The problem I have with it, is that the “new” versions of Shining Force make no effort to be even remotely related to the earlier games in visuals, style, gameplay, story, anything. I don’t care about genre bending… Panzer Dragoon Saga did it well. I happen to love Phantasy Star Online as another example. The former was a totally different genre from the first two games, but retained the core storyline and expanded the world a great deal. The latter, while not part of the story of Algo, still retained many familiar themes present in the original games and played on nostalgia a great deal. There’s several songs that remix the original games’ tunes.
Shining Force EXA just happens to be a sequel to a game most Shining Force fans didn’t want in the first place. At least they got a new artist… NEO’s art was repulsive.
The simple fact is, regardless of whether SF Neo deserves a fair shake on it’s own merits or not, the larger Shining “*” series is a fairly unique case. It was an incredibly stupid decision to name the game using the specific convention every existing fan associates with the S-RPG format, since it had been an absolute constant previously that every “Force” game was S-RPG and everything otherwise was not.
PSO was not named Phantasy Star V, Panzer Dragoon Saga declared it’s distinction from the existing games. I don’t even have any great attachment to the Shining series but even so it seems to me this did qualify as egregious idiocy.
Genre is quite a vague way of categorising something anyway. A game that is classed as an “action game” could be a first person shooter, Diablo clone, or a side scrolling beat em up like Streets of Rage.
[quote=“Kimimi”]That’s the part that really irritates me - I haven’t come across anyone who has actually played Neo that has detested it as much as the “real fans” that haven’t.
The vitriol poured on SFN purely due to a single word in its title strikes me as childish and blinkered - I’ve got no problems at all with somebody telling me they hate the game because they think it plays like crap.[/quote]
Is that so? So if Sega decided to turn PANZER DRAGOON into a glorified GTA type of game but without the dragon in it,people around here wouldn’t be horrified that they have gone down this route? They wouldn’t be angered that the name PANZER DRAGOON which stands for something in terms of great gameplay and storytelling has been turned into a cash in?
Its like saying “you don’t know if dogs poo is bad for you unles you eat it”.
Sega can do whatever the hell they like with their IP. If they did turn Panzer Dragoon into some GTA clone, I wouldn’t necessarily think it was a wise move, but I would/wouldn’t buy it based entirely on whether it was a good game or not, rather than spending my time complaining about something I couldn’t change.
I’m really not that bothered. “Heritage” and whether or not a game is deemed to be a cash in - change can be a very good thing, and cash ins keep programmers in employment for future titles.
Again I’m not commenting on the relative justice of any of it, Sega can of course do what they damn well please. But it’s the very fact they apparently didn’t foresee this reaction that constitutes the greatest disrespect to the fans. Are they wrong to name it Shining Force, no… but they are undeniably stupid to have done so knowing how desperate fans of the strategy/tactics format are lately.
Sega has the right to name their property whatever they see fit, just as a fan has the right to feel like they’ve been lied to about a favorite series. shrug
But this isn’t really about one game. The feelings of one fanbase is essentially an accumilation of mistake after mistake they have seen Sega make time and again and SHINING FORCE among other titles are the man ifistation of those mistakes. people have invested their time and money on this series to make it a sucess it has become yet those same people across the board are not getting satisfied since it seems that the company has abandoned them for another fan base that will not stay with the series for 11+ years.
Well, Sega did release shining tears a few months before shining force neo. I think that since shining tears was an action rpg, fans expected that shining force neo would be a true successor to shining force 3. Since that didn’t happen of course they got angry. That’s my theory, anyway.
