Every attack in Shining Force stops the war for a moment. On the battle map, the player’s army is a crowd of small figures on a grid of squares, moved one at a time like chess pieces. Order one of them to strike and the screen cuts to a close-up: the centaur knight lowers his lance and charges, the enemy reels, the damage counts down. Hiroyuki Takahashi, who led the game, said he had been drawn to strategy games “where you used your head more”, but “I wanted to make a game with fully animated fight scenes, something different than what you normally saw in strategy games.” The animation nearly sank the project. When the team first worked out how much memory the fight scenes would need, Takahashi remembered, “we were shocked to find it would be over 40 megs.” They compressed the graphics to 22 per cent of their size to fit them on a Mega Drive cartridge.
Shining Force came out in Japan in March 1992 and in Britain and America in 1993. It was, as Retro Gamer later put it, “a tactical RPG, of which there had been very few released at the time”, in a style of play “relatively unknown in the West”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Sonic Co., a small studio inside Sega led by Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi, which later became Camelot Software Planning, with help from Climax Entertainment.
- Publisher: Sega.
- Machine: Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in America); remade for the Game Boy Advance in 2004.
- Released: Japan, March 1992 (as Shining Force: Kamigami no Isan); Britain and America, July 1993, priced at £49.99 in Britain.
- Genre: Tactical role-playing game.
- Army: more than 30 characters to recruit, up to 12 in each battle.
From a dungeon to a battlefield
The Shining series began with Shining in the Darkness (1991), a first-person dungeon game for the Mega Drive. Retro Gamer describes the team behind it as tiny: a studio called Sonic, with four people, the brothers Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi, the programmer Yasuhiro Taguchi and a secretary. They contracted other work to people at the newly formed Climax, and the two studios worked together again on the sequel. Mean Machines, previewing the Japanese release in January 1992, was glad of the change: Shining Force was “the sequel to the nice-looking, but rather dull-playing Shining in the Darkness”, keeping its look but “losing the duller elements”.
The model for the battles was Nintendo’s: Famicom Wars (1988) and Fire Emblem (1990), in which the player moves “each unit around the battlefield like pieces on a chessboard”, as Retro Gamer describes it. Fire Emblem would not be released in English until 2003. Takahashi wanted the story to matter as much as the fighting: “a dramatic tale full of tears and romance”, drawing on King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings. Sega Retro, citing the developers, adds that he began planning the game in November 1990, while Shining in the Darkness was still being made, and that a Japanese computer role-playing game, Kure Software’s Silver Ghost (1988), shaped the idea of a hero leading a “force”.
How it plays
The player is a young swordsman, named Max by default, from the kingdom of Guardiana. Sega’s own magazine, Sega Visions, set out the story for American players in 1993: the Gate of the Ancients, sealed a thousand years before, is in danger of being opened, and the Dark Dragon “seeks a return to the world”. The kingdom of Runefaust and its general, Kane, are invading, and behind them stands the sorcerer Darksol. The game runs over eight chapters.
Between battles the game is an ordinary Japanese role-playing game, seen from above: towns to walk round, people to talk to, shops for weapons, and a headquarters where the player chooses who will fight next. Commands are chosen from a cross of four pictures, one for each direction on the joypad, a menu carried over from Shining in the Darkness that Retro Gamer credits with making every battle “fully accessible to even the most novice RPG player”.
Battles are fought on a grid. Each unit moves a set number of squares, slowed by rough ground unless it flies, then attacks, casts a spell or uses an item. Takahashi said the enemy’s thinking had a hard limit: “On the enemy’s turn, their calculations (for what action they’d take) needed to finish within 1 second.” The classes play very differently. Centaur knights cover a lot of ground, dwarf warriors absorb punishment, archers hit from a distance, birdmen fly over water and cliffs, mages hit several enemies at once and healers keep the rest alive. The character designer Yoshitaka Tamaki filled the army with odd creatures, among them a robot, a dragon and Jogurt, a rodent in flying goggles that began as a test drawing and was hidden in the game as a secret character.
The army joins as the story goes on: “more than 30 characters”, Sega Visions counted, of whom 12 can fight at once, chosen and changed in towns. Some only join if the player finds them. A unit that reaches level 10 can be promoted at a church to a stronger class, a knight to a paladin, a mage to a wizard, which resets its level to 1.
Losing was gentle by the standards of the genre. In Fire Emblem a fallen character stays dead. In Shining Force a priest raises the fallen for a fee, and if Max himself falls the army retreats to the last town, keeps all its experience and loses half its gold. “This makes Shining Force a winner of a game for players of every skill range,” Sega Visions told its readers: careful strategists “will get farther faster”, but players who simply fight their way through “also eventually win by virtue of ever-increasing strength”. Retro Gamer saw the other side of it: because death “had little consequence beyond reducing the Force’s number”, it was the characters’ personalities that made players look after them.
Reception
British magazines liked it. Sega Retro’s survey of period reviews lists 90 per cent from both Mean Machines Sega and MegaTech, 89 per cent from Sega Power and 92 to 93 per cent from Sega Pro. In Japan the scores were lower: Beep! MegaDrive gave it 78 out of 100 and Famitsu 73. Retro Gamer called it “a huge hit with Mega Drive owners”.
The Shining Force series
The Takahashis kept the same kind of game for the next five Shining titles, all between 1992 and 1995, and stayed in charge of each one:
| Title | Year | Machine |
|---|---|---|
| Shining in the Darkness | 1991 | Mega Drive |
| Shining Force | 1992 | Mega Drive |
| Shining Force Gaiden | 1992 | Game Gear |
| Shining Force Gaiden II: Sword of Hajya | 1993 | Game Gear |
| Shining Force II | 1993 | Mega Drive |
| Shining Force CD | 1994 | Mega-CD, remaking the first two Game Gear games |
| Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict | 1995 | Game Gear |
| Shining Force III | 1997–1998 | Saturn, in three scenarios |
Shining Force III was released in Japan as three separate scenarios between December 1997 and September 1998; only the first was released in English. After it, Camelot left Sega (see Camelot Software Planning), and Sega carried on the Shining name with other studios. Climax remade the first game for the Game Boy Advance as Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon (2004), and the Mega Drive original has been re-released many times since, on the Wii’s Virtual Console, in Sega’s compilations and, from 2021, on the Nintendo Switch Online service.
Sources
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4 (2010), “The History of Shining Force”, pp. 169–174: Shining in the Darkness; the four-person Sonic team and Climax (p. 171); release in 1992, 1993 in Europe; “a tactical RPG, of which there had been very few”; Famicom Wars and Fire Emblem; “relatively unknown in the West”; death “had little consequence”; Yoshitaka Tamaki and Jogurt; “a huge hit”; the cross-shaped menus; the Takahashis in charge of the series to 1995 (p. 172); Shining Force III and only the first scenario in English; Climax’s Game Boy Advance remake (p. 173); the series list.
- Mean Machines issue 16, January 1992: preview of Shining Force.
- Sega Visions, June/July 1993, pp. 42–45: Shining Force feature (Guardiana, the Gate of the Ancients, the Dark Dragon, Kane and Runefaust; eight chapters; “more than 30 characters” in “any mix of 12”; raising the dead; keeping experience).
- Hiroyuki Takahashi and others, interviews from Famicom Tsūshin (1992), translated by Shmuplations as “Shining Force – Developer Interview” (web, secondary): “where you used your head more”; “fully animated fight scenes”; “over 40 megs” and 22 per cent; “a dramatic tale full of tears and romance”; the one-second limit on enemy turns. https://shmuplations.com/shiningforce/
- Sega Retro, “Shining Force” (web, secondary): release dates and prices; the planning from November 1990 and Silver Ghost; Darksol; promotion at level 10; raising the dead and losing half the gold; the list of period review scores, citing Mean Machines Sega, May 1993, p. 74, MegaTech, May 1993, p. 76, Sega Power, July 1993, p. 58, Sega Pro (1992–1993), Beep! MegaDrive, April 1992, and Weekly Famitsu, 27 March 1992; the re-releases. https://segaretro.org/Shining_Force