Originally posted January 18th, 2019. Edited and re-posted here for archival purposes.
Shining is a series that I’ve little experience with. The last game with Shining in the title that I’d played was Shining Tears. I can’t say I recall much of it. When I owned a Genesis as a kid, I wasn’t into RPGs at all. My first experience with them was a game called Sword of Vermilion. My time with that game gave me a pretty bad impression of RPGs as a young and impressionable kid. Following it, I had a pretty aggressively ignorant mindset about RPGs in general. I’d always thought: “who would want to stand around taking turns hitting one another? That’s dumb.” Additionally, I considered them to be slow and boring. This was before I actually tried other games in the genre, so it’s somewhat amusing to look back and see how much of an uninformed kid I was.
Shining Force would have been a game I would not have liked back then. Though, if I’d given it a chance when I was a teen, I’d probably have enjoyed it quite a bit. Somewhere around the age of thirteen, RPGs quickly became my favorite genre and I found myself delving heavily into them in the PSX era, while also taking time to dig back into the SNES gems. To this day, 90% of the games that I own are RPGs. While I’ve my own niche of tastes and styles, I never really gave much mind or attention to any of the Sega RPGs. Yet here I am, over two decades after the game came out, and I’ve just finished it.
I played the game on Steam via the Sega Genesis Classics collection, though the game itself is only $1 if you buy it standalone. You don’t have to drop the full amount on the package, thankfully. Initially, I put in two or so hours into it. As I got my bearings and started to become comfortable with the controls, I closed down the game and came back to it the next day. My save was gone. It wanted me to start over. This was bizarre, irritating, and it deflated my enthusiasm. After I did some whining and lamenting about lost time, I’d learned that the Sega Classics collection has…multiple emulators it seems. Multiple locations for your save to be, whether it’s in that unsightly 3D ‘VR’ gameroom or the simple and clean Simple Launcher. After finding out my save was in the Simple Launcher emulator, I spun it back up where I left off and put some more time into it.
Out of the gate, Shining Force is a pretty game. It has bright colors and a sharp art style that help it stand out. It has a very “Sega” look to it, if that makes any sense. The colors help the game pop, ensuring terrain doesn’t blur together or end up muddy. The character portraits are wonderfully drawn and give some personality to characters who pretty much never say more than a paragraph throughout the entire game. The battle animations are great to look at, though I wish the battle models matched the portraits a bit more. The combat animations were snappy enough, though I’d appreciate if there was a bit more variety to them. Perhaps a different animation for criticals ala Fire Emblem, or maybe a different move from a unit that happens to be the same class. I wonder if the sequels will expand on that?
The music was fine overall, I can’t say any of it really found its way into my head for long periods of time. I do wish the music kept going in between the battles instead of stepping into its own little song for attacks. I can’t really say anything negative about the music, so I’ll stick with it being fine. I’ll admit that I did mute the sounds after a while as I was multi-tasking and coming back to the game in short bursts. As a package, it works well with the animations and general theme and scope of the game while also having that fairly iconic grungy Genesis soundchip tone to it.
Controls took a bit of getting used to, but I’ll state that I never once felt completely comfortable with them. Having to pull up a menu to talk to someone or search was something I never became accustomed to. I took no real joy in trying to chat with an NPC, only to have them step one frame away and get a window stating ‘No one is in that direction’. I wasn’t a fan of the UI and it left a bit to be desired. I had no idea what any item did unless I googled it (though I imagine it was in the manual). Shuffling items around was a chore (inventory management was a mild lesson in frustration), and I never figured out what some shopkeeper options actually did until the last chapter. In regards to inventory, I didn’t like how opening a chest made items go directly to the main character. I’d have to shuffle things down to someone else just to use an item I received moments ago. That said, my complaints on the UI and inventory aren’t meant to be too harsh as they sound as the game is nearly 30 years old. I can’t knock it too much due to its age and era it released in, but it’s a mild headache going back to it after many years of quality-of-life improvements in RPGs.
On the subject of its age and how two and a half decades is a long time, perhaps it wasn’t such a tired trope at the time but I found myself immediately rolling my eyes at the story premise. As you start it up, you’re met with a dragon girl who has an big Ancient Book that has Secrets and an Ancient Tale that she tells you. It speaks of an Evil Dark Dragon who was Sealed Away no more than One Thousand Years Ago and the Forces of Evil are marching on your hometown. They seek to Enslave The World and want to Resurrect Their Dark God. The Darkness is coming, and only you, The Chosen One, can wield the Power Of Light and stop the Dark Evil Armies from Taking Over The World. I’ve capitalized those as I imagine each of them is a TVTropes entry with at least five dozen games, a hundred TV shows, and countless books. I’m sure there’s a concept album by a power metal band that has this exact premise from start to finish. Don’t get me started on the stupid deus ex machina fabled special Ancient Sword.
Within minutes I was groaning. This isn’t exactly the games fault. I’ve been playing RPGs for a long time and I’ve seen this scenario over and over and over again. As the years pass along, I’m getting very tired of the Dark Vs Light narrative. While some games can do it interestingly enough for me to not find myself overly concerned by it, such narratives just feel tired to me. I wouldn’t call them lazy, I just find them overly derivative and not to my tastes – which I admit are rather eclectic. Some may call it classic story telling, but I call it boring. With how barebones and tiresome the story and setup are, I find it takes a backseat to the personal story that unfolds with each battle. My irritation with the setup faded as I began to tell my own tale in my head about how I felled these throngs of enemies that charged blindly to their deaths. While my grievances in regards to the story may seem a bit harsh, I eventually let them go as the game came out almost thirty years ago. If anything, the games I played with the tropes I’d grown so sick of were derivative of Shining Force.
Back to what the game does well: each battle had a distinct reason for existing (save one or two on a boat because whatever). They all had their own identity to where I could probably state “Oh, the battle in the open field.” or “The one where I’m charging the castle.” or “The one with the mountains.” and a veteran of the series may know exactly which one I’m talking about (and likely how to overcome it.) They don’t really blur together in terms of battlefields, so I appreciated the variety. I do wish there were some other terrains though. Perhaps a throwdown on the beach, or a clash in the snowy peaks. Weather would have made things even more ‘epic’, especially when facing down a force half a mile away and almost three times the size of my own. Rain does tend to make a pleasant backdrop for dramatic showdowns.
Continuing on with ‘my own story’, I mention that because I found the way I used my units to be interesting in retrospect. Who I picked for battle, who I took chances with, who I put my faith in to actually do damage, and who I kept protected at all costs. Each of these had a reason, some form of method in my head that I carried over from other games. After learning that I can fail a mission and simply restart it while keeping any exp I gained, I became a bit less conservative with my main character. Normally, in a game where MC Death = Game Over, I tend to guard that character with stronger ones around them as I’d hate to lose progress in a battle that took me 35 minutes to get through. On that note, I greatly appreciated that aspect of Shining Force.
I personally haven’t liked using the term “respecting my time” or “respecting the players time”, as it always felt like something a game critic has spouted off numerous times when they fail something or just flat out don’t like the design of a system. However, I couldn’t help but think of it when I fell in combat and didn’t get a game over screen. My thirty minutes of battle didn’t feel wasted and I didn’t have to rely on savestates (which I would have done). I was quite thankful for that and wish more games had the foresight to do such a thing. To add onto that, being able to escape any battle at any time and recover/restock was a blessing as well. It does also allow you to grind in a game with finite encounters if needed, so abuse away if you must. I never once had to. It’s a game that made me do a turnaround on the term ‘respecting my time’, as it never made me feel like I wasted it.
Back to my original point with my own story and units. I enjoyed how I was able to make my own strike forces, divide my forces up into little fire-teams or make formations on my own to lure in enemies, protect my healers, or rain down hellfire from above. My MVP of the entire game was a unit you get within the first battle: Mae, a centaur who uses polearms. Her stat growth made her stand out very quickly from the rest of the pack. While she couldn’t really hoof it through forests and hills, she could cross the battlefield quickly on open plains. I also thought it’d be a great idea to give her a mobility ring and let her move two more spaces. Because why not?
Early on, she could close the distance to enemies and take them down very quickly. While her attack wasn’t exactly anything special, for the longest time I had her with a throwing spear that let her do ranged attacks. Within a couple battles, she was a one-woman blitzkrieg that wrecked mages. She was resilient as her defense stat just kept climbing with each level along with her HP. Time and time again had I thrown her into the middle of a group of enemies and they’d plink away at her, one by one. 1 damage. 1 damage. 1 damage. She’d strike back with enough to one-shot some things, but usually two-shot every enemy around her. With a couple healing items in her pocket, she was practically unkillable.
I had this kind of experience with my mage as well, another starter unit named Tao. Interestingly enough, I didn’t know she was in my party when I first saw her name. There was an NPC talking trash about her, leading me to think that perhaps she wasn’t a good mage and would be replaced by someone better. I was wrong. While she started out somewhat weak with low MP, I focused on her a bit as she began to learn better versions of her spells and hit harder. And harder.
At the end of the game, she had enough MP to call down a firestorm on any enemy and kill them in one blow. She could do this close to ten times in a battle. Half the enemies forces could be burned away by a single mage, albeit it’d take a while and she had to be protected. She also received a spell called Boost that buffed up the physical attack of the target, so putting that on my hardest hitting units amplified her own usefulness. She never once left my team, and the second mage that came in seemed more of a counterpart to her than a pure replacement. The majority of my final team had units growing from being mediocre combatants to destructive forces that wiped maps quickly and with surgical precision. Yet there were some enemies that eluded my deathblows so often that it drove me to frustration.
Evasion in this game is a pain in the ass. Flying enemies can evade more often, and it seems like any ground based unit attacking a flying enemy gets a penalty to their accuracy. Yet these stats are not present in game. Taking a swing at an airborne foe feels like a coin flip, and more often than not I ended up with the losing side. Bats and seabats were nightmares on the field. Only magic could take them out for the longest time. Early on, you’re faced with many flying enemies and you’ve so little MP that you’ll deplete your magical offenses before you finish off the winged beasts. This gets worse as you get further in the game.
There were few encounters that didn’t have flying enemies in them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to actually improve your chances to hit them. I audibly groaned as four of my units surrounded a Seabat, only to have it quickly evade every. single. attack. One person even attacked twice and missed both times. I recall losing a unit to that fight because of the constant misses on my end. While your own flying units can evade at a much higher rate as well, it never felt like it was balanced in the same way. For every one time I dodged, it felt like the enemies dodged ten times.
The last two chapters introduced Chimeras, which are the worst enemy I’ve faced in the entire game. They can fly over anything, have a very long range of movement, they evade almost every hit, and they can hit you with very powerful ranged magic that ignores your defenses. Yeah, good luck. Even the Mae the God struggled against these pesky foes. I suppose it was humbling in the end, for I’d come to rely too much upon my most powerful units. In the end, I overcame the struggles before me and was met with a fairly merciful last set of battles. They weren’t overly difficult. In fact, I think they were a bit of a brief respite after smashing my head into Chimera, Dragons, Horsemen, and Priests.
While I had some frustrations with the game, I will say that I enjoyed my time with it. It was fun and seemed to be a pretty unique spin on the SRPG subgenre. For all I know, it’s one of the first. It still feels solid enough and doesn’t come across as dated, poorly aged, or archaic by any means. It feels like a very ‘basic’ SRPG that is a wonderful start for anyone new to the subgenre (or even new to RPGs). It doesn’t layer in overly complex stuff, doesn’t give myriad ailments to cast and cure, and also doesn’t seem to care about positioning, direction, or height for the most part. It’s a great way to get your bearings and wrap your head around slower battles that require you to think a few steps ahead.
Shining Force is a nice little gem of the past. Playing it in recently gave me a glimpse of ideas that must’ve been incredibly interesting and unique back then (sans power metal storyline). Despite my gripes, I think it’s worth playing and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in JRPGs and their strategic variants. It has a great color palette, charming art style, thoughtful music, intriguing encounters, and rewarding combat that lets you form your own war stories alongside the incredibly basic backdrop of Light Vs Dark, evil…etc.
If you’re looking into classic RPGs, I’d rank this up there with them. While it may not be my favorite game by any means, it’s certainly one I’d suggest to people to give a shot. It’s pretty brief, clocking in around 20 hours (though steam says 27 for me. I let it sit for a while and reloaded a few times due to mistakes such as forgetting to revive half my team.) So, give it a look. It’s a dollar on steam. If you prefer to play on the go/whatever people do in their incredibly important lives, the Sega Classics collection is also available on Switch (and home consoles) for a cool thirty bones ($30). Unfortunately you can’t buy it separately on consoles.
I’m looking forward to trying the sequels. We’ll see if I become one of those bitter fans who hate the direction the series has taken. Who knows, I may end up liking everything and appreciating each for what it does – but we’ll come to that bridge when I get to it some day. I might give SF2 a shot this year, assuming I’m not buried under more games that take 40-60 hours to beat.
