Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

"A light snack of a sRPG"

This game is a remake of the original Shining Force for Genesis, with some additional gameplay elements. It's an old game that just can't stand up to modern sRPGs, with a lot of fundamental gameplay, AI, and difficulty problems. It's a light snack with a lot of filler and no real challenge, much like the recent Zone of the Enders or Onimusha Tactics. I thought it was worth a day to kill it and move on, considering I've already been through SF2 and SF3-1.

The largest problem in the game is the computer AI - it's dumb as a bag of rocks. It will attack the main hero, then if that fails it will attack whoever's directly next to it, and if that fails it looks for someone it can do the most damage to or kill. Even without using egress to power level your heroes (which I didn't do), it's easy to buff your main hero up with defense potions and turn him into a nearly invincible tank that every enemy wants to brush up to. The AI won't go after units it can kill in lieu of the main hero or whoever's directly next to it, or gang up on anybody (unless they happen to be the only unit in range, which is merely accidental.)

The second largest problem is the game difficulty. The game is really easy, so easy that I plowed through all the missions on my first attempt, with the clear bonus. Once you get the card using unit, it's easy to will four of your units to get two actions per turn, resulting in a mass slaughter. You can make hard saves so it's very easy to backtrack on a mistake (although you can't reload to try to hit something), plus you only get a gold penalty for losing a hero in battle. If you're looking for a challenge, this is not the game to find it in. I had the main hero, Gort, Zylo, and Narsha plus the card using hero for double movement tear up anything and everything in the last few battles. And that's on a first time play. Yes, you can replay the game up to 99 times with a higher difficulty each time, but who is going to bother? The new game+ difficulty didn't seem any harder than the original, and I'm not willing to play the game several times over just to have enemies with higher stats to fight.

On to the gameplay problems. You only see a units movement range, not their attack range. You can't check an enemy's stats until after you've attacked them. The inventory management system is old and clunky. Any unit of yours with low speed is going to fall behind in levels since everyone else will move before them. By the end of the game only power/defense units are worth much, except for the Domingo caster. There's no rating system or grading system, and although the 'clear bonus' was nice, it had no challenge to it. Some of the battles are merely no-challenge filler trying to get from one town to the next, with no plot progression.

The storyline is very stereotypical, but that's to be expected with such a dated game. I don't play video games for the plot, anyway.

I'll give a passing mention to the graphics and sound. You can't turn the animations off or skip the battle chat, which is annoying. The game shows a noticeably bad slowdown with too many sprites on the screen, especially when doing things like shopping in town. The music and sound effects both got on my nerves, so the volume was off for the duration of the game.

Only sRPG diehards, Shining Force fans, and players who don't want the full sRPG experience are likely to pick this one up. Sega may as well have just tried to make an original SF sRPG game for GBA if they wanted to introduce a new generation to the series.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/02/04