If I could pin-point a game that defined my childhood, this would be it. Shining Force was released in 1993 for the Sega Genesis and while simple to today's standards, this opened the flood gates to the style of games I would play to this day. The story is a bit cliche, with an ancient evil being woken and summoning its dark forces and you, a young ward to a great knight, assemble a team together to thwart these forces. You are the Shining Force, though it is never revealed why your team is called the Shining Force. Though it's just assumed you are the shining light to Dark Dragon's shadow.
There's knights (who are actually centaur, so that works out just fine), monks, elves, dwarves, mages, archers, a werewolf, a dragon, some sort of jellyfish,and how could you forget the hamster with a helmet? There's a ninja and a Samurai, but that's not until later in the game and they're secret characters. It's quite the motley crew. I remember at one point my mother just buying this game because we had already spent so much money renting it from our local Blockbuster.
My brother and I must have easily put a year of time just playing and replaying this game over and over. There was a re-release for the GBA in 2004. I played it, but it was so different, it just didn't seem right, though the actual translation of the game was clearer, ie, it basically told us that Kain and Max were brothers instead of it being hinted at. I just got the emulator for the original (I just started. I'm on the second battle heading BACK to Guardiana and I just got Gong from his hut), and once I beat this sucker for the trillionth time, I'm probably going to move on to talk about the sequel, appropriately titled: Shining Force II.
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