Retro spotlight: Shining Force
Retro spotlight: Shining Force
A strategy RPG designed by someone who really did not like the original Fire Emblem, and it shows.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Before there was Camelot Software Planning, there was Sonic! Software Planning. And before that, even, there was Consumer Development Studio 4, but then Sega got cute with all its internal studio names, and it was rechristened to be one of the studios named after Sega’s mascot. In 1991, Sonic! Software Planning would team with Climax Entertainment to develop what would be the first game in the long-running (and still-running) Shining series, Shining in the Darkness, for the Sega Genesis.
This dungeon crawler made waves, critically, at the time of its release, but for the next game in the series, everything changed, anyway. No longer was Shining going to be a series about first-person dungeon crawling, but instead, it was shifting to the world of tactical role-playing games. It was meant to be something of an answer to Nintendo’s Fire Emblem franchise, and developed by someone who did not like Fire Emblem.
You would think a dislike for Fire Emblem by anyone, never mind a game developer, would make them an enemy of me, but, uh, early Fire Emblem games were… not without their problems, let’s say. Shining Force, the first tactical RPG entry in the Shining Series, was led in its development by Hiroyuki Takahashi, who, to this day, remains with Camelot as its president. Takahashi was, understandably, asked about Fire Emblem and its possible influence on him at some point following the creation of Shining Force, and this is what he had to say about it:
“The original Famicom Fire Emblem game? The tempo of that title was so bad that it wasn’t something I even wanted to play. Fire Emblem had zero influence on Shining Force.”
I’d argue that the tempo issue of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light actually did influence Shining Force, in the sense that Takahashi absolutely did not want to make the same mistakes that Intelligent Systems had in their inaugural Fire Emblem title. Listen, I love Fire Emblem, in case the sheer volume of its games appearing on the Nintendo top 101 wasn’t enough of a hint. But the original didn’t come close to making the cut, and neither did its remake on the Nintendo DS.
There’s a reason that Nintendo essentially re-imagined the original and added a whole new game on top of it for the series’ introduction on the Super Famicom (Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem), and it’s a shame that North America hasn’t received the DS remake of that game in some form, considering it’s vastly superior in every way — pacing, story, characters, gameplay — to the game it built on. Shadow Dragon’s menus and even its gameplay are often a chore, and Nintendo’s 2021 Switch release of that game to celebrate Fire Emblem’s 30th anniversary essentially requires that you shut off battle animations and maybe even use the speed up options if you’re going to get through it.
It’s not that the model Fire Emblem still uses to this day was a bad one for Shadow Dragon — your side attacks, then the other side attacks, and so on until the mission objective is a success or failure or everyone on one side is dead — but the feel of it all wasn’t right yet, and the pieces of Fire Emblem we know that make the series’ strategy and its characters work weren’t in place yet, either. Support hadn’t been introduced, never mind the in-depth conversations that showed off some real world- and character-building, and the series’ trademark rock-paper-scissors weapons format — you could call it a triangle strategy, but don’t call it a Triangle Strategy — wasn’t yet a thing, either.
In short, you had a plodding tactical RPG where the major hook was that a character’s death meant they were dead forever — that was a great hook, mind you, and certainly something to build on, but other than that, an above-average story (for the time, and mostly because they bothered to even try to tell one), and the introduction of some songs that remain franchise classics to this day, Shadow Dragon is lacking. You have to play it to experience all of that other stuff, and, well, there are other FE games to play, and only so many hours in the day, you know? I revisited just enough of Shadow Dragon after playing Shining Force for this entry to be able to authoritatively say, “Well, he’s not wrong,” and then I stopped.
Anyway, that’s enough about Fire Emblem: the point is that its mistakes made for obvious areas of improvement to the tactical RPG formula for Sonic! Software Planning to focus on. They didn’t necessarily succeed at surpassing every aspect of Shadow Dragon — Shining Force does almost nothing at all to make you care about any of its characters, and its plot was cliche even 30 years ago — but they did nail the gameplay in a way that makes it fun to return to all this time later, in a way that Shadow Dragon just is not. Points for that.
Takahashi did cite influences for Shining Force at the same time he dismissed the possible influence of Fire Emblem: those games were Dragon Quest, which every Japanese developer was legally obligated to say for at least 10 years after the release of the original, and Silver Ghost. Sadly, it’s not quite as simple to fire up Silver Ghost as it is Shadow Dragon or Dragon Quest: Silver Ghost was developed by Kure Software Koubou for NEC’s PC-88, back in 1988. And no one has translated Silver Ghost into English from what I can tell, so even though you can get the gist of things by firing up an emulator, you can’t necessarily get the full experience of it all. (Believe me, I gave it a try, but I got tired of the emulator failing or the game giving me messages I could not read about what I needed to do next.)
Luckily, Hardcore Gaming 101’s blog covered this influence years ago and saved me some time:
The main reason Takahashi pointed to liking Silver Ghost was due to its real time action and multi-character system. It's very similar to other Japanese action-RPGs of the time, like Ys and Hydlide, where you scamper around and ram into enemies to attack them. Instead of controlling a single character, though, you control an army of about a dozen people. By default, you control the leader, and the rest of your soldiers haphazardly follow you, engaging in combat with anything that comes close to them. You can switch to any other character at any time to take control of them, although your fellow soldiers usually won't bother following anyone beside the leader.
It's a neat little game, but just what, exactly, was the Shining Force connection? Shining Force was still turn-based and Silver Ghost plays nothing like it. I guess maybe the graphics and general style could've inspired it, but Silver Ghost doesn't really look all that much different from any other similar game of the time. Maybe it's just that Silver Ghost convinced him that strategy RPGs didn't necessarily have to be so boring, but he still want back to the genre standards when making his own console game? Shining Force is, as mentioned before, a lot friendlier, allowing you to talk around towns like standard JRPGs, and you control characters directly rather than pointing and clicking with a cursor, so maybe that mentality spilled over.
This, of course, makes me want to give Silver Ghost another try to see if I can find a deeper connection, but maybe there isn’t one. Not to go back to Fire Emblem again, but, the series originator, Shouzou Kaga, has cited elements of a different Kure real-time strategy series, First Queen, as one of Fire Emblem’s influences,. Looking around for what exactly in First Queen appealed to Kaga leads you to realize that it was the idea of upgrading characters and equipment to make them stronger: sometimes, in the really early days of new genres, “influenced by” doesn’t have to be a wholesale thing, so much as it could just be “hey did you know we could make a game where characters are promoted to new, stronger classes?” It might sound silly here, in 2021, but hey, Shining Force doesn’t even have armor in it, there are few weapon upgrades to purchase or find, and this all despite it releasing after Fire Emblem. It was a different time.
As for Shining Force itself: sure, the plot is cliche, as said, with the silent protagonist turning out to be the perfect leader for the right moment in history, able to combat the forces of darkness threatening the land for reasons, and it has plenty of annoying UI and inventory decisions in place that Sonic! carried over into its Camelot and Golden Sun days, but it’s just a lot of fun to play despite that. And while the plot might be cliche, Shining Force does a great job of utilizing more than the standard fantasy trope character races. Sure there are elves with bows and a very strong dwarf you want to equip with your best axes, but there are also centaurs who all become knights, because what else are you going to do when you’re a fighting centaur, werewolves, human-sized birds with swords, and… Yogurt. Yogurt is Yogurt, unless they are Jogurt. Basically, Shining Force might not do much with its characters on a personal level, but at least you’ve got some real variance from the standard fantasy races, and in a game where robots and lasers inevitably mix in with millenia-old evil dragons. That’s not nothing.
Shining Force is a lot more forgiving than many other tactical RPGs, as characters that fall in battle can just be revived by a priest in the town you were just in or the next one you’re going to, and the cost is just their level multiplied by 10 — considering defeated enemies drop big ole piles of gold, and you don’t have to upgrade your weaponry all that regularly, forking over some cash to bring your pals back to life is easy enough.
Plus, whenever you do fail — which happens either because your entire side was obliterated or the protagonist was killed — you don’t lose any of the experience gained prior to your defeat. If a level is giving you trouble, you just play it again, leveling up until you can pull it off. Since it’s not a particularly long game at around 20 hours, and the levels themselves aren’t noticeably lengthy for the genre, this replaying thankfully doesn’t turn into a chore.
So, you’ve got a game that isn’t asking a ton of you, but is still engaging enough in a tactical sense to keep you playing. Enemy weaknesses are pretty basic — some are more resistant to physical attacks, some to magic, so you’ll have to balance who you’re attacking with — but you’ll spend a lot of time making sure you aren’t accidentally leaving someone out where they’re going to get killed before you can stop it from happening. And a lot of that has to do with the pacing, the tempo, of Shining Force’s battle system. Unlike with that series I keep mentioning, Shining Force doesn’t have one entire side in a battle go before the other does. Instead, it’s more of a back-and-forth, based on the speed of the characters involved in the battle. Whereas in a game where you get to direct a dozen characters in a row you can set things up to wipe out entire enemy blockades in one go if you plan well and successfully execute your plan all in one go, Shining Force has you thinking in much smaller steps.
Sure, you can risk that letting a couple of your characters out ahead of the rest of your party will pay off, but you might also end up seeing them completely overwhelmed when it turns out that your enemies are, on the whole, faster than you and about to surround and kill your lonesome soldiers before you get another chance to advance and bolster their defenses or heal them. This constant back and forth means there is no downtime in Shining Force’s tactical portion of things: you’re always reacting to what just happened, always balancing short-term planning with your long-term goal. Considering how many older tactical RPGs feel like they are forever-taking as you wait for the other side to complete their turn, Shining Force feels downright speedy. And it really isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, but boy does it sure feel that way in comparison to other games that look like it. Pacing — or tempo, as Takahashi referred to it — truly does matter for this sort of thing.
The actual fighting doesn’t happen on the field. Instead, you’re transported to a one-on-one encounter, whether attacking from up close or from a distance, and this is where the Dragon Quest of it all comes in. You get that little hitch in the proceedings, the little pause that creates tension again and again, and makes you wonder if it’s going to be a hit or a miss, if it’s going to be a paltry, weak attack or a critical blow, and that waiting, that tension, releases all kinds of fun chemicals into your brain: there’s a reason so many developers copied the Dragon Quest system, either in little bits like Shining Force, or much more directly like Mother, and it’s because our brains sure love the release of fun chemicals. Obviously, I am in favor of that kind of system here, especially since you can hold down the A button and speed up the text so these encounters don’t take forever, either.
Unlike with Fire Emblem or Bahamut Lagoon or loads of other tactical RPGs, Shining Force’s encounters are one-sided. There is no counter period for your opponent or for you: you are attacked, or you attack, and the encounter ends when that one thing does. You can’t simply throw a tank up against the front lines and absorb damage while dishing out counters until an entire offensive falls, as you are sometimes able to do in this kind of game. No, in Shining Force, all you are doing is getting your HP chipped away on a character who you might need later on in order to stand up to a boss character’s powerful assaults. Don’t do that if you can avoid it, because the bosses hit real hard, and they often automatically recover hit points, too. It’s just one more way that Shining Force has you thinking in completely different ways than many of the other tactical RPGs out there, and why it feels different enough, in a good way, to return to all this time later when tactical RPGs have grown well beyond what they were at the time of this game.
I have my problems with Shining Force, but they’re not the kind that keep me from enjoying playing the game. It’s just kind of annoying, for instance, that the game doesn’t tell you much about its promotion system, and kind of just expects you to figure it out: surely the game’s manual did a better job of explaining this to you to keep that from being a problem, but for better or worse we’re in a post-manual age where the game itself has to tell you what is expected of you, or, you better hope someone in a game guide somewhere has answers to the questions you didn’t even know you had to ask. The promotions, by the way, can occur after a character reaches level 10. They actually make the character weaker at first, not stronger, but the promotions do allow for the character to equip the strongest weapons for its particular class, and the growth rates are much better, too. In my most recent playthrough, characters who would pick up one or two points of defense or attack or hit points in their initial class started jumping up by four or five or six points in the first two categories post-promotion, and as many as nine hit points at a time on some levels.
You don’t have to promote at level 10, but from that point forward you run the risk of gaining levels where no growth at all happens, so you might as well promote when you get the chance for most, if not all characters, and start escalating those growth rates.
It’s also a little annoying that experience gained from a single battle is capped at 48 points. You receive partial experience points for damage dished out, and more experience for actually defeating an enemy, which is normally not much of a problem. However, your mages end up a bit screwed: they are capable of attacking more than one enemy at a time with their more powerful spells, which can mean that, even if they do major damage to four enemies — or, in some cases, end up defeating four enemies with the same spell — they’re stuck receiving just 48 experience points. Which very well might be how many points a single enemy would have been worth had they been defeated solo. It makes you need to be a little overly careful with what your mages are doing, as they might essentially send potential XP into the ether, rather than having them aggressively level up and become even more powerful.
It’s a nitpick, sure, but it also impacts the way you end up plotting out your strategy and the long-term direction of the titular Shining Force, so it’s a nitpick worth bringing up and complaining about.
Who will actually comprise your party each level is an area where you have a lot of freedom to work with. Your protagonist must appear in each stage, yes, but other than that, you can pick any of the 30 members of the Shining Force for each stage. You can start a mission and realize you are not properly organized for it, then head back to remake your team: maybe you need more flying characters to quickly make it over mountains, or you realize you’re short on mages in a stage where walking hunks of rock are going to shrug off all but the most powerful physical attacks you can muster. Or, you can just power through with a central crew who soak up experience and levels to the point that, late-game, it might not matter if you don’t have the exact right match-up in play.
It’s not always clear how you’re going to recruit every character, but rarely is it that much of a headscratcher to contend with, either: you’ll often find that simply by completing an area, or talking to someone once, that they’ll eventually find their way into your party. If you aren’t thorough in your exploring, you’re likely to miss a couple of them along the way, but it’s not that big of a deal, considering your characters don’t permanently die when they fall in battle, and you have almost no shortage of replacements if you decide someone is too weak of a member of their particular class for you, or you just don’t like how their character or battle portrait looks. Be petty, it’s fine, you’ve got characters to spare.
The difficulty certainly ramps up by the end of the game, as you’re expected to go longer without access to revivals or item refreshes while facing more and more powerful foes, but it’s nothing you can’t figure out, or eventually just power through by retrying with the boost of your past experience behind you. It’s all a bit of a breeze, especially in a genre that’s become more complicated and layered, but it remains a welcome one nearly three decades later.
Shining Force has not historically been very difficult to find, as it was on the Wii’s Virtual Console as early as 2007, received an iOS release, and is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Steam. It’s also not surprising that, being a first-party Genesis game from a developer that is now a second-party Nintendo studio, that it was already announced as part of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. Though, if you want a bunch of Genesis classics without paying an annual subscription, you could also just get a Genesis Mini, which comes with Shining Force as one of 40 pre-loaded games, or buy one of the many Genesis Classics collections around — the Switch, Xbox One, Series X/S, and current Playstations all have a Genesis collection available digitally, for $30, that includes 50 games, three of which are Shining titles. Later Shining games, you might see in a future “Re-release this” column entry, but the original Shining Force? You basically have to put in effort to not have access to it these days. And since it’s that available, you might as well revisit it.
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