Collection essentials #295: Shining Force CD (Sega CD)

I’ll take a second here to talk about the Sega Game Gear. As I’ve already covered in this series, the handheld system Game Boy from Nintendo was an enormous success which made portable gaming as we know it mainstream. It’s no surprise that Nintendo’s biggest competitor at the time, Sega, would challenge it. The Game Gear launched in 1990 in Japan and Western countries the following year. It saw modest success and surpassed Game Boy’s other competitors…but it still finished a VERY distant second to the Game Boy. The console had a colored screen and backlight which set it apart from the Game Boy, but the unit itself was huge and it dried up batteries much too quickly. I owned a Game Gear for quite a while as an adult, but it just didn’t have enough games of interest for me to keep it.


Anyways, the reason why I bring it up here is because there were a few Shining Force games on the Game Gear. This release, Shining Force CD, is a remake that contains two of those games greatly spruced up with 16-bit graphics and CD-quality audio, plus a bit of new content on top of it. They did a great job, making it hardly obvious at all that these games originated on an 8-bit handheld. Though if you’ve played the other Shining Force games you may notice how you won’t have towns or other areas to roam around in, and that was a result of the games being made for less powerful hardware. 


Now, I played Shining Force CD many years ago at this point. I don’t really have specific memories to share of playing the game or its story. I just remember it being good fun and a worthy entry in the Shining Force series which I’m quite fond of in general. Like I explained before, they’re strategy RPGs with gameplay that’s pretty straightforward and easy to jump into, yet challenging once you progress, and I like that because the complexity of strategy RPGs can sometimes turn me off from wanting to play them. You could say maybe my lack of distinct memories is a bit of a knock against the game, since I’d remember it more if it were truly great. And yeah, it’s not the #1 Shining Force game, but it’s got some tough competition so that’s not a big insult.


At some point I intend to replay most of the Shining Force series, and I’m sure I’ll really enjoy replaying Shining Force CD, in part because when you have faded memories it can make old things feel fresh again. And then I’ll definitely have more specific things to say about it. Which gets me thinking…what will I do with this blog when I have more to say about games I’ve already posted about? Maybe I’ll do follow-up posts, maybe I’ll update the old posts then re-share the links on social media…we’ll see.


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