Shining Force IV

Sorry I haven’t updated the blog in awhile, but it’s about time for another version of ‘Games that should be developed’. Hopefully I’ll get to some more reviews to post on soon. The younger generation might not know about the Shining Force franchise, but former owners of the late great Sega Genesis might know about this amazing series. Shining Force was one of the first, (if not the original) console turn-based strategy games. To this day it remains an amazing title, despite its age.

Shining Force introduced many compelling elements that set it apart from many games of its genre. Perhaps the most unique was the combat perspective. Whenever a combat action took place, a mini animation took place in which you could see the action executed up close.

These animations made each encounter seem more intense then most modern TBS game encounters, which always maintain the same combat perspective. Shining Force also introduced the Promotion system. Once your character reached level 10, you could choose to promote them to a more prestigious combat class. The interesting thing about this system was a newly promoted character was typically weaker for a few levels then they would hit what I call a ‘growth spurt’ and start acquiring high stat gains per level. This system made you really consider when it was best to promote your characters so that your entire team wasn’t too weak to handle an upcoming battle.

Shining Force also had many interesting combat units. There were centaur-like melee classes known as Knights who used lances for up close combat but could also use spears for ranged combat. There were also Birdmen who had advanced movement capability due to their ability to fly. There were also many other single units that stood out, namely: Zylo the werewolf, Bleu the dragon, Adam the cyborg, Hanzo the ninja, and of course the overly powerful Musashi the samurai. Considering the fact that there were over 30 playable characters in this game, many of them were intriguing enough to remain memorable throughout all these years…

I know Sega has continued the ‘Shining Force’ name with some of their newer PlayStation 2 titles. I was extremely excited to play the 1st one, but was very disappointed when I picked it up. Now don’t get me wrong, I liked this game but it was no Shining Force. Basically this game is an action RPG title; this isn’t a bad thing, but it really has no true relation to the original Shining Force series. So if anyone at Sega happens to see this…please bring back the true Shining Force! The TBS genre has evolved immensely since Shining Force (the Final Fantasy Tactics franchise is an excellent example), but as the innovator of this genre, I know you guys can adapt to the times and make an amazing true Shining Force title. Even it’s a hand-held title, that will suffice!

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