it’s laughable more than anything.

When I first played Shining Force III, it was after I had completed all of it’s predecessors; Shining in the Darkness and Shining Force I and II on the Genesis, Shining Force CD on the Sega CD (which was really a compilation of the Game Gear Shining Force games) and Shining Wisdom and Shining the Holy Ark on the Saturn. SFIII is a conundrum to me. It takes a step forward in the right direction, adding new gameplay features to the battle system, but it also takes a step back from certain elements that were included in SFII. In fact, I may be so bold as to say that SFIII plays a bit more like SFI than SFII.

Other than some new features that play out during battles, SFIII removes almost all the advances that Shining Force II made over the original. The free-roaming RPG aspect of SFII is gone; instead, like SFI, you automatically move from town to town as the story progresses, getting into battles along the way. You also can’t visit towns and areas from earlier parts of the game. While this may seem like no big deal, it makes SFIII more like every other Strategy game by removing it’s more interesting RPG elements. Additionally, because you automatically move with the story, the game is extremely linear and at no point in the game are you allowed to choose your next destination; you’ll either find it nice to be able to follow the story instead of wandering around aimlessly or sitting in town wondering what your next move should be, or you’ll feel as if you're being pulled along with the story instead of being directed where to go. The RPG elements were a rather big loss as they were a welcome distraction between each of the large scale battles.

Battles, which are the meat of the game besides the storyline, play out excellently. The game requires a modicum of strategy that makes it quite difficult at times, but the battles aren’t saturated with endless enemy statistics and percentages. Positioning and planning are more important than wondering whether you’re standing on the right tile at the right time during the right weather condition holding the right weapon equipped with the proper shield attacking an enemy that has the exact hit statistics that you need to damage them. The gameplay is simple, easy to get into, but later in the game the battles can get so hard that it’s a welcome challenge. During battles, the player can access secret areas that can only be entered with a secret map. Almost every battle has another secret battleground, usually littered with secret items that can be most helpful during the course of the game. Choosing several characters to fight on a separate plane can make the game quite hard as it thins your ranks and leaves you vulnerable to defeat. Another innovation is the friendship system. If two characters spend enough time attacking next to each other or healing each other, they will begin to view each other as “Partners”. Friendship can either lead to increased offensive or defensive capabilities when Partners are standing adjacent. However, should a character fall during battle, his friendship status is lost. The friendship system is an interesting touch that doesn’t get overly complicated but adds the right amount of extra strategy. The battles in previous Shining games could get quite repetitive, but in SFIII there’s so much variety that every battle has elements to it that make it unique. In some battles, you’ll need to save an important NPC from enemy attack. In one battle, you take control of refugees moving across a Railroad crossing before oncoming enemies kill them. Mentioned before, many battlemaps have secret areas that contain secret enemies and items.

Ah, the story; SFIII probably elicits nightmares in the minds of Sega fans when the storyline is mentioned. Not that the story is bad, but that the story is so good, that it’s an incredibly uniquely engineered story, and that it’s also incomplete. Shining Force III employs a feature called the “Synchronicity system”; the game centers around 3 characters: Synbios, Medion, and Julian. SFIII originally consisted of 3 separate games that told the events of the story from the separate point of view of each character. Certain events in each game cross over, giving a greater depth to the storyline and ultimately, making the game one GIGANTIC RPG. While each game in and of themselves are extremely linear, there exist certain branching points that only become evident in the later episodes. In the US, we only received the first portion, which tells the story of Synbios. The other 2 were only released to Japanese gamers. While at least attempting to play the 2nd and 3rd scenarios in Japanese is worthwhile, it would never had matched a complete US translation. And who could blame Sega; RPGs are the most difficult and expensive games to translate to English. Otherwise, the game’s story is very well done, the scripting is written well and humorous, dramatic, and intense all at the right times. Also, the ending will rip you apart, literally; it’s an incredible ending, but it’s an incomplete ending.

Replay:7

Shining Force III is good the first time through, but it's focus on gameplay make it worthwhile for additional outings. The storyline will get old after a while, but playing out various battles again and again can never gets old, especially since certain battles can have different outcomes that effect the story. There are also numerous secrets in the game, such as hidden map areas (mentioned before), secret characters, weapons, items, and even spell effects.

Shining Force III is a game that may be outdated from a technical standpoint, but holds up against contemporary offerings of Strategy/RPG games. If you can, try to find this game, which will take some effort as it's quite rare, and if possible, it's sequels, Shining Force III scenarios 2 and 3.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/07/02, Updated 07/29/03