Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Finally, I have beaten the first Shining Force!

I picked up the GBA remake again after having sold it years ago. I'm not sure what stopped me from playing it through back then; I had beaten Shining Force 2 several times and this time, I really enjoyed playing through the vast majority of the game. I'm going to break the game down as best I can.

First, this game probably has some of the most interesting maps in the series. The standouts are peppered through the game: the Laser Eye battle, Colossus, the battle against Chaos, and some others. The Colossus and Laser Eye are probably my two favorite fights in the game. For the Laser Eye fight, the enemy army has set up a Laser Eye on the far end of a narrow bridge the Shining Force must cross. The problem is, the Laser Eye can fire a laser every six turns that damages everything in front of it. It's range covers pretty much the entire lengthy bridge, so the player must plan carefully if he is to cross while not taking too much damage from the Laser Eye and avoiding other enemy attacks. It's a challenging battle made better by the turn limit the game sets that gives you a reward if you beat it in a certain number of turns.

I think adding in the turn limit was a great idea for this reason. The rewards don't break the game as far as I know, but they help a little bit and usually the weapon you get helps quite a bit in the next battle or two. They are totally optional and for those maps that just give you gold coins, you can safely skip them without worrying about missing anything important (gold coins are a pretty terrible reward anyway, since  you get coins every time you defeat an enemy. Egressing back to town means you can just grind for coins if you absolutely need them).

As for the Colossus battle, I had a really good time because of how my choices affected the enemies. There is a very narrow bridge right at the beginning of the battle, and the whole battle has mostly flying enemies. Given the past few battles, I thought I could figure out where the flying enemies would go and sent most of my guys quickly across the bridge, leaving my hero Max, a healer, and a gladiator behind to deal with who I thought would be scragglers.

I was wrong.

The flying enemies all flew down the sides of the map and came after Max. The problem was, most of my units were engaged with enemies north of the bridge, and bringning them all back to Max would have dragged all the enemies they were fighting with them. So I sent one or two units down to Max to help out, and did my best to clean up the enemies to the north. Max came close to dying twice - a few lucky turn placements for my healer and and an inexplicable choice from an enemy Blue Dragon to attack my gladiator as opposed to Max helped. I ended up ekeing out a victory while only losing Tao, one of my mages.

Here's my problem with Shining Force, though: the game is very strangely balanced. The early game is pretty difficult, in that most characters can be killed fairly easily. Once your characters start getting close to level 10 and beyond, by that point in the game it would be tough for the player to lose a battle due to how much damage their units can take. Due to some advice I received on Talking Time, I decided to level up my characters to 15-18 and then promote, rather than promote at level 10 when the option first became available. I'm not upset with my decision, given how challenging the last few fights are, but I wish I could have promoted at 10 and still had the exact same difficulty at the end. As it was, once I leveled my characters to level 12 after promotion, the game was an absolute cakewalk. I barely used any strategy or gave much thought to unit placement until the final 3 battles, and even then, I didn't use a ton. Tao dying in the Colossus battle was the only character death I had from Balbazak (where I grinded out those levels) until the end! I've been told that the game is a little more challenging if you don't grind for most of the latter half of the game, and then quite difficult in the final few fights. I'm not sure which version I'd prefer to play. Frankly, I'd like a version that remains somewhat challenging throughout.

...Which is why I think I like Shining Force II better. The game doesn't have as many memorible fights in terms of map design, but it has a much smoother difficulty curve. The maps aren't as claustrophobic as in the first game which is to their detriment (Shining Force II has a lot of outdoor world map fights which are pretty boring, as are the few that are in the first Shining Force), but unit placement matters throughout the whole game because the enemies don't start doing 1 HP damage for most of the latter half of the game. The original Shining Force tries to counter the weirdly balanced DEF stat by having a bunch of enemies that either cast spells or who breathe ice or fire at the player in order to cause magic damage. That helps give the game a bit of challenge, somewhat, but giving the computer AI the option to either damage player units either this way or with a regular physical attack is dumb. A lot of times, the enemy would hit one of my units with a physical attack for 1 HP damage, when they could have done 15-30. Odd!

No need to go into the story, other than to say that I enjoy that there is time travel, robots, surprise family members, and a sacrifice or two along the way. More crazy stuff than in Shining Force II, though I consider that game to have a more well-handled story, if it is a little more cookie cutter.

Of course, it's a shame Sega no longer makes proper Shining Force games. One day I will beat Shining Force CD and III as well, though those games aren't going to be as enjoyable to get through as the first two, from what I've played.