i have always had a maybe silly amount of nostalgia for this game despite having barely played it in my teens, largely due to the love shown for it in the game magazines i read religiously back then (egm, gamefan, etc). i had my snes and zelda 3, but i was still young and couldn't afford much—shining force 2 was one of the foremost among the many games i coveted.

anyhow, suffice to say this game deserves to be remembered and rediscovered. if you've never played it before (perhaps if you've liked any fire emblem), give it a shot.

dank. borderline kusoge in some regards, but it's a weird enough blend of valis, el viento, maybe a little shinobi and/or castlevania, and king of demons to be interesting/cool, full of alien/demonic dream freaks to slash or blast. i mean, its odd anime-cronenberg plot was written by kenichi nishi, known for moon: remix rpg adventure and LOL: lack of love) so... that may speak to this game's underlying quality! the soundtrack, unfortunately, feels like a sort of lazy effort from michiko naruke, who would leave telenet in around 4 years to work on wild arms (which has a fantastic ost). at least it feels 'off' enough that it sometimes manages to enhance the game's overall strange vibe.

though i have just now played the game in its entirety for myself, i have some history with it going back into the mid '90s. see, i actually owned a copy of it and had played just a bit of it before a friend of mine offered to buy it from me. he had a new sega cd, and i was far more stoked on squaresoft games; i wanted to buy a copy of chrono trigger (which was retailing for EIGHTY BUCKS!) and, well, lunar got me there. that's pretty much the long and short of it.

still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.

it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.

aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.

one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.

i haven't yet completed this or tried the variety of its unique modes (classic zebes, a revamped version of the original game set on a new planet, a randomizer, multiplayer, and map creation...!) but i have played enough that i really think this deserves more attention. it's such a polished update to a somewhat dusty classic that if there were any justice in the world, its developer might be paid by nintendo and a port released for the switch. it's not any kind of dramatic overhaul like zero mission by any means... it feels more like the nes game had been ported to pc engine and now it's got some more modern additions. really, really cool.

https://forum.metroidconstruction.com/index.php/topic,4952.0.html

finally getting around to playing this for my first time! been enjoying it well enough for the first ~20 hours—i'm using the character portrait pack made by ryouko kui (dungeon meshi mangaka) and enjoying the vibe that brings, and the narrative involving strange dreams around the conflicted nature of the player character has me curious... it's not the most compelling thing to play, with so much more emphasis on the awkward pause and click combat than planescape: torment's much heavier storytelling style.

what has me really hesitating to continue at the moment is my first encounter with viconia, which comes out of nowhere to reveal the problematic nature of the d&d alignment system. when 'good' is violent racism and 'evil' is a character struggling to survive this hateful world, i become conflicted. having spoiled things for myself in my curiosity, because this game encourages me to overthink every aspect of it, i'm aware that my current party is the 'canon' one (as far as bg1 goes with respect to bg2's treatment of it) as well as the fact that viconia very much goes against my current playstyle of chaotic good and high reputation. she seems kind and friendly at first, and then the moment after recruiting her she starts calling you "surface scum." ok, so i need to earn her trust, perhaps. my anxiety stems from this game's handling of roleplaying mechanics i know are going to lead to her abandoning my party unless i start doing things like murdering the cops of the land to drop my rep, which... ok, lol, i can do that. it may also make more sense to just continue with the party i already have and then go with viconia in bg2 (when other characters will be... uh, dead), especially since there hasn't been a ton of dialogue or interaction between characters in bg1 so far anyway. it frustrates me a little bit that the first character to really interest me is so at odds with my playstyle and that i would have to arbitrarily ditch other characters (whom i currently find pretty useful) to even recruit her! but the idea of deciding to form a bond with a wicked and persecuted character who may have unforeseen depth in this stupid, rigid world of 'alignment' really excites me!

uh, anyway. might post another thing whenever i eventually finish this game. :B

yeah, this... is pretty much what i remembered. this game was straight up irresistible bait to a kid browsing rentals in 1991 (at video tyme... before the blockbuster buyout). preceding the era of 'tude and following the most righteous triumph of bill & ted (rather blatantly), totally rad was very attractive.

it's a great-looking and great-sounding nes game, yet its gameplay is... er, marginally rad? it's not exactly bad. its platforming is utterly basic - more like contra than mario, though hardly on contra's level with its shooting. odd quirks like the inability to run up small diagonal ramps or keep your weapon charge while jumping make it more awkward than it should be. the magic system is... well, it's there, but it's very limited in that there are no replenishing drops - you have to manage your mp between checkpoints. you also can't use your heal spell while transformed, so you'll have to go into the pause menu to revert to your human form, and then pause again to heal, and then probably pause again to transform once more. yeah, there are transformations giving you different attacks and abilities - sort of a blend of mega man and super mario bros 3, or something, though not nearly as good as either.

a little bit rad and a little bit gnarly, but most of all it's... well, it's charming and even a bit odd, yet fairly standard, ultimately. worth a shot.

seems like it might be cool with 2 players, so someone can control the bird. without that, your tiny rapier makes combat incredibly tedious, and combat is constant, making this a pretty grueling trial of patience. you're constantly assaulted by virtually unavoidable damage from flying enemies and projectiles, and you'll absolutely die before a level is finished if you aren't dealing with every single enemy by poking and retreating... again... and again... and again. it just feels kinda gross to play.

might like it a bit more if i ever have a chance to play it with someone, though i'd say that's... extremely unlikely. always thought this seemed like one of the interesting nes games i'd missed out on, but no - i would not recommend this one to anyone but serious nes completionists.