
	Platform Sega Genesis Genre Strategy RPG Publisher Sega Developer Climax Released 1993
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Shining Force

When Sega’s Shining in the Darkness first came out, I trekked all over the city to get my hands on a copy. After thoroughly tearing apart the first person, dungeon crawling RPG, I was eager for more. A year or so later, I was flipping through one of my game magazines, and noticed a new game called Shining Force, and it was apparently going to take place in roughly the same world as Shining in the Darkness, except it would be on a different continent. My interest was peaked, and I just hoped like mad that somehow, someway, this game would find its way from Japan to North America, something completely up in the air given the strong anti-RPG sentiment among game publishers in the US during the early to mid 1990s.

The game was going in a different direction, deep-sixing the first person perspective in exchange for an overhead view, and the combat would be more akin to a strategy game, as characters took turns moving around the battlefield. Despite all of these changes that would make Shining Force fundamentally different from its predecessor, I was still extremely excited about the game. I would snap up any magazines that came along with updates on the game, and each time would be disappointed that there was still no sign of a US release date. In time, though, a North American release was announced, and I was elated, although the clerks at my local game store would not be too pleased by it.

The day I learned that Shining Force was going to be making its way across the Pacific, I got on the phone and called Encore Video, the shop I usually bought my games from (boy do I miss the days when small, privately owned game shops were everywhere). I asked them if they were planning to get any copies of Shining Force in, they said yes, and I promptly reserved one. Over the next few weeks I must

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have called the place a few dozen times to see if the game was in yet. Much to my relief, as well as those at Encore, the game eventually came in, so I whipped over to the store right away to pay for it, and whisked it home.

Firing the game up, I was very impressed by the game’s visuals on my Genesis. It wasn’t the level of detail that made the graphics charming, but instead the art style. It wasn’t really traditional anime, nor was it all that influenced by Western

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art, instead there was this odd mixture of giant feet, everyone had either very sharp, or very round faces, and outside of the dwarves in the game, everyone was quite thin. The whole approach to character design was in vast contrast to much of what was available in the game industry at the time, as most other developers were pumping out either anime, or highly-idealized physiques in RPGs.

The one thing that I learned very quickly while playing this game was just how important it was to take out the enemy's magic users as soon as possible. Early on mages and healers wouldn’t be a big deal, as they didn’t have any high level spells at the ready. However, by the time one reached the midway point in the game, enemy sorcerers would have a decent arsenal of Area of Effect spells that could really do a number on a player’s tightly packed units. As such, players would need to learn how to disperse their troops in an unconventional manner, so to make sure as few as possible would be smashed by area effecting enemy spells, while finding a way to get to these enemies as soon as possible so that they could be neutralized.

Overall, though, combat wasn’t really all that challenging once one found a way to swarm the enemies. More often than not, players could divide their main force into several groups of three or four, with one or two melee, a healer, and a mage, then have the mage open up with AoE attacks to soften the enemy, followed by sending in the melees, to clean up, with the healer keeping everyone’s hit points in the black.

Once players found a rhythm it didn’t take long to plough through the game. As such, I probably wound up finishing the thing in two or three days. Even by the standards of the 16-bit era, this was not very much time. However, the game was amazing for that short period of time. I loved the story, and the final battle was incredible. What kept me the most excited for some time to come was how the ending of the game set everything up for a sequel, and got my hopes out that a Shining Force 2 would be on the way, causing me to keep my eyes on the magazines for this game just as I did for the first one.

Mr. Nash

(May 14, 2005)


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