For this month's TR centered around Camelot-developed games, I had a few games to choose from, but I decided to go with the earliest one I had, the original Shining Force. Thankfully for me, it was recently released on the Switch Online Genesis service, so I played it there. It took me about 19.5 hours to play through the English version of the game with very limited save-state and rewind use (only used it a couple times when the fiddly UI made me end a turn when I hadn't meant to XP).
You play as Max, a knight in training in the tiny kingdom of Guardiana, whose life is suddenly thrown into disarray when the evil kingdom of Runefaust invades. Runefaust seeks to unleash the ancient Dark Dragon and destroy the world, but it's up to Max and his team, the titular Shining Force, to put a stop to the Runefaust's evil machinations. The story is pretty straightforward for a fantasy story of the time, but it's remarkable in just how excellently its translated for 1993. A colorful world full of silly characters and fun quips (from a talking space-hamster to a bunch of centaurs to an armadillo man in a steam-mech suit) make the world of Rune a very memorable one.
The gameplay of Shining Force is a strategy RPG very much like Fire Emblem (a series also in its infancy at the time, as FE2 predates this game by only about a week), and reads very much like Sega's answer to Fire Emblem. Very much like Fire Emblem, you (effectively) have different classes of units composed to NPCs you recruit throughout the game, these units level up semi-randomly upon level-up, and they can equip weapons to make themselves stronger. Unlike Fire Emblem, Camelot decided to lean more into the RPG aspect of things rather than the strategy, having towns you can walk around and talk to NPCs in, mages that learn spells with levels rather than items, and simply buying items that have no durability, but there are also a lot of less than ideal consequences to that.
But first, let's start with some good and welcome innovations (or at the very least things I like) compared to Fire Emblem. First of all, there is no perma-death in Shining Force. If an ally goes down, they can be resurrected for super cheap back in town if you get a game over (i.e. your main character is taken out) or win the battle. There are also virtually no consequences for getting a game over, as you just get sent back to the last church you saved at but keep all of the items and experience you gained in your last encounter. Being able to level grind like this is a really cool feature in a game with semi-random level-ups and lots of characters (many of whom are admittedly not worth using). You also don't recruit characters in battle, and recruitment is always done in towns by just talking to people. Even level-ups have a really nice feature in that they have a built-in stabilizer for just how many bad level-ups you can get. If you're stuck with a few bad levels in a row, you're much more likely for the next one to give you BIG bonuses to get you to where the game thinks you "should" be at that particularly level. These are all really nice features that make the game, on a surface level at least, a very welcoming and forgiving experience compared to the (certainly at the time) far more brutal SRPG of Fire Emblem.
However, Camelot make a lot of baffling and (I would argue) bad choice in their further RPG-ifying of Fire Emblem's formula. First and foremost above all of them is how turn order is handled. The order each character goes in is determined by their respective speed stat combined with some hidden RNG, and this effectively means that you have no idea when a character's turn is coming. You can get an idea sometimes, if you're in a map with only a few enemies, but in larger maps, an enemy very well might get two turns and run forward to snipe your character before you had any meaningful chance to react. There are global turns limiting this (so they at least can't get like, three turns in a row), but with how hard many enemies hit and how hard the game can be at times, that's pretty cold comfort. This is made an even further problem by having no real way to tell how far an enemy can move, as while you can see their movement stats, you can't see how terrain affects it, so you can only hazard a guess at how safe you are from any given enemy. The game also lacks counterattacks of any kind (automatic or otherwise, at least so far as I experienced), so if you aren't getting in the first strike, you're getting the crap kicked out of you. And then on top of all THAT, the enemy AI is AWFUL, so it's a total crap shoot on if the enemy won't just stand there while you pummel their head in because something in their AI has bugged out so hard that they just don't know what to do.
The end result of all of this is that it's very, VERY difficult to meaningfully strategize in this "Strategy RPG", and it can lead to a lot of annoying game overs with your most valuable units getting sniped (robbing you of the DPS necessary to beat the many auto-healing bosses). A lot of them wouldn't even be THAT big of a problem if there were just turns like Fire Emblem (and so many other SRPGs) use. Thankfully, the fact that the penalty for dying is so minute and how you can grind whenever you want means that these aren't game-breaking problems. They're still big problems, and they make a lot of maps feel more like RNG chores to slog through rather than strategic puzzles to solve, but they keep the game from descending from "annoyingly bothersome" to "unforgivably mean-spirited".
Then on top of that there are some other problems that are more just things you can chalk up to the game's age and a lack of proper foresight in their design. Something that's sorta in between both of these spaces is how mages work. They level VERY slowly, and they have very low MP, so healing is a very limited resource compared to a lot of Fire Emblem games. It's not nearly as bad as Fire Emblem 1, where healers need to get attacked and survive to level up (because healing doesn't give them EXP), but it's still glacially slow compared to the rest of your party, and it makes those cheap shots earned by bad luck on the turn order feel that much worse and cheap.
Magic is also incredibly dangerous almost the entire game, as there is no way to defend against it with stats. Until you get to higher HP values (which some characters simply never do), you're almost always one or two magic attacks away from being killed, no matter how high your defense stat may be. In one last move that I consider well-meaning but ultimately not very good, things such as double attacks, evasion, and critical hit chance are all linked to hidden, fixed values for each character and monster type, so you never know just how much danger you're going to be in (unlike a Fire Emblem where you generally have a speed or luck stat that determines when those things will happen). None of them are outright game breaking, sure, but it all contributes to that "this is a slog I need to get lucky to win at" feeling that plagues a lot of the game.
The presentation is quite good. It's a Mega Drive game from 1992, and it's a damn nice looking one at that. Character portraits are pretty, as are the environments. The monster designs are also very cool, bringing that "fantasy meets ancient high technology" aesthetic that the Shining series is known for to full bore through very pretty attack animations. The music is also very good, and makes the slogging times much more bearable when they happen.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Given the two points that the localization is so good AND Fire Emblem wouldn't be localized for roughly a decade, it is not that surprising to me how Shining Force captured so many hearts and minds back in the day and continues to be a fondly remembered game now. But in 2021, I think the game has aged very roughly with just how poorly the strategy elements are executed. This is a game you'll likely find charming in its presentation and not utterly impossible in its difficulty, but if you're more used to more polished strategy game or SRPGs, then you're likely going to have a quite boring if not frustrating time seeing Shining Force through to the end.
You play as Max, a knight in training in the tiny kingdom of Guardiana, whose life is suddenly thrown into disarray when the evil kingdom of Runefaust invades. Runefaust seeks to unleash the ancient Dark Dragon and destroy the world, but it's up to Max and his team, the titular Shining Force, to put a stop to the Runefaust's evil machinations. The story is pretty straightforward for a fantasy story of the time, but it's remarkable in just how excellently its translated for 1993. A colorful world full of silly characters and fun quips (from a talking space-hamster to a bunch of centaurs to an armadillo man in a steam-mech suit) make the world of Rune a very memorable one.
The gameplay of Shining Force is a strategy RPG very much like Fire Emblem (a series also in its infancy at the time, as FE2 predates this game by only about a week), and reads very much like Sega's answer to Fire Emblem. Very much like Fire Emblem, you (effectively) have different classes of units composed to NPCs you recruit throughout the game, these units level up semi-randomly upon level-up, and they can equip weapons to make themselves stronger. Unlike Fire Emblem, Camelot decided to lean more into the RPG aspect of things rather than the strategy, having towns you can walk around and talk to NPCs in, mages that learn spells with levels rather than items, and simply buying items that have no durability, but there are also a lot of less than ideal consequences to that.
But first, let's start with some good and welcome innovations (or at the very least things I like) compared to Fire Emblem. First of all, there is no perma-death in Shining Force. If an ally goes down, they can be resurrected for super cheap back in town if you get a game over (i.e. your main character is taken out) or win the battle. There are also virtually no consequences for getting a game over, as you just get sent back to the last church you saved at but keep all of the items and experience you gained in your last encounter. Being able to level grind like this is a really cool feature in a game with semi-random level-ups and lots of characters (many of whom are admittedly not worth using). You also don't recruit characters in battle, and recruitment is always done in towns by just talking to people. Even level-ups have a really nice feature in that they have a built-in stabilizer for just how many bad level-ups you can get. If you're stuck with a few bad levels in a row, you're much more likely for the next one to give you BIG bonuses to get you to where the game thinks you "should" be at that particularly level. These are all really nice features that make the game, on a surface level at least, a very welcoming and forgiving experience compared to the (certainly at the time) far more brutal SRPG of Fire Emblem.
However, Camelot make a lot of baffling and (I would argue) bad choice in their further RPG-ifying of Fire Emblem's formula. First and foremost above all of them is how turn order is handled. The order each character goes in is determined by their respective speed stat combined with some hidden RNG, and this effectively means that you have no idea when a character's turn is coming. You can get an idea sometimes, if you're in a map with only a few enemies, but in larger maps, an enemy very well might get two turns and run forward to snipe your character before you had any meaningful chance to react. There are global turns limiting this (so they at least can't get like, three turns in a row), but with how hard many enemies hit and how hard the game can be at times, that's pretty cold comfort. This is made an even further problem by having no real way to tell how far an enemy can move, as while you can see their movement stats, you can't see how terrain affects it, so you can only hazard a guess at how safe you are from any given enemy. The game also lacks counterattacks of any kind (automatic or otherwise, at least so far as I experienced), so if you aren't getting in the first strike, you're getting the crap kicked out of you. And then on top of all THAT, the enemy AI is AWFUL, so it's a total crap shoot on if the enemy won't just stand there while you pummel their head in because something in their AI has bugged out so hard that they just don't know what to do.
The end result of all of this is that it's very, VERY difficult to meaningfully strategize in this "Strategy RPG", and it can lead to a lot of annoying game overs with your most valuable units getting sniped (robbing you of the DPS necessary to beat the many auto-healing bosses). A lot of them wouldn't even be THAT big of a problem if there were just turns like Fire Emblem (and so many other SRPGs) use. Thankfully, the fact that the penalty for dying is so minute and how you can grind whenever you want means that these aren't game-breaking problems. They're still big problems, and they make a lot of maps feel more like RNG chores to slog through rather than strategic puzzles to solve, but they keep the game from descending from "annoyingly bothersome" to "unforgivably mean-spirited".
Then on top of that there are some other problems that are more just things you can chalk up to the game's age and a lack of proper foresight in their design. Something that's sorta in between both of these spaces is how mages work. They level VERY slowly, and they have very low MP, so healing is a very limited resource compared to a lot of Fire Emblem games. It's not nearly as bad as Fire Emblem 1, where healers need to get attacked and survive to level up (because healing doesn't give them EXP), but it's still glacially slow compared to the rest of your party, and it makes those cheap shots earned by bad luck on the turn order feel that much worse and cheap.
Magic is also incredibly dangerous almost the entire game, as there is no way to defend against it with stats. Until you get to higher HP values (which some characters simply never do), you're almost always one or two magic attacks away from being killed, no matter how high your defense stat may be. In one last move that I consider well-meaning but ultimately not very good, things such as double attacks, evasion, and critical hit chance are all linked to hidden, fixed values for each character and monster type, so you never know just how much danger you're going to be in (unlike a Fire Emblem where you generally have a speed or luck stat that determines when those things will happen). None of them are outright game breaking, sure, but it all contributes to that "this is a slog I need to get lucky to win at" feeling that plagues a lot of the game.
The presentation is quite good. It's a Mega Drive game from 1992, and it's a damn nice looking one at that. Character portraits are pretty, as are the environments. The monster designs are also very cool, bringing that "fantasy meets ancient high technology" aesthetic that the Shining series is known for to full bore through very pretty attack animations. The music is also very good, and makes the slogging times much more bearable when they happen.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Given the two points that the localization is so good AND Fire Emblem wouldn't be localized for roughly a decade, it is not that surprising to me how Shining Force captured so many hearts and minds back in the day and continues to be a fondly remembered game now. But in 2021, I think the game has aged very roughly with just how poorly the strategy elements are executed. This is a game you'll likely find charming in its presentation and not utterly impossible in its difficulty, but if you're more used to more polished strategy game or SRPGs, then you're likely going to have a quite boring if not frustrating time seeing Shining Force through to the end.