Shining Force wasn't the first tactical RPG. There's actually a lot of precedents that came earlier. And on consoles, the Famicom saw both the first in the Daisekryaku (Advanced Wars, etc) series in 1988 and Fire Emblem in 1990. But here's something that Nintendon't way back then: localize their tactical RPGs for fear that Westerners wouldn't understand them.
The Genesis was a different story. 1990 saw the release of both Master Of Monsters and Warsong (a localization of the first Langrisser game). And in 1993, Sega published Shining Force. Like I said, it wasn't the first tactical RPG, but to those of us in the US, it was possibly the first we were exposed to with its push from Sega. I didn't actually play Shining Force back upon release, but I wish I had. My first tactical RPG is a classic but cliched one: Final Fantasy Tactics. I fell in love with the genre and I ate up anything I could find. I began devouring anything I could find within the genre, until looping back around to discovering Shining Force. And much like with my love for Phantasy Star, I contend that while Sega didn't have the heavy hitters like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy on their consoles, they were doing some immensely interesting stuff. In fact, the forward-thinking of these series have left me feeling for the past decade that the Shining and Phantasy Star series of games are actually some of my absolute favorite JRPG experiences of all time. And not to side-track here, but I wish Sega would embrace their legacy a bit more. While Phantasy Star II-IV are almost always accessible, I wish the original game was on PS5. The Shining series is even rougher. You can get Shining In The Darkness and the first two Shining Force games, but then a gigantic gap between those 16-bit titles and Shining Resonance. There's so much in between I'd love to have access to. How about re-releases of Shining Force CD? Or the truly underappreciated Shining Wisdom and Shining The Holy Ark on the Saturn? Never mind the myriad oddball PS2 and PSP releases we missed out on in America? But I'm totally digressing here. I actually first played Shining Force on the Dreamcast. It was included on the Sega Smash Pack back in the day. And I fell hard in love with that game. And now I'm fondly revisiting it in 2023, and remembering why I've held it in such high regard all these years later. It certainly took cues from that original Famicom Fire Emblem, but refined the UI to be way less clunky. It also benefits from the 16-bit hardware. And honestly, Genesis JRPGs were unrivaled when it came to world building and tone. I adore the art style of this game so much. Playing today - via the Sega Genesis Classics compilation on PS4 - Shining Force still feels like a definitive statement in early 90s strategy RPGs. While we can all agree it wasn't the first of such games to hit consoles, it's certainly possible that it was the introduction for many in the west. Through that lens, it's staggering just how much of the genre convention staples was in place and ironed out here. Remember that while Fire Emblem did it first in Japan, the series didn't even come to America until 2004. And it really wasn't a household name here until well over a decade later. The RPG portion of the game is definitely linear. But that's fine. I don't need an SRPG to offer up too much between battles. Honestly, I'm here for the battles. And most of Shining Force's downtime is devoted to exploring towns, buying upgraded gear or healing supplies, and hopefully recruiting new fighters. While your team starts off small, eventually you will outgrow the twelve party member max of each battle and you'll have to start making some decisions. There's a staggering thirty characters you can encounter and recruit in the game. Again, this is a 1992 console game. Picture the scope of being introduced to a whole new sub-genre like this and having access to thirty possible party members, and trying to pick your dozen. The possibilities are insane. Given that most any action you take in a given turn will net a character at least some XP, how do you proceed? Do you aim for pure balance? Or maybe you prefer a team of brute force? Or one of mostly magic? This doesn't even take into consideration that higher level characters have the ability to be promoted, even further improving their stats and abilities, as well as further complicating the choices of team composition. The campaign itself is a decent length. Depending how much grinding you want to do, you can mostly speed right through in twenty or so hours. Which is to say, it feels substantive but certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. The eight chapters feel like they have a steady ramp up in difficulty with only a few difficulty spikes along the way. The marionette battle was a real shockingly tough one, for instance. But overall the game flows well. My only real complaint with the game is that some of the menus can feel obtuse. For instance, each character can only hold four items. This includes their main weapon. This means that when our main character (Max) wants to open a chest, he can't even take anything out of it if he's holding four items already. Effectively, this means that in order to open a chest, our protagonist should never be fully stocked with healing items or whatever, or he won't be able to open any chests. And after opening one he should almost always go into a menu and either give his newfound item to another party member, or just drop it to free up some inventory space. Another similar issue is that equipping items doesn't feel as simple as it should be. You have four slots to hold items, but only one of them can be your main weapon. It's easy to get confused within the menus and buy a character a new and better weapon, only to spend the next battle with them simply holding that weapon in reserve without realizing it. These are of course the kinds of issues found in any early game in a fledgling genre of the day. I can't really fault Climax for making these missteps as they were trying to be inventive and intuitive in the console space, and they were so close to perfection right out of the gate. The bottom line is that Shining Force is a magnificent game. It's a genre-defining game. Though my own personal introduction to strategy RPGs was Final Fantasy Tactics, I went back to Shining Force not terribly long after that one and I adore both games. But it's beyond impressive what Climax pulled off with this game way back in 1991. It has that classic 16-bit Sega audio-visual sheen. It has the elegance of a tabletop game. It is deeply addicting and every moment I play it I'm just reminded how pained I am at all of the Shining games that never even made it to the states.
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