Well, this is going to cost me...

The trading time thread over at Gamespite continues to be good/bad for me, because I recently acquired Shining Force III for the Saturn for a good deal over there ($60, to be exact, while it currently goes for $100+ on eBay). This has opened the floodgates to what may be my most expensive classic videogame obsession yet: Saturn fandom.

I just gave my girlfriend a list of Saturn games I want (there's 14 games on it! Way more than I thought I'd ever want for the thing) for Festivus. She kind of rolled her eyes at me; I can understand that. Trying to acquire Saturn games, at all, much less at a reasonable cost, is damned near impossible.

Well, she tells me she loved me, so it's all her fault anyway.

That being said, though, I need to outline some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for at least 12 years now (!) about Shining Force III. I've wanted the game for about that long, but I was never able to play it - I didn't have a Saturn during the short time it was viable, and when I finally got one (around 2003-04) the game was way out of my price range.

I was a huge, HUGE Shining Force II fan, however. That, and Sword of Hajya for Game Gear were the two games that made me interested in RPGs at all. So when I first heard about Shining Force III, probably in the pages of Game Players magazine, I wanted it. Badly. But I never got it, and my thoughts about what it must be like were all I had. I'd like to get them down here, for posterity, because when I finish Etrian Odyssey III, I plan to sit down and finally play Shining Force III.

So. Shining Force II was given to me as a present by my parents, and I hadn't even asked for it, much less heard of it - they got it for me probably because the box art looked pretty cool, and I think they assumed since it was the second game in the series, that it must be somewhat good.

I sat downstairs and hooked my Genesis up to the only TV available at the time - the black and white 13' beauty (my sister was using the main TV down there for watching some stupid movie she had just gotten). The fanfare started up, and then the tale began to unfold before me. The graphics blew me away - I had never played an RPG before, and the perspective of the game allowed you to see a lot. It was top down, sort of like an old-school Zelda game, but it was tile based. All the little people shuffled around in place, like they were living, breathing people. When you talked to them, the text would scroll by with different intonation; fat old dudes would have a deep voice, whereas little pixies and kids would have a high-pitched shrill. Important characters even had a detailed face pop up when you talked to them - and their mouths moved as they spoke! Sure, it never synced up, but it was novel nonetheless.

The battle system really thrilled me, too. It wasn't action-y, like many of my other games. It reminded me of chess; you would place your guys close to the enemies, and then they would attack each other. Strategy was the name of the game; if you let one of your guys stray too far from everybody else, they would quickly get overwhelmed and killed.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Shining Force III, not II. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed II quite a bit, and started playing other RPGs, starting with Final Fantasy III (VI) when I finally got a SNES years later, and fell in love with that series and type of game. SFII really opened my eyes to one of my favorite genres, and I really loved the aesthetic of the game, so when I heard about SFIII and saw pictures, I was blown away and excited for it.

But it was for the stupid Saturn. Who wanted one of those?! I had a N64 and would have rather had a Playstation than get a Saturn, especially back then. They were expensive, and at the time, SFIII was the only game I really wanted for it. So, I pined and pined and then tried to forget about it.

As the years passed, I would hear about how great the game was. How it was one of the best games on the system, much less how apparently it was the BEST SHINING FORCE GAME EVER (which really pissed me off, because if it was better than II, I really, REALLY wanted to play it then). So I began to imagine what it would be like...

From here on, I'm going to describe what Shining Force III has always been in my mind. Remember, I coveted this game for over a decade, and still don't really know much about it. All I've done thus far is put it into my Saturn to make sure it works. The rest of this blog will be speculation (well, really, straight up DREAMS) about what Shining Force III will be like when I finally play it.

I always wanted a direct sequel to SFII. I wanted to find out what happened to those characters after the credits rolled; I loved the world in that game, from Granseal to Parmecia, and wanted to explore it again. That's what I thought, anyway, coming right off SFII. As time went on, I wanted that less and less, with maybe just some cameos from old characters or something because SFII's world was pretty self-contained. There wasn't really any room to do anything there besides SFII.

So Shining Force III was going to be a new game in my mind. It would have no old characters, and all new environments. New countries, new places to explore, new battle maps, everything. It wouldn't be like Sword of Hajya, because it would let me explore towns at my leisure like in SFII - and that is anytime I want, unlike the original Shining Force. The story was going to be epic - Zeon would probably be revived or something, or some equivalent malevolent force would rise up and threaten the world, and it was up to ME to stop it.

So, you know, typical JRPG plot.

But the graphics, from what I had seen in little magazine screenshots, were AWESOME. Everything would be fully 3D, but incredibly detailed - not like the blurry N64 visuals I was used to, but with detailed textures and snappy loading. The music would be even more impressively varied and interesting compared to SFII, and the battles would be way more cinematic (I always imagined more frames of animation for the characters during attack scenes in SFII, you see). I wanted all of that, and I have no idea if SFIII will deliver in that department. From what little I've seen of it, the FMVs are horribly dated - which is fine, because what little I've seen of the actual in-game graphics are pretty good, if kind of chunky like 3D visuals were at the time.

And Shining Force III was looooooooong in my mind. It went on forever and ever (which apparently, it does, because there are 3 parts to it, only one of which came out in English, dammit). I always thought it'd be neat to revisit parts of Grans Island, and maybe some locations from the first game and Hajya, too, because back then I was very interested in story continuity.

What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I've always imagined Shining Force III to be the best game ever. I'm sure it won't live up to that; more than ten years of wanting it will likely leave me underwhelmed after I'm done. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure I'll like it! But my expectations are sky high.

Either way, it was worth the $60. I've not even spent that much on a 360 or PS3 game, which I find interesting (okay, I find it telling that I'd rather spend $60 on a twelve year old game than spend that much on anything they're making these days, but that's another blog post altogether).

I'll finish Etrian Odyssey III, probably write one more blog about that, then delve into Shining Force III after all this time.