Shining Thread

[Anonymous No.5498297]

Lets talk about how awesome and diverse these games were in a GOOD way unlike Final Fantasy, lets also talk about how this series died and never took off unlike Final Fantasy, we may also talk about how this isnt considered THE sega RPG and got BTFO'd by PSO

[Anonymous No.5498337]

>>5498297
Shining in the Darkness is a pretty great game. I beat it years on. The fact you could wander off and find metals to raft and all that was pretty awesome for its time.

[Anonymous No.5498418]

>can't roll my own character
even FFI and FFIII let me do this

[Anonymous No.5498432]

I'd also like to point out the best Shining game that never gets mentioned because of the Saturn

Love how this game looks along with its characters its all super charming

[Anonymous No.5498437]

>>5498418
Try Might and Magic 2.

[Anonymous No.5498439]

I'm playing SFII but I can't beat the chess map. And I don't want to promote my units now. Who thought this map was a good idea?

[Anonymous No.5498523]

retro shining games suck except >>5498432
It got better after the old devs left

[Anonymous No.5498670]

>>5498523
which shining games you talking about. The anime-esque ones? not being sarcastic I genuinely dropped off after Holy Ark and I heard Resonance or whatever is the one on steam lets me bang hot girls

[Anonymous No.5498719]

>>5498432
I loved everything about that game, except those fucking scissor crabs. Pain in the ass enemies.

[Anonymous No.5498721]

>>5498670
>anime-esque
Not sure which ones those refer to considering the cartoonish visuals have always been a big part of shining
Action rpgs on the GBA and ps2 were decent, which is a step up from the former shining series
Shining resonance is subpar.

[Anonymous No.5498774]

>>5498439
There's no reason to postpone promoting units. But yeah that map is terrible.

[Anonymous No.5498783]

>>5498297
I recently played the Shining Force 3 trilogy and it's the best strategy JRPG I've ever played, planning on playing Holy Ark soon too.

I also played Shining Wisdom recently and it's decent, but I never see it mentioned in Shining threads.

[Anonymous No.5498827]

>>5498437
we're not talking about WRPGs

[Anonymous No.5499247]

>>5498297
I can appreciate all the subtle shit in Shining in the Darkness that I didn't notice when I was younger.

>you can beat the final boss without the Arms of Light despite the game heavily implying that you need them
>you can beat the game without rescuing the princess despite this being the whole objective of entering the labyrinth
>it's tough but possible to beat the game with Gila, Dai, and the princess in your party
>the main villain isn't all that evil, just bored as fuck and wants a challenge
>the main character is actually the weakest of the 3 characters and takes the most damage despite wearing heavy armor
>the most busted weapon in the game comes from a random enemy and is only noticeably busted when paired with a specific spell

Hell, the only misdeeds he does in the entire game were kidnapping the princess and brainwashing your father with the Dark Sword. He didn't create the Labyrinth nor its monsters, the Ancients did. He merely dwells on the 5th floor.

[Anonymous No.5499265]

>>5499247
>>it's tough but possible to beat the game with Gila, Dai, and the princess in your party

How does that work?

[Anonymous No.5499335]

>>5499265
There's a number of ways to go about it actually, ranging from amusingly easy to savescumming like crazy hard. The easiest way would be to deliberately skip the spots where you encounter Gila and Dai and the Princess until you're at a high enough level to take on Dark Sol, then rescue all 3, use Magic Rings to get your MP back, and then take on Dark Sol from there.

The more Dante Must Die mode to this is getting each character in your party ASAP which means being barred from the Tavern which means no MP recovery and in the case of Jessa, no anything other than the Shrine.

[Anonymous No.5499428]

>>5498297
Can we just talk about how good the shining games are without your weirdo grudge against final fantasy?

[Anonymous No.5499930]

>>5499428
Nobody has brought up FF in the thread dumbass

keep talking about Shining

[Anonymous No.5500038]

i have shining tears for ps2. i never played it. maybe i will someday.

[Anonymous No.5500250]

>>5499930
reading is hard

[Anonymous No.5500263]

>>5498439
That's considered one of (if not the) hardest fights in the game. Dying only makes you lose money which isn't a big deal (and can be infinitely grinded with egress abuse) so just keep at it until you win. There is no reason to delay promotion, especially on characters like Slade or Kiwi who explode in power upon promotion.

Small tip for when you beat it; pick Karna, she's the best healer in the game and you wont get another one until much later, and make sure both her and Sarah are casting a heal spell every single turn, even if nobody needs it. That 10xp/heal can add up to dozens of levels over the course of the game.

[Anonymous No.5501421]

>>5498297
Great series. It's too bad that the original company kept splintering into separate groups.
But we did end up with...

>Landstalker
>Beyond the Beyond
>Alundra

All made by Shining alumni

[Anonymous No.5501723]

>>5498439
That's the first really hard fight in the game.

[Anonymous No.5501735]

>>5500263
This is good advice. Hold off on promoting Sarah until you have a Vigor Ball though. Then you can promote her to a Monk, and Monks are awesome.

[Anonymous No.5501887]

>>5501421
Didn't a lot of them splinter off and end up making FEDA: Emblem of Justice, too? I know the character designer from Shining Force 1 worked on it, at least.

[Anonymous No.5501905]

>>5498523
Go back to whatever hellhole you crawled out of. You do not belong here.

[Anonymous No.5501978]

>>5499247
>>the main villain isn't all that evil, just bored as fuck and wants a challenge
Yeah, no fuck you, that's evil. You don't start shit because you're bored.

[Anonymous No.5502004]

The best Shining is Golden Sun TLA

The rest are shit

[Anonymous No.5502007]

>>5502004
Golden Sun is fuck awful. Go shove your GBA up your ass.

[Anonymous No.5502138]

>>5501887
Yep

>>5501421
Don't forget Dark Savior!

[Anonymous No.5502293]

>>5499335
Thx.

What about tamayoshi helm and the glass armor, is there any use for these items?

[Anonymous No.5502352]

>>5501978
Starting shit because of boredom is kind of why 4chan exists.

[Anonymous No.5502354]

would your rather a firey little elf mage or an ice cold princess mage?

[Anonymous No.5502358]

>>5500038
It's excellent as a 2 player game. I don't think it's an actual SF game but was advertised as a spiritual successor back then.

[Anonymous No.5502380]

>>5498297
Amazing voice acting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IhrlM3nYzFg

[Anonymous No.5502383]

>>5502380
Is this...the end?

[Anonymous No.5502401]

>>5502380
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XlwjS53pAho

[Anonymous No.5502705]

>>5501735
Just wanted to add, there are two Vigor balls in the game. So you can promote both Sarah and Karna to Master Monk

[Anonymous No.5502734]

Are the first 2 games connected to the third plot wise?
I've been meaning to play through 3, but I've only played the first briefly.

Also, around how long does it take to beat the first scenario?

[Anonymous No.5502743]

>>5502734
No, only Holy Ark is connected to Shining Force 3 although it's not necessary to play Holy Ark beforehand.

Each scenario of Shining Force 3 is about 35 hours.

[Anonymous No.5502992]

>>5502734
I believe 3 makes a short reference to the main antagonists in prior games, but that's really about it. They also all take place in the same universe, just in different parts of the world. Pic related

[Anonymous No.5503263]

>>5502705
>there are two Vigor balls in the game. So you can promote both Sarah and Karna to Master Monk

Why not Frayja?

[Anonymous No.5503669]

>>5503263

[Anonymous No.5503752]

>>5500263
>abusing egress to grind gold
I've known this now for a while but I wish I was a smart enough kid back then to have done this instead of restarting the entire game over due to having no more money to revive force members (sans Peter).

[Anonymous No.5504061]

>>5503752
>restarting the game

Holy shit...

[Anonymous No.5504097]

Technical question. Why is the dungeon screen windowed? Would it have technically been possible to make it full screen? Lets say with a bigger cart memory size? What was the limiting factor there?

[Anonymous No.5504220]

>>5498337
terrible and grindy barely even a game

[Anonymous No.5504298]

>>5504220
You do know that you're not clever or funny, right?

[Anonymous No.5504471]

>diverse
Kill yourself. I mean it, end your life. You know very well what this word means in the industry.

More on topic, I kinda wish Quest and Atlus weren't so irrelevant nowadays. The Ogre franchise had so much potential.

[Anonymous No.5504505]

>>5504471
I took it diverse as in many different genres, but I see what you mean. Let's all commit suicide!

[Anonymous No.5504510]

>>5504471
>you're not allowed to use this word because this other group of people use it
Wow

[Anonymous No.5504634]

>>5504097
I don't think it was a technical limitation. Rather that Camelot were trying to emulate the style of then-current dungeon crawlers which also had the dungeon view windowed in the UI. See stuff like Westeood's Eye of the Beholder.

[Anonymous No.5504636]

Why did Camelot make Master Monks to be so incredibly strong?

[Anonymous No.5504646]

I've kinda accepted that SEGA probably won't ever change from the current style of Shining games, with its ARPG combat and Tony Taka designs. What I'm irritated about is that they've not put out a single brand new Shining RPG since Resonance which was a 2014 game iirc. Refrain was an enhanced port, and we don't count that all-stars fighting game. For what is once considered a flagship title, there aren't that many new Shining games around.

[Anonymous No.5504654]

>>5504646
It can stay dead for all I care.

[Anonymous No.5504664]

>>5504646
If Tony Taka's design is the de facto, then the series can stay dead.
If nothing else, just release a compilation of the games up to 1998 before that horrible being came into the light, and be done with it.

[Anonymous No.5504667]

>>5501421
>>5501887
>>5502138
Someone should make a "family tree" for all of the different companies and games that came from Climax/Sonic Software Planning's Shining in the Darkness.

These games are made by separate companies on different systems but they all have a familiar connecting style to them.

[Anonymous No.5504671]

>>5504664
Taka's cookie cutter designs aren't even the worst part. It's the modern Tales style generic ARPG gameplay template that gets me.

[Anonymous No.5504675]

>>5504667
I've always found it ironic that a company named Sonic! that directly worked with SEGA never made a single Sonic game.

Then again, modern Camelot doesn't make RPGs anymore ;_;

[Anonymous No.5504676]

>>5504664
>Tony Taka

Isn't that some sleazy late 90's hentai site dude?

[Anonymous No.5504693]

>>5504676
Yeah he used to draw porn before being hired by Sega. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was still doing hentai while already illustrating for the Shining series.

[Anonymous No.5505603]

>>5504693
Nice

[Anonymous No.5506436]

>>5504097
It's windowed like that for the sake of animating. It is more difficult to animate and more resource intensive moving walls at maximum resolution. It's windowed to cut down on the necessary resources on the part of both the animators and the console.

[Anonymous No.5506451]

>>5506436

Ever since i played this game i have been wondering if the mega drive is beefy enough to run the labyrinth full screen. Technically there isn't much more going on. The monsters that pop up are 1 frame only. And the M68K can without a doubt do it, it might come down to not enough ram.

[Anonymous No.5506598]

>>5505603
Uh no, you're supposed to hate Tony 'sameface' taka for bringing ruin to this franchise that was formerly respected by sophisticated gentlemen who appreciate horse pussy and tao's bikini.

[Anonymous No.5507547]

>>5506598
This but unironically.

[Anonymous No.5507724]

I loved the game gear shining force games and I loved shining 1 and 2 on geni, shining 2 is prob along with Chrono trigger and ff10 my most comfy games to play. What shining games came after 2 are the most like sf2 for me to try out?

[Anonymous No.5507862]

So are the other discs of Shining Force 3 finished fan translation? I remember looking at the site and it saying its in beta but I see people talk about it like they played it? Are they redpilled nip readers or are the TLs done?

I gotta get my saturn emulator shit on point

[Anonymous No.5507889]

>>5507862
Pretty sure it's fully translated these days, yeah.

[Anonymous No.5507892]

>>5507862
>>5507889
Oh, possibly except the bonus disc. Scenario 2 and 3 should be though, fuck knows if they're compatible with non Jap saves from 1 though, I would bet not.

[Anonymous No.5507914]

>>5507892
Would I need to play the first in Jap? I know you have to like beat all 3 to get the true ending or some shit?

Can we get some experts in this thread

[Anonymous No.5507967]

>>5507724
Shining Force 3, obviously.

>>5507914
No, just download the Japanese ISO for the three games and then download and apply the translation patch (I reccomend this over downloading pre-patched versions because Saturn emulators can be finnicky).

Basically Shining Force 3 is a trilogy so when you finish one of the games you carry over your save to the next game and so on.

[Anonymous No.5508185]

>>5507967
oh word they have an english patch for the first disc of Shining Force 3?

[Anonymous No.5508595]

>>5508185
Yeah, you just mount one of the discs and the patcher detects the scenario and patches it accordingly. It's better to play patched Scenario 1 rather than the US version so that the translation of names and shit is consistent throughout all three games.

[Anonymous No.5508726]

>>5506451
It has nothing to do with the CPU. Only so many tiles can be stored in VRAM at a time and you can only swap out so many tiles in a vblank. Fullscreen would at least double the number of tiles to be drawn. This isn't like Sonic where a small number of tiles are repeated over and over, almost every tile is unique. With all the animation frames, that's probably going to exceed what can be stored in VRAM at once or swapped every frame without compromises. If half the screen is going to be taken up by UI elements anyways it's a smart design choice to go with the smaller viewport allowing a higher variety in tiles and higher animation framecount.

[Anonymous No.5510038]

trying to run shining in the holy arc on mednaffe. It booted up fine at first but then when I closed it and tried opening it again it keeps giving me the memory manger screen. Any Saturn emulator experts know whats up?

[Anonymous No.5512250]

>>5508185
Maybe

[Anonymous No.5512272]

>>5498297
Never played the PS2 ones. Stopped playing Shining games after the Saturn died.
But I enjoyed Holy Ark and Wisdom.

[Anonymous No.5512360]

>>5510038
Gonna need a bit more info.

[Anonymous No.5512673]

I'm currently playing Shining Force CD for the second time in my life and I can't shake the feeling that Mages got nerfed in this game compared to SHF1 and SHF2.

I can't find any data on this via Google though. Anyone here feel the same way? Their spells just seem much less powerful.

[Anonymous No.5512740]

> Ywn visit Old Vic's tavern

[Anonymous No.5512784]

>>5508726

That makes sense. I think i read somewhere that before release SEGA opted to cut down the mega drives ram by half, since the cpu was already costing them an arm and a leg.

[Anonymous No.5512851]

The only good "shining" game is pic related

[Anonymous No.5513483]

>>5504675
I always thought Sonic Team made Shining Force 3 because the official Sega Saturn Magazine (UK) said it was made by Sonic Team.

[Anonymous No.5513534]

>>5507914
The first one, you can play US version but the Japanese translation one is more faithful to the Japanese story without localization strangeness. Either is fine though. Also scenario 2, 3 and premium disc are all translated.

[Anonymous No.5514697]

>>5512740
Top tier comfy. I can never forget the tune that plays while you're in the tavern, even after all these years.

[Anonymous No.5515898]

>>5512851
>game was supposed to be called Shining Rogue, cementing it as a part of the Shining franchise
>Sonic! and Climax have a falling out, Climax in turn has to rename the game to Landstalker
>Climax gets broken up into Matrix Software, then goes belly up years later because Landstalker and Dark Savior was their only objectively good games
>Matrix Software only does ports
>Camelot is more-or-less forced by Nintendo to make sports titles since Dark Dawn was a blunder
>all that raw talent from the original 2 companies are either retired, unable to work on JRPGs, or are literally dead
>meanwhile the Shining series is a shell of its former self ever since Tony Taka stepped into the picture

This is the worst time line.

[Anonymous No.5515914]

>>5515898
I started this thread just to have some nice talk about the genesis and Saturn games but now im crying so hard

It's not fair bros

[Anonymous No.5516649]

I hope Shining in the Darkness makes it into the Mega Drive Mini lineup.

[Anonymous No.5517043]

>>5515914
There was even a Landstalker PSP remake that got cancelled. This one legit hurt the most ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2igJr2ZsNE

[Anonymous No.5517062]

>>5517043
That would have been glorious. We'd have never saw it in the west, cuz Japan likes to just leave cool stuff there.

[Anonymous No.5517070]

>>5498432
Was this the game with the pixie bell? The "other" 1st person shining game?

[Anonymous No.5517075]

>>5517043
It was only a remake though. No new content, who cares? If a Landstalker 2 got cancelled THAT would be a tragedy.

[Anonymous No.5517079]

>>5499930
Thats cute

[Anonymous No.5517082]

>>5502383
Symbios sounded funny when he died. But not as funny as that gay guy when he did his arctic blast

[Anonymous No.5517131]

>>5513483
It was made by Sonic personally.

[Anonymous No.5517201]

>>5517075
Retard

[Anonymous No.5517297]

>>5517201
Explain to me why it's so bad that you never got to play the game using an 3D engine that would ruin the puzzles that rely on engine limitations and that had worse music. Tell me why I'm a retard for wanting a sequel with new ideas and concepts instead of a downgrade of a game I already own.

[Anonymous No.5517325]

>>5515898
Yeah, Mana, Saga and Valkyrie are other series that got benched hard.
Fallout and Elder Scrolls died in spirit.