3.5/5 ★ – CartridgeDust's review of Shining Force.

What a difference a decade (and a half) makes. This isn't the Sega Genesis PC collection I swindled from Office Depot, and I'm not playing it on my mom's Sims machine. I'm also not skipping, like, half the characters and even more of the extra content. I'm a more thorough gamer as a grown up. I remembered the story being extremely bland and, in the broadest strokes, it is. Dark dragon will be resurrected! Stop the resurrection with a magic sword! But it's the individual scenarios and set pieces and flourishes along the way that elevate Shining Force. Character design is gleefully fun; rat men in mech suits, haunted marionettes, and a sacred sword that looks suspiciously like a green lightsaber. That, too; I totally forgot how intriguing the science fiction elements are. Their presence is never directly explained, but you can surmise that they belonged to the "ancients" and, from there, extrapolate some pretty interesting backstory. In fairness, this game benefited greatly from my emulator's fast forward feature; every enemy in a battle gets a full turn, even when they just stand in place, doing nothing. Every healing item gets a full scene, too. Add to that the hyper-restrictive inventory, the under-explained mechanics (how the fuck does promotion work?) and items (what does this ring do?) which require some internet scouring to sort out, and you've got a game that really shows its age. Pricklier than other 16bit titles. Simpler, too; no counterattacks. Also, turn order is invisible, a baffling and annoying decision that strips a lot of the strategy out of combat. You can't coordinate your team's actions effectively when you don't have any idea what order they'll be acting in. Still, the abundance of recruitable characters, some truly clever battle scenarios (there's a reason I remembered the laser eye on the land bridge fifteen years later), and music that is mostly excellent (except for the one town theme you'll hear a hundred times) are creative and engaging in all the right ways. Enemy AI is a little busted, but it's also refreshingly unpredictable. Some foes rush you from the word 'go,' some wait for specific event triggers, others stay mostly still until they suddenly get very mobile... It's far from effective (so many missed opportunities to attack by enemy AI) but it also keeps gameplay fresh and interesting, forcing you to adapt. It's funny. As I write this, the descriptions don't feel flattering. And yet, I really like this game. It's the stuff underneath the complaints, the great characters and moments and story beats, that'd be redundant to write up and yet make the game pretty stellar and, with a little help from modern internet & emulation, surprisingly playable. There's lively personality and real creativity galore if you look past the trope-ridden back-of-the-box story outline. A unique and badass attack animation plays if you deliver the killing blow to the final boss with the protagonist, one unseen anywhere else in the game and totally missable. It feels like a reward for caring about the story. This was a game made with real passion.