Collection essentials #132: Shining Force (Genesis)

Here’s the first game I’m covering in Sega’s “Shining” series of role-playing games. Shining Force wasn’t actually the first one, as it was predated by “Shining in the Darkness”, which was a first-person dungeon-crawling turn-based RPG that isn’t making my list because it’s not quite good enough. The developers went in a different direction for Shining Force, making it into a tactical RPG instead.

I’ve already covered a tactical RPG in this series, Fire Emblem on the NES. There’s a huge and immediately-obvious difference between Fire Emblem and Shining Force, that being how turns play out. In Fire Emblem, you move your entire squad on your turn, then the enemy team does the same. But in Shining Force, each individual unit gets their own turn. The turn order is determined by the characters’ “speed” stats, meaning that the units with the highest speed will act first. There are plenty of other differences between the two games, but this isn’t meant to be an in-depth look so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Tactical RPGs tend to be very complicated games that take a lot of time to get into and play through. Something appealing about Shining Force, in my opinion, is the fact that it’s fairly straightforward for the genre and easy to jump into. It doesn’t require you to spend a lot of time learning various complex gameplay mechanics, nor will it kick your butt mercilessly if you’re slow to master the game. I can really enjoy complicated and challenging games too, but sometimes you don’t want to think THAT hard when you’re enjoying a game.

Shining Force is also notable for its distinct and appealing anime art style, story, characters and music. With this being the early ‘90s, game publishers were usually very reluctant to show anime illustrations on the front covers of their games, so you’ll see in the photo that the box art for Shining Force was redrawn for its international release in a more lifelike style that doesn’t really reflect the art that you see in the game itself. This was a pretty common practice, though by the end of the decade anime started to captivate American audiences and publishers realized this was unnecessary.

Shining Force’s localization wasn’t great, and it left out some significant story details in the original Japanese version. It’s for this reason that I haven’t actually played all the way through this Sega Genesis original yet (though I did play the remake of it released in the following decade). I am waiting on fans to make a translation patch that will make this version playable in English more true to its original form, and that might be released fairly soon!

There are bigger and better games to come in the Shining series. This game has some flaws, such as infamous maps where your characters can hardly move through difficult terrain, resulting in a slog of a battle. But this game really put the series on the map in my opinion and is an essential because of it.