Anyone who is still interested in this game should check this out:
I didn’t get it.Wasn’t Dark Dragon already a SF1 remake?
I don’t think Sega has announced how the storyline will fit in with the other Shining games (correct me if I’m wrong), but I’m guessing that it will be a prequel or sequel to Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon.
The name Shining Force NEO sounds like it’s out of the Matrix or something…
You only controll one character in the force?
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
Wheee, I LOOOOOVE being right. The game is revealed as a bigger pile of garbage each time more is leaked out. Now, it even has a stupid name to go along with it.
Ah… I can’t wait to see how this one performs. I’ve already predicted it’ll bomb like Shining Tears did.
Once again, for your strategy/RPG fix, Fire Emblem will be fully translated and available for GameCube in 2nd quarter 2005.
We all pretty much knew it was going to be an action rpg, I don’t see any really new information in this one… Most of us had already expressed their thoughts on the battle system and had even speculated right that you would only control one character…
So, with the above, I don’t think there was anyone here that believed this would be THE Shining Force game or that it would live up to the series’ legacy.
Still, saying it will flop is pure guess work as there’s nothin to back that up (no, “betraying the SF fans” is not reason enough for this game to flop as the SF fans haven’t been enough to hold Sega afloat in the past - after the changes that happened in the industry with Sony entering the market). So it’s not a real Shining Force game and it’s not the strategy/RPG that everyone used to hope it’s going to be. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be a shit action RPG tho as what we have seen so far actually looks good… There’s as much chance of it being a good game as there is of it ending up crap. The production values seem to be a lot higher than Shining Tears’ were as well. We’ll see what happens.
Of course Shining games didn’t carry Sega around. Sakura Taisen sold well over a million copies with each release and couldn’t save Sega, so I fail to see what you’re getting at. No amount of game sales could save Sega with one major hardware failure after another. Between 32X, Sega CD, “portable” systems that didn’t have a screen or game controls, and a rushed-to-market console that didn’t have any games for it, what could possibly be done? Absolutely nothing. Sega’s doing so well now BECAUSE they ditched the hardware aspect of console gaming.
It has everything to do with your fanbase. This is why Fire Emblem, despite not selling millions upon millions like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, continues while Shining games struggle. Nintendo continues to stay true to their established formula and has created a loyal fanbase. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy enjoy millions of sales because Square and Enix both too, stuck to a formula that fans wanted and never deviated from it. Sega and SNK used to have some of the most rabid and loyal fans around; ask National Console Support and other import retailers about that. Anyone remember the tons of Sega sites all over the place years ago? Sega no longer has that these days. Hell, I was one of those foaming-at-the-mouth fans back then. I haven’t bought an import game in a LONG time, nor have I been particularly excited about a Sega game since… Panzer Dragoon Orta. That’s pretty bad.
Hiring hentai artists and fancy anime composers isn’t going to make people buy your games en masse. It pushed Shining Tears for a few days, but sales still ended up being nothing fancy. Shining Force fans want a strategy/RPG, and if you don’t give your original fanbase what they’re looking for right from the get-go, you’re now starting from square one and have to try to sell a product to a bunch of people unfamiliar with your series, rather than having some guaranteed sales from the start and whomever else jumps onboard.
This is just another chronicle in Sega’s huge book of failed marketing attempts. I’m anticipating a Panzer Dragoon platformer game sometime in the near future. Sega will hire a currently popular rock band to compose the game’s X-TREME soundtrack, and hire a porn director to handle the cinematics.
Concur’d, sir.
Gamers don’t like shit games.
I still don’t see any valid points made on why SFNeo is going to suck. It’s not a real SF game, other than that, it can be good or it can be bad for what it really is despite its name. Shining Tears was a different game, I never said it was good so stating it wasn’t good all over again does nothin for this thread.
AS for the fanbase stuff, as I said before, Sega’s hardcore fanbase has not been able to save them in the past, why would they want to start all over again? It’s natural to want to go in a different direction to attract the mainstream instead of create/re-attract a small hardcore fanbase since that is NOT enough. It used to be enough but it’s not anymore. All the companies that were relying on that have been doing worse and worse with Sega and SNK being the main examples.
Anyway, you may be right, it can flop, I never said it won’t. I just said that saying it WILL flop is a totally random guess and nothing more. The only negative we’ve seen from the game so far is that it’s not a real SF game, aside from that we CAN’T KNOW if it’s good for what it is or if it’s bad. Not yet. Sega has done great action RPGs in the past, they may do one more.
Still, if you are so certain that Sega is creating a shit game with SFNeo then why the hell would you want them to do a “real” SF game? It’s apparently a company that can’t make good games so that one would suck too and disapoint fans even more since they’d expect it to be good due to it being “true to the series” gameplay wise. I guess they are doing us a favor by showing us it’s bad already by making it a different genre huh? 
Although I’m still holding onto the faint hope that the second Shining Force game Sega is developing at the moment is true to its Strategy/RPG roots, I basically agree with everything Parn has said.
Fans have been waiting ever since Shining Force III (which was never released in its entirety outside Japan when it by all rights should’ve been) for Sega to make another Shining Force game. Really and truly, Shining Tears and Shining Force Neo have only succeeded in disappointing the true fans of this long-running series, and I hope Sega realizes that.
Some people actually agree with Sega’s decision to recreate the series in its own image… because turning Strategy/RPGs into Action/RPGs would somehow mean more money for Sega. Well I don’t.
Nope, nope, and for good measure… nope. Sega isn’t selling any more games now than they were in the past. They are profiting because they abandoned the hardware aspect of the console industry. Sega broke the million barrier on several titles in the past; Phantasy Star Online, Sakura Taisen, and so on. Sega hasn’t broken the million copy barrier with a game since the Dreamcast days. Someone enlighten me if I’m incorrect.
For the average game, it takes about 40,000 to 50,000 copies sold to break even on the title. A game like say… Shining Force 3 had the nice advantage of being sold as three seperate games, despite that most of the coding was done for what is effectively ONE game instead since all three scenarios shared the same source code, and that 50,000 barrier was way, way, WAY past broken. Shining Force 3 was a definite success for the Saturn.
Saturn games were outselling PlayStation games for a fair amount of time before Final Fantasy 7 released, but Sega was still writing red ink. Why? Hardware costs. There’s a nice article on Sega’s history somewhere on the internet… I can’t remember the link offhand.
Games like Panzer Dragoon Orta would never come out if your analysis of the games market were accurate. Companies like Treasure wouldn’t exist, either.
Alienating your fanbase and trying to pick up a mainstream audience is a fool’s dream. Sega’s lack of success is a mixture of poor decisions and disappointing their fans over, and over, and over again. And it is because of this, that Sega will continue stumbling every single time, and why when Dragon Quest 9 is announced by Enix and Enix chooses not to change anything central to the series, it will sell 3 million copies in one weekend again. Because Enix was smart enough not to ignore their core fanbase from the beginning. Nintendo’s smart enough to maintain the same, as is Square.
I want a new Shining Force game, but who says I want this development team working on it? Shining Tears is a 2D game and it has SLOWDOWN, which tells me plenty on their programming capabilities. Slowdown with a sprite-based game on a 128-bit system is embarassing, and I know for a fact that it’s not Sony’s hardware. There are plenty of graphically intense games, 2D or 3D, on that system.
The only game I’m interested in out of Sega right now is Phantasy Star Universe, and even then, I’m very wary.
Sonic Heroes has sold over one million copies in Europe alone, and is still selling strong in the UK. I’m surprised that a sequel hasn’t been announced already.
Are you serious? That piece of trash sold over a million?
Well, I stand corrected then. Even then, my argument still stands. Case in point: Treasure.
I didn’t really bother reading the rest of your post or the others since it because I’m seriously not in the right frame of mind for it right now, but I just want to point out something that may or may not have been touched upon.
Sometimes you just feel a game is going to suck. Perhaps its a subconcious decoding of the facts, but perhaps not. It’s just one of those things. After a while things become predictable, and you pick up on certain trends and signs. I’ve seen nothing that tells me SFN will be anything interesting, special, or exciting. I get this feeling about a lot of games, because 90% of games suck. And 90% games go through the same sort of build up.
That having been said, this is of course entirely my opinion.
Do you seriously believe that PDO is considered a success or something? If not, what was the point of bringing it up here?
As for Treasure, it’s a much smaller company that CAN live on just a hardcore fanbase, I won’t bother explaining the reasons but if you look it up Abadd has provided good arguments for that kind of things in the past.
Now, for Sega, If their 32 bit era games sold so good why would they kill the Saturn? They could just stop manufacturing hardware but keep making games since the already established fanbase was according to you enough to bring profit through software sales. If the hardware was the reason Sega was doing bad why would they stop making their well selling software for it? They could just keep selling games until they break even with the loss they had from the hardware… Basically that’s what they are doing now even tho according to you their games don’t sell as good now… They are breaking even for past losses with selling software… They could have done the same by selling software for their own console back then but they obviously stopped doing that. Do you really think they did that even tho it was profitable business?
Anyway, when are you gonna say where you base the certainity of SFNeo being a shit game that WILL flop (regardless of it not being a real SF game)? You keep ignoring the points I make for that when that’s what I’ve mainly been arguing with really… If it’s just a thought like Shadow said then you could have just replied that on first place and end this…
They killed Saturn because the brilliant execs decided to pursue Dreamcast. Simple.
Panzer Dragoon Orta wasn’t phenomenal in sales, but it pulled in enough to warrant making another in the future.
As far as Shining Force Neo being crap, Shadow more or less spelled it out. It’s going to be crap because I say so. See: Shining Tears for a great example of what the development team is capable of.
[quote=“Parn”]Are you serious? That piece of trash sold over a million?
Well, I stand corrected then. Even then, my argument still stands. Case in point: Treasure.[/quote]
Apparantly Sonic Heroes has what Sega calls “mass market appeal”, which is always something I find difficult to define.
Truth be told, a company as large as Sega couldn’t sustain itself on the 5 million strong Saturn user base it had created in Japan. Sega of Japan threw away a marketshare of 32 million Mega Drive/Genesis owners outside of Japan in favour of focusing on a shrinking Japanese market.
The only thing Sega of Japan ever did right was spending the wealth it had earned from console game sales in America and Europe on dominating the market for arcade games in Japan.
If Sega had sold more than 5 million Saturns and more than 8 million Dreamcasts, who knows what might’ve happened? Selling more consoles would’ve naturally translated into more games being bought. Sega still would’ve sold each and every console at a loss, but would’ve recovered its losses from the sales of its games… eventually. Sony sold the PS2 at a huge loss when the console was initially released to the gaming public, but did so in the full knowledge that profits were not far away. Hell, Microsoft is still losing many from every Xbox it sells…
[quote=“Shadow”]
Sometimes you just feel a game is going to suck. Perhaps its a subconcious decoding of the facts, but perhaps not. It’s just one of those things. After a while things become predictable, and you pick up on certain trends and signs. I’ve seen nothing that tells me SFN will be anything interesting, special, or exciting. I get this feeling about a lot of games, because 90% of games suck. And 90% games go through the same sort of build up.
That having been said, this is of course entirely my opinion.[/quote]
But you barely know anything about this game. We’ve seen a small ammount of screenshots which don’t actually look bad and other than that we know that there will be three person parties and you will control only one of the three in action RPG style. I fail to see how from knowing so few things you can see signs of it being a bad game… We really can’t have any idea on what it’s going to play like with so few information… It could play like Alundra or it could play similar to Zelda or it could play like DarkStalker or whatever that mega drive action RPG was called or it could play like Sword of Mana or it could play nothin like any of those…
[quote=“Parn”]Are you serious? That piece of trash sold over a million?
Well, I stand corrected then. Even then, my argument still stands. Case in point: Treasure.[/quote]
Everyone here likes bashing Sonic Heroes but did anyone actually played it?
Concerning SFNeo’s quality : Al3x please check shining-force.jp’s character section for the game.I don’t know most of other Shining characters but some fo those truly blow…The “main” female character…please…
I’m not saying is going to suck as far as gameplay is concerned tho.I personally think Action RPGs have room for a much deeper and greater gameplay than Strategy RPGs.That’s not to say I don’t like Strategy RPGs…
With Shining Force NEO, what I admit I don’t like is that it doesn’t look like a Shining Force game. (And the fact it’s an action/RPG rubs me the wrong way. 
) But if I was seeing this game for the first time, the only mildly negative impression I would have would be the ridiculous “NEO” part of the title.
So… I’ll give it the benefit of a doubt. There’s still time until it comes out, so even if it doesn’t feel like a Shining Force gme, it still might be decent.