Retro RPG fans, if Shining Force worth getting into?

[Michael-5]

kupomogli said:
In my opinion, no. There are so many other RPGs out there worth getting than the Shining Force games and there are very very few tactical RPGs I'd recommend getting Shining Force over. Shining Force isn't as bad as Eternal Eyes, but it's not much better.

I've only played the first game in the series, so it's my opinion of the entire series, but according to fans, the first series is a great game as well and I just don't see this. The game is painfully slow paced, both in battle and out. It's fairly grindy as if you don't grind then you're going to quickly become overpowered and be forced to grind. If you die in battle you retain your EXP or if you use a spell your main character has you also retain your EXP. Attempting to set it up so you're able to get a certain character a kill so they get the most exp and can actually level up drags the game on even more.

The battles are usually set up in a way where enemies won't come towards you until you reach a certain point in the ridiculously large maps. So a large group of characters have to progress through these maps, forests killing your movement happens a large portion of the time, etc. Sometimes you'll be in dungeons where your characters just have to follow a long path to where enemies are at in order to kill them. Why do you make me take 50 character turns just to reach the enemy?

It's nice to hear people mention tactical RPGs that aren't FFTactics and such, but Shining Force isn't one I like to hear as the best ever. People have their own opinions, but my personal opinion is it's far from it and rather the game is the tactical RPG version of boredom personified.

I'd recommend looking into these games, maybe they'll interest you. Brigandine Legend of Foresna, Brigandine Grand Edition, Tactics Ogre, Dark Wizard, Wild ARMs XF, Wild ARMs 4/5(sort of TRPG,) Arc the Lad series, and Kartia. If you've played all these then look around for others, but these are some of the better TRPGs in my opinion,

Hm... I'll take that into mind. I have the first game on the GBA, I'll play that before I get the others. Maybe this is a series like Lufia, which really only made 1 good game.

Never heard of Bigrandine, it looks okay. Not sure if it's a type of SRPG that iterests me. Tactics Ogre, except for the SNES/PS1 game, I own them all . Wild Arms isn't for me because I don't like Westerns, I plaed WA3, and I'm not too impressed. Arc the Lad I've heard mixed things and Kartia looks cool. The character designs remind me of Front Mission (Which is one of my favorite SRPG franchises, right up there with Fire Emblem).

Can you reccommend me any other SRPG's which don't look like Final Fantasy Tactics? Sorry Bigrandine and Kartia kinda look like that to me lol.

Squint_Eastwood said:
The shining force series, before Camelot left, was the reason I bought a Saturn and a Dreamcast (although it never released on DC I lived in hope).

Defo start with Resurection of the Dark Dragon. You could play Shining in the Darkness but id give it a miss. It was to repetitive for me and I dont think its aged well. Shining Force 2 was a series highlight for me. Shining Wisdom was... good. Different but good. Shining the Holy ark was fantastic - it took all that was good about Darkness and made it more open with a belting story which tied in directly with Shining Force 3 and the Vandals story ark.

Im playing Shining CD for the first time at the moment. Its good enough but there are no towns and villiages so its just battle after battle with story expo in between. 

Theres a very good story behind the Shining series deveopment and Camelots relationship with Sega. Its worth reading just to see how turbulant things became with Saturn. Makes you really appreciate the games when you realise how close they each came to getting canned.

See this is why I want to give the series a chance, I think Camalot is an amazing dev with Golden Sun and Mario Golf/Tennis.

Shining the Holy Ark looks a lot like Golden Sun to me, that's why I want to eventually give it a try. When I have a full career and some money, maybe I'll get a Saturn and play some of these rare gems. I'll start looking for them, maybe I'll be lucky and find them for $5 like I did Super Mario RPG that one day.

I'll read up on Camalot, I know a bit about the Saturn, it was kinda the reason Sega started to fell apart (Sega of Japan developed the Saturn without help from Sega of America which made the 32X, and it never really opened well outside of Japan because of it).