Shining Force: Resurrection Of The Dark Dragon was released early enough in this era that for a while it gave me a not insignificant amount of false hope. This era of imposter Shining games has now been running longer than the golden era ever did, and while it’s brought me few moments of real joy, there is one noteworthy exception that is well worth playing. 2014’s Shining Resonance felt more like a Tales Of game than a Shining game, and I genuinely detested it. But as good as these games were, they weren’t the “Shining Force” I loved and, over two decades on, I’ve now stopped buying these new games on misplaced loyalty alone. Later on, a couple of PSP titles borrowed the gameplay system from the genuinely excellent Valkyria Chronicles series with pretty decent results. Shining Force Feather on DS was a genuinely fun game that offered tactical command of a small group of three characters with radial areas of movement. There was even an arcade fighting game at one point! I still haven’t played that one and I’m in not really in any rush to do so.Įvery so often the series has at least dabbled in the strategy RPG genre on which the classics built their reputation. Most of the entries stuck to an action RPG formula or drifted even further afield. For many years I continued to buy these new Shining games, clinging on to the few qualities I liked and hoping in vain that if I stayed loyal to the series I would eventually get a “Shining Force IV”, or at least something that seemed to have the same creative spirit as the original games. The sad thing is that it worked! The series became a perennial seller, at least in Japan, and there was really no good business reason for Sega to change it tactics. As it bounced from one developer to another, Sega put a couple of creators in charge of the overall vision including Tony Taka, a well known hentai artist, whose influence was increasingly felt in borderline unsavoury character designs seemingly intended to sell these new games, and a big pile of merchandise, to Japan’s Akihabara-shopping, body pillow-loving, anime crowd much more than old school RPG fans. The longer this new Shining series went on, the less it felt like those classic games I’d fallen in love with. Games like Shining Tears and Shining Wind still have some of the most impressive pixel art I’ve ever seen, but something just seemed a little off. ![]() As the series hopped from Game Boy Advance to PlayStation 2, the graphical wow factor increased. For readers of this blog, the two Shining Soul games are also notable for being directed by Akira Ueda, one of the core developers of moon at Lovedelic. It boasted some really nice pixel art, with designs from Yoshitaka Tamaki, who defined the look of the original Mega Drive Shining games, as well as distant relatives like Landstalker and Alundra. When the series eventually reappeared in 2002 with the release of Grasshopper Manufacture’s Shining Soul it seemed promising. There were some noble attempts here and there. ![]() But it never quite continued in the way a Shining fan would expect. Although Camelot had stepped away from the series, Sega did eventually continue it and it’s still going today.
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