At the Tokyo Game Show 2004, Sega were trying to tell you something: after six long years the Shining Force series was back on home consoles. Anime and in-game videos played on large projector screens and Sega even had the theme song to the latest Shining game performed live for all attendees to hear. The once-giant software publisher was obviously proud of the Shining games and was keen to get the fans to take notice again. Here’s why…
On the 29th of March 1991, Sega released Shining & the Darkness to the Japanese gaming public, who lapped up the game despite being unaware of the fantastic series that would be born of that moment. The game was co-developed by Sega’s Sonic Co. (a very small team that consisted of just Shugo Takahashi, Hiroyuki Takahashi, Yasuhiro Taguchi and a secretary) and Climax. Members of these two teams would later merge to form Camelot Software Planning when Sonic Co. wanted to work on non-Sega consoles.
Shining & the Darkness (or Shining in the Darkness as it was renamed in the UK) was never what anyone would call a “great” game. Its gameplay roots were firmly planted in American RPGs such as FTL’s Dungeon Master but what it did very well was to give the player an unparalleled sense of immersion. The first-person perspective (borrowed from DM) famously put the player directly into the game world but this would have been for nothing if that world felt flat and lifeless. Thankfully Sonic Co. populated it with a living, breathing set of characters and protagonists. This was helped greatly by the town segments that punctuated the dungeon-crawling. Sound was used to add depth to the world: stand near a pub and you would be able to hear the music coming from inside, enter the pub and that sound would become clearer and louder. It was a small touch that went a long way to creating a believable, inhabitable world. Once a player enters the pub the true nature of the Shining world becomes apparent to them as they are greeted by a variety of different races, such as elves, dwarves, gnomes and wolflings.
It is these races that give the Shining world its unique identity. No matter which playing styles the Shining games have straddled, they have always contained the same species and although many of these can be found in previous works of fiction it is their co-existence in one world that gives the games (what many fans have called) the Shiny look. So when Sega decided to create a follow up to Shining & the Darkness, the Takahashi Bros. took the setting of that game and blew it wide open and expanded a kingdom into a continent. In 1992, Shining Force was born.
Yoshitaka Tamaki (character designer on over 5 different Shining games) says of Shining Force: “I proceeded with the design, trying to depict an atmosphere like the melting pot of races in 'Shining in the Darkness'. The Centaur, which was born because the system required it, was a good companion who helped me spread the view of the world”. As well as adding the Centaur, Tamaki contributed Bird-knights, Dragonewts and Steam-knights to the Shining Force population. These served a dual purpose. The nature of the tactical RPG meant that the player needed characters with different fighting styles and different ways of negotiating terrain. Tamaki’s designs addressed these needs whilst also giving Shining Force an extra layer of charm that helped it stand out from the crowd of other tactical RPGs.
Like S&tD before it, Shining Force’s battle system was not original; it borrowed heavily from Nintendo’s Famicom Wars and Fire Emblem. Nintendo’s technically limited Famicom hardware restricted the number of possible on-screen troops at once and reduced the amount of detail in the faceless characters, whose fate meant little to the player other than that of beating the game. The power of the Mega Drive, on the other hand, allowed Sonic Co. to fill the screen with a force of individuals who were all distinct from each other and Tamaki’s designs were brought to life with a revolutionary level of detail. The Takahashi Bros. expanded on this detail by implementing a back-story, plot and motive for every single playable character in the game. This was a masterstroke that would ensure the continuing success of the series. Since the fighters had a reason to fight, the player had a reason to keep them alive. By limiting the number of fighters one could use in the force, Sonic Co. encouraged players to use only their favourite characters and this made their survival a top priority for the player; another element that made Shining Force fun to play was the scripted battles. The most popular RPGs up to that point had been Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, which both used random battles, yet there were no such battles in Shining Force; instead every minor scrap or epic struggle was pre-scripted and unavoidable. This meant that the placement of enemies on the screen had been chosen to give the perfect balance of difficulty, the progression from the start of the battle to the boss never felt too easy or too hard and the pacing was just right. The defeat of every single enemy felt like it had been won through planning and intelligent battle rather than a hard slog; as such battles never became tedious as they would in other RPGs.
Shining Force was a breakthrough title for the Takahashi Bros. and proved to be so popular that Sega would bankroll a further ten sequels in the following six years. The first of those sequels hit the Mega Drive on the 1st of October 1993. Set in a different time and place to the original game, Shining Force II featured all new characters whilst retaining the familiar strategy style. The gameplay was just as fun as before but some players were disappointed that the story did nothing to resolve the ambiguous ending of the first game. Sonic Co. seemed to have forgotten about the ending to Shining Force; wherein the hero Max is presumed dead but briefly appears to be alive again in the post credits sequence. Sonic Co. had not forgotten and had already begun to fill in the blanks between the two games in a way that was unusual for a videogame company but would soon become quite typical of the Takahashi Bros.
Between the releases of Shining Force and Shining Force II, Sega had released Shining Force Gaiden and Shining Force Gaiden II on the Game Gear. These were heavily diluted interpretations of the Shining Force game; animation was simplistic and the town roaming that was a big part of the console titles was completely removed from the handheld versions. The main appeal of these titles, however, was that instead of rehashing the story of the Mega Drive game they actually continued the tale and told the story of the children of the original shining force who were in search of the missing hero Max. After the release of Shining Force II the decision was made to release a third Gaiden title. On the 30th of June 1995, Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict was released and featured heroes and villains from Shining Force and Shining Force II. It had taken Sonic Co. three separate releases to connect the stories of the main games when most developers would have explained away the connections in a prologue or a promotional manga. Sonic Co. knew that the best way to tell the story was to let the fans play through it and the idea cleverly helped to turn a trilogy of technically inferior Shining Force games into compelling and essential releases. American and European gamers, however, would never truly benefit from the Gaiden games. The first two games were released in English as Shining Force CD, they featured updated graphics and bonus battles but the story was incomplete, as Final Conflict was never released outside of Japan. Just as the unique storytelling skills of the Takahashis would become typical of Sonic Co., so too would the reluctance to release important titles outside of Japan become typical of Sega. This policy would ultimately help to kill off the Shining Force series during the era of the Sega Saturn.
The Saturn’s first Shining game was a Zelda-like action RPG that was initially developed for the Mega Drive. Shining Wisdom’s 16-bit roots showed through in the graphical style, and despite Sonic Co. bulking the game up with CD sound and an FMV intro, it still looked like a Mega Drive game and sold poorly as a result. The poor sales are a shame as Shining Wisdom is one of the most charming of the Shining games, has good dungeon gameplay with a healthy mix of combat and puzzles and even features characters from Shining Force II.
For the next game in the series Sonic Co. created a game that would both echo the style of the very first Shining game whilst also hinting at what was to come. Shining the Holy Ark was a spiritual update of Shining & the Darkness that used the power of the Saturn to create richer, more detailed environments to explore and animated the characters more realistically. The pre-rendered characters and monsters also set the game apart from its contemporaries, it resembled nothing on the PlayStation and as the characters looked like they were made from neither sprites nor polygons it had a unique style that elevated it above other RPGs on the Saturn. Just as Shining & the Darkness excelled in immersing the player in a believable world, Shining the Holy Ark used its improved graphics and sound to take that immersion a step further. More importantly than this though, the game would foreshadow the upcoming Shining Force III. The excellent character designers, musicians and coders would all move onto the next title and so Shining Force III promised to retain the same beauty that Sonic Co. had worked hard to produce.
Set ten years after the events of Shining the Holy Ark, Shining Force III is possibly the most ambitious videogame of all time. It came on three discs, and released periodically in between December 1997 and September 1998. Each featured a full game with a different force in each one and each of these discs could be played separately or in sequence. When taken as a whole, the game told the story of a civil war in the Shining world: Scenario One told the conflict from the side of the Republic’s shining force whilst Scenario Two played through the exact same events and time frame but from the point of view of the Empire’s shining force. This method of storytelling added an emotional resonance to Shining Force III unlike any game before it. It encouraged the player to identify with both sides and to witness the political and emotional complexities that can lead two countries (that both believe they are the good guys) to go to war. Scenario 3 continued the story to its conclusion and featured a third shining force whose mission was to track down and defeat the real cause of the war – a devil (or Vandal in Shining speak) called Galm who was manipulating both the Empire and Republic to his own ends. This third shining force was interestingly led by a Vandal hunter named Julian who the player originally met in Shining the Holy Ark as a young child whose father had been killed by Galm.
As well as taking videogame narrative to unique levels Sonic Co. (now known as Camelot) also improved upon the gameplay of Shining Force. Each character, for example, was capable of using two different weapons and would get better at fighting with each one if they stuck to that weapon for the entire game. Each weapon would give the character different strengths, weaknesses and abilities so it was important to pick the right one from the start. Another genre-defining addition was the introduction of the friendship system; if two characters helped each other to kill one enemy then they would become friends and each would gain attributes from the other. Help a magic-user for example and that character’s magic resistance might increase. Helping that same friend again would award the characters with even more attributes. If one of them were to die then their relationship would crumble and those attributes would be lost. This gave the player another good reason to try and keep their force alive.
As a prize for the fans, those players who sent in the tokens that came with the three main discs would be sent the strictly limited edition Shining Force III Premium Disc. This disc allowed the player to customise their own shining force from the different teams across each instalment and then threw this team into a series of bonus battles. This was a real treat for longtime fans as it featured many of the boss battles from the Mega Drive games.
The Premium Disc was ultimately the last Shining game that the Takahashi Bros. would ever work on. This was mostly due to the increasingly strained relationship between Sega and Camelot. This shaky partnership is detailed in a text file on the Premium Disc. To read the file you’ll need to slide the disc into a P.C., make sure you have the software to display the file properly and go and study Japanese for a few years. Once you’ve done that you should be able to read the developer diary by Yasuhiro Taguchi, the game's main programmer. In the diary Taguchi criticises Sega for not promoting Shining Force III as much as they should have. By the time of Scenario 2’s production and release Sega were pouring all of their resources in to the Dreamcast and as part of these actions they had begun to drop support of the Saturn. Taguchi mentions that Camelot were having problems getting in-game music to play properly in Scenario 3 and that Sega refused to help them fix it. Sega obviously had more important things to worry about, but this seemingly trivial problem led to the demise of the Shining Force series as we know it and one of the biggest travesties in RPG history.
By the time Shining Force III was released in America and Europe the western Saturn was on its last legs and the Dreamcast could be seen galloping in from the horizon. Sega unwisely released the first scenario of the game in English and left the later scenarios to gather Anglophobic dust. Anyone in the west who played Shining Force III realised just how good it was but would find disappointment in the ending which leaves on a cliff-hanger for a sequel that would never be released. Previews for the sequels in Sega Saturn Magazine only made the disappointment worse as readers caught glimpses of the games they knew they’d never get to play in English. Many fans agree that if all three scenarios had been fully translated then Shining Force III would be held in the same esteem its contemporaries: Final Fantasy VII and Panzer Dragoon Saga.
Camelot was so angry at the way Sega had treated the Shining series that they vowed never to work with them again. Since turning their back on Sega they have mostly worked on Nintendo games including the recent Mario Power Tennis and the massively popular Golden Sun series of RPGs and whilst Golden Sun is a decent game it doesn’t quite have the same pick-up-and-play magic that Shining Force had. Sega, meanwhile, have continued to produce their own Shining games which have also failed to live up to the expectations of existing fans. A small developer called Nextech made Shining Soul, Shining Soul II and Shining Tears whilst Amusement Vision have released a remake of the original Shining Force and are working on Shining Force Neo. Some of these games have had decent enough gameplay but, much to the anger of the fans, have contradicted the massive story and timeline that the Takahashis created between 1991 and 1998.
Much of what made the Shining games interesting to play was that the same small group of people made them all. The Takahashis and Taguchi-San worked on every element of the games, be it story, map design, programming or game system. This meant that every time a gamer played a new Shining game they felt like they were returning to a familiar world. This was because Camelot had taken as much care as possible to ensure that even if the game had a new playing style it still conformed to the traditions of the earlier games. Sega has tried to make the new games work with the old ones but has had mixed results. Shining Soul staggeringly managed to contradict the story of every single game before it, Shining Soul II got the balance just right and was also a very good game, whilst Shining Tears seems to play well but has character designs that don’t always feel particularly “shiny”.
Early images and videos of Shining Force Neo indicate that Sega have thrown away any connections to the old series and started afresh. Despite the title the game does not play in the “force” style and instead adopts a traditional three-character system like Final Fantasy or Grandia. The “Shining Force” no longer refers to the band of warriors you create but is now a Star Wars-like mystical energy force. Sega’s actions are akin to George Allen & Unwin taking the rights to Lord of the Rings from Tolkien and deciding to rewrite The Return of the King as a Science Fiction / Courtroom Drama
To many fans the Shining series will never be the same again without its estranged parents. Others optimistically look to the future games and hope they will retain a little of what they loved about the originals. Regardless of how the new games turn out though, the classics will always be around to enjoy, their light will never fade.
Further reading:
[Shiningforcecentral] – The web’s most comprehensive resource for all things Shining. Look here for script translations for Shining Force III and don’t let Sega stop you from playing one of the best RPGs of all time.
[Shining-world] – Sega’s official Shining website. A well-presented site with up to date information on present and future Shining releases.
www.NTSC-uk.com – Keep an eye out for full reviews of Shining Tears and Shining Force Neo: coming soon. |
