Shining Force: A week later...

I have to admit, I've been shirking playing my SF. I'm in Chapter 3, in the Laser Eye battle right now. I just promoted a slew of people including Zylo and Gong (who I never used as a kid). I was thinking of using Amon and Balbaroy, but they are too difficult to level up right now. I forgot how slow they are when you first get them. My team consists of Tao, Mae, Arthur, Gong, Zylo, Hans, Diane, Khris, Anri, Gort, Luke, and of course the main character. Now I know it seems funny to have Khris, but she's a really good healer and Lowe doesn't know Aura, plus Gong can also fight back. I will eventually replace Diane later and keep Hans. Range is the key for the later battles.

I like having at least two warriors/tanks/whatever you call a strong person now in your team and Gort really fills out nicely. His defense is super from the start and only gets better when you get him promoted. The toughest battle so far is anything dealing with the undead because they have such HIGH defense. I'm so use to playing other tactics games for years now, I haven't gotten use to using items like herbs and such. Though I have two healers and they seem to get the job done. I just need to make sure Khris actually gets XP during fights instead of getting one-hitter-quitters from damn pegasus knights.

Oh the pains of being a deer...girl...thing.

Reasons why Sega rocked: Shining Force

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.