Use tactics and strategy as a leader of an adventuring band in a war-torn fantasy kingdom.

Story

Ancient history tells of The Lord of Darkness who once led hordes of dark creatures to fight the good Powers of Light. After a long and world shattering struggle, The Lord of Darkness was defeated and cast into another dimension to be trapped away forever – but he vowed to return in a thousand years to take his revenge. Now, after ten centuries of peace and harmony a new war has begun in the Rune Kingdom. Wicked evil creatures ravage the land and the knights of Rune suffer casualties each and every day. The Kingdom now awaits a hero that can wield the eternal Powers of Light and once again bring peace to the world.

The Game

Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon is a remake of the original Shining Force game released to the Sega Mega Drive back in 1992 and the Virtual Console in 2007. The game is a strategic roleplaying game where you take control of a young boy called Max. His background is unknown because he was found unconscious and suffering from an amnesia a year before the game starts. It has shown though, that Max is a natural talent when it comes to sword fighting and when the rumors of war reaches his hometown he is sent by the king to investigate.

Content

The game has no tedious tutorials and boring introduction sequences, and is intuitive enough to be manageable at the first go. There isn’t really much you need to learn here to get going – you can talk to people in the village, buy and sell items at the shop, check your characters stats in the status screen and that’s about it. Talking to people is something you are encouraged to do through the whole game, as that is the main way to collect clues and hear rumors about various events and secrets in the game like optional characters that can be recruited to your party.
As you progress through the story things get a little more complicated as you will be managing a vast roster of characters, the inventory of each of your party members, their skills and magic abilities.

The various characters that you can befriend and recruit to your band of adventurers include everything from archers, centaur knights, magicians, mechanical armored warriors, werewolves, and monks. There are 33 playable characters all in all in the game – some of them optional and secret. You’ll get to know them mainly from how they perform in battle and they will rise in levels and powers as you take them to battles and earn experience points with them. Your adventuring party can at most be twelve characters however, so those not in your party will kick back and relax at your headquarters. This means that you can completely leave some characters behind that doesn’t suit your battle strategies and focus your training with a select few or rotate your roster to make sure you have an agile band of heroes to select from before each challenge.

The battles take place on a strategic overview map and are turn based. Turn order is based on an invisible initiative order mechanic. This means that you’ll never quite know in which order your characters will get to act. This adds a whole lot of uncertainty and even an element of surprise to battles that can be hard to get used to. If you leave your vulnerable characters in the risk zone for even one round you must be ready to react to the fact that they can become under attack from approaching enemies in a way you didn’t foresee – it seems as if the enemies will take every chance they get to kill off a weaker character.
You move around your characters on the map, one by one and when you meet an enemy you can attack it. Attacks are resolved in a special battle mode where a number of things can happen randomly. Attacks can hit or miss, become critical hits and there is also counter attacks and bonus attacks that occur from time to time. This randomness adds another element of surprise to the battles and is something you need to take into consideration.

Just like the original, the game supports three save games on the cartridge, but this time you can choose to play the game in five different languages (English, Italian, French, Spanish and German). The story is rather lengthy, estimated to somewhere around 40 hours (not counting all the backtracking and replaying you need to do if you get stuck in the story or fall in battle). As a special bonus to this Game Boy Advanced remake is that you can replay the game after completion to unlock a new game mode known as the New Game+ mode. This is a game mode where you play the game again and it becomes harder after each time you beat it. New to this remake is also the inclusion of special cards that can be found or unlocked. These cards can be used to unlock extra powers, and you get to keep the cards you collect from game to game. This makes it possible to collect all the cards even if you should fail to unlock it the first time around, or miss the secret area where it lies.

The basic course of actions in Shining Force is this; equip your latest and best equipment, head out to fight a battle, proceed the story and repeat. You will need to upgrade the weapons your characters use from time to time to stay on top. There is not much depth to the equipment in this game as it is limited to a few different weapons, some healing herbs and some bonus magical items that raise some of your stats – there are no armors for example. When your characters reach a certain level however, you get the chance to promote them to a hero class in which their appearance and stats change to become a more heroic version of their previous class. This is a cool feature and adds some depth to the characters and strategies as they then can learn new skills too.

During your adventures you will travel and battle in many different locations and situations. You’ll explore dark caves, battle in mountains, forests, ruins, castles and dungeons etc. The story is grand and epic, and will engulf the player much like an engaging book can do. The plot twists may not be the deepest you’ve seen, but there is enough drama, mysteries and conflicts to keep you enticed for many hours. The many secrets and side quests also adds a nice sense of exploration and wonder into the mix.

Unlike most other roleplaying games, there are no random enemy encounters. This means that every battle in the game is related to the story somehow. This in turn means that if you want to boost your characters experience points, you need to escape from the battle field before defeating the last foe. This way, you’ll get to fight all the enemies again while still retaining the experience points from last time.

Graphics

The visuals resemble the original version closely, but everything has been remade. It is much richer in detail this time and is also more colorful. The game looks pretty basic in the overview mode but the graphics really shines in the battle mode where you get to see a close up view of the fight. The animations might not be the best, but it definitely works. More importantly, it’s easy to see what’s going on, even if the battles can be quite chaotic. Despite the pretty basic graphics the game lets you explore many different settings and they all have their own look and feel.

Sound

The music is also true to the original but is updated with better sounding instruments. The music is a nice blend of cheery and anime-style roleplaying music and dark moody tunes to accompany the doomsday theme of the game. Most tunes stand out as instant classic and unforgettable and surely adds to the flavor of the game. During battle though, it keeps changing between two different songs (the one from the overview map and the one in the battle sequence) and that can be quite an annoyance. But overall the sound and music is very good – they have even added some screaming voices when certain units die!

Summary

Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon is a great adventure for any roleplaying and/or strategy game fan. It’s easy to get into and offers many challenges even for veteran players. The battles alone are interesting, and mixed together with this awesome story about heroic deeds in a war-torn kingdom is a perfect match. Thanks to the fact that the game leaves many important choices up to the player, the game becomes interesting enough to play though and enjoy. The game also allows you to develop new and better strategies and tactics over time and finding one that suits your play style is a daring and fun quest in itself! This game has so much to offer and it is a treat to anyone looking for an interesting strategic roleplaying game.

Developed By: Amusement Vision
Published By: Atlus Co.
Version Reviewed: Gameboy Advanced
Genre: Roleplaying
Players: 1
Released: 2004-06-08