The new Shining Force info

SEGA
1

Source:
forums.shiningforcecentral.com/i … wtopic=451

[quote]The Shining Series has been a popular Sega RPG series which obtains high appraisal from many users since its release on Genesis because of its high degree of completion and novelty of the system. And among them, the “Shining Force” series, starting from “Shining Force: Legacy of Great Intention”, are the most popular works in the series.
As the first feature presentation of “The Shining Project” in 2004, “Resurrection of the Dark Dragon”, a power-up version of “Legacy of Great Intention”, was launched on Gameboy Advance.
This time, we proudly present the new born “Shining Force”, “Shining Force” for Playstation 2.
“Shining Tears” and “Shining Force” marks the beginning of the rebirth of “Shining Series”. Theme music of the new series is made by the famous composer of MISIA and Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shiro Sagisu. Character design was by the popular manga artist Nishiyama Yuriko, who published “Harlem Beat” and “DRAGON VOICE” on “Weekly Boy Magazine”.

Synopsis

Young Max lived in Yukurist, the realm of thunder. He was attacked by monsters at the Ragail Stronghold when he visited there for training.
In the fight, the holy power “Force” in him awakened.
In order to become a warrior capable of using the Force, MAX returned to his homeland. What greets him are the familiar scenery and his childhood friend Meriru.
MAX received warm welcome from his homeland … except from Gaia, his father.
MAX repels to Gaia’s harsh attitude and set journey to the holy land to prove he is a warrior worthy of the Force. All of a sudden, an uncanny masked man appears before Max, and dragged Max into the eddy of extreme destiny.
The crisis of the world, followed by the battle to reveal the true power of the Force, is already starting…

The companions who venture together

  • Summary of party
    Your team grows when companions join. But the player usually can only make a party of 3, including the player himself. There are also special events that allows a party of more than 3 to fight.
    The characters who became companions are always gathered in a place called “headquarter”. It’s possible for the player to change the party member. Furthermore, each companion fight with judgment of his/her individual thought.

  • Type of companion
    The members who will join are the 10 listed below.
    In addition, there’re also characters who become your companion as NPC.

Meriru (human heroine)
Graham (centaur)
Mariel (centaur)
Chikitita(kyantol)
Baron (wolfling)
Rhinos (titan)
Fryea (birdling)
Klein (birdling)
Dryu (dragon)
Adam (guardian)

  • The strategy which utilizes the personality of the companion
    The companions has their own feature. For example, Chikitita the monk is strong at healing magic and against undead. As for Rhinos of a bare hand attack type, he’s superior in physical strength, but he can’t use any magic and his magical tolerance is low.
    Knowing which fields these companions are good at, the player can choose a party that best fits his play style. On the other hand, in order to utilize the favorite companion in the party, adjusting your play style is also possible.

Title: Shining Force
Genre: RPG
Player number: unknown
Release date: 2005 Spring
Price: to be announced
Platform: PlayStation2
?SEGA,2004
Character design: Nishiyama Yuriko
Monster design: Yoshitaka Tamaki[/quote]

I’m really disappointed, to be honest. The game is starting to sound more and more like a generic 3 or 4 person RPG. With only three members in your group at a time, the game is no longer Shining Force.

Why couldn’t Sega have called this something else? It’s one thing to enhance the Shining Force battle system by allowing multiple characters to attack at once or whatever… it’s an entirely different matter when they decide to throw the battle system we all love out the window and replace it with an inferior form of combat. From what I know about this game so far, calling it a force title is an embarrassment to Shining Force fans.

Thoughts?

2

The story sounds like Star Wars…

3

May the Shining “Force” be with you. Because by the looks of things, it won’t be coming to PS2.

4

I’m a bit confused now. Granted I haven’t seen enough of either of the games to get a feel for how they work, but that description of the new Shining Force sounds a lot like what I thought Shining Tears was going to be. It doesn’t seem to make two Shining action/RPGs so closely together (assuming the new SF is an action/RPG, which the independant thought on the part of the companion characters makes it sound like). If they’re both action/RPGs, what distinguishes one from the other and, speaking from a marketing perspective, why should a player buy both instead of one or the other? It’s making me a very puzzled consumer. :stuck_out_tongue:

5

You guys should head over to Shining Force Central and savour the disappointment.

Sega has stooped to new lows by creating a different type of RPG and giving it a familiar brand name in order to draw more attention to it in the hopes of garnering sales.

I really can’t understand Sega’s motivation for changing the core gameplay of Shining Force so drastically, especially when Strategy/RPGs like Fire Emblem still sell well in today’s markets.

I honestly never thought that Sega would resort to cloning Final Fantasy.

Sigh.

6

Well atleast it doesn’t sound like final fantasy… It sounds like an action RPG like someone else said in hist post. The fact the “companions” are AI controlled shows you’ll likely just control the main character in some kind of real time combat and the other two characters just do their own thing…

Lets just call it a Shining game, not a Shining Force game <_<

7

Yes, the game sounds like it fits the Shining series moderately well, just not Shining Force. Shining the Holy Ark was good, and this almost sounds like a real-time combat version of it. Does seem odd they would call it Shining Force when it has more in common with the regular Shining games.

8

From what I’ve heard from a number of sources, Sega are rewriting the Shining history and world. They’re trying to pretend that Camelot’s storyline never existed, and that this new Shining alter ego is the one true series of events. In other words, Shining Force on the Megadrive never happened, hence the reason why this new Shining “Force” game is simply called Shining Force.

I hope that I’m sorely wrong, but it doesn’t look that way. Imagine if Sega rewrote the Panzer Dragoon storyline…

9

…you’re kidding?

10

Well, this is coming from second hand sources, but after Shining Force III was released, the games that followed altered the original story that Camelot envisioned, introducing a large number of inconsistencies.

Shining Soul 1, 2 and Shining Force Resurrection of the Dark Dragon changed a number of details regarding the origins of some important characters, among other things. It looks as if Shining Force for PS2 will be following this pattern, unless Sega have decided to abandon the new story that they’ve dreamt up in favour of the old one (unlikely).

I haven’t actually played any of the GBA Shining games, so you might want to hear it from someone who’s played the games before coming to any conclusions.

11

Considering that Camelot has said that Shining the Holy Ark and Shining Force 3 have nothing to do with the previous games, I don’t really think that Sega breaking away from previous Shining games is really all that bad. Caemlot already did it itself.

Of course rewriting may be a different matter, but coming out of Lunar fandom, where the same game has been done three different times by three different developers, I’m a little jaded towards feeling any bit of outrage when it comes to overhauling and messing with the storyline in a remake. It’s just something I’ve seen before, lived through, and decided that it ultimately didn’t matter as long as I still had the originals to enjoy.

My take on rewrites is this: It’s an alternate universe. If you don’t like it, don’t play it. But it might be interesting. And just because it exists doesn’t mean it erases the old one.

By the way, I played the two Shining Souls and did not find any outright contradictions with the Genesis-era storylines. It was a bit nonsensical sometimes (Shining Soul 1 was a virtual who’s who in the Shining villain world), but there was nothing I could tell that said it couldn’t have happened that way. There was one minor error where a character refers to the land as Runefaust, which is incorrect since Runefaust didn’t take its name until the time of the first Shining Force game, but that was the worst I’d found and it’s an oversight I’m sure most people would make since Runefaust’s old name is mentioned only once in the original SF.

12

I have a feeling that the new Shining Force is a direct prequel to the Shining Force remake set in the time when the ancients sealed away Dark Dragon for the first time. Max and Kane are both present in the new Shining Force, and according to the Shining Force remake, they were both put in hibernation in preparation for Dark Dragon’s return which occured 1000 years later.

The Shining Force remake can’t be considered a part of Camelot’s series, though, because the story was almost completely rewritten. In any case, I regard the GBA Shining games as nothing more than side stories. The only thing that can be considered true to the original Shining games is the great artwork seen in the Shining Soul games, which was rendered by one of the original artists.

I wouldn’t mind if Sega started the story from scratch, or even if it rewrote the history of the series… as long as the new Shining Force actually retained the turn-based combat we all know and love from the old Shining Force games (i.e. the gameplay Shining Force is famous for). As far as I’m concerned, Sega has no right to call the new Shining Force game “Shining Force” if it plays nothing like that type of Shining game.

It has become painfully obvious to me that Sega is trying to make an RPG with as much mass market appeal as possible rather than a game that is true to its roots. Sega is going to alienate the older fans of the series (mostly in Japan) who would’ve bought a new, true Shining Force game in favour of making an RPG that Sega believes will be a mass market gamer’s dream come true, and thus, sell out. The only thing that is selling out at the moment is Sega.

In the eyes of your average Sega fanboy, Sega can do no wrong, but I’m still waiting for Sega to do something right with this series for a change. I suppose that in the end sales figures are the only thing that truly matter to Sega; if that’s the case, then I hope this game flops.

Our only hope now is that the other Shining Force game, which went into development recently, is a proper Shining Force game. However, I’d wager that it’s a remake of the Game Gear’s Shining Force: Final Conflict, or a remake of the Genesis game Shining Force II (one of the best 16 bit RPGs ever created) for the Game Boy Advance. Remaking an old 8 bit or 16 title wouldn’t be very costly, and would yield a nice return on Sega’s investment.

13

I need to play more Shining games (both old and new) in order to fully understand what changes have been made to the series as it’s evolved. I don’t like what I’ve heard about the new Shining games though.

I did hear that there were some inconsistencies in the old Shining series (the ones made by Team Sonic, Camelot, and. Climax?)…

I think it’s okay if storywriters choose not to link previous games directly (although it’s better if they do, or at least set it in the same world), however from what I’ve heard Amusement Vision rewrote some on the key details in RotDD’s plot, to make it fit in better with the Shining Soul games.

I agree with you there… thankfully remakes don’t erase the old ones. As with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (which were quality movies IMO), the original books still exist, the movies are just someone’s interpretation of those books. The originals are, of course, still the ‘factual’ accounts of what ‘really happened’.

The thing I don’t like about Sega rewriting the Shining history is that it’s not just for one game, it’s for the future of the Shining series too. So, by the looks of things (and, again, I really do hope I’m mistaken here…) any future Shining titles will tie in with the new story, thus replacing the old story. Is that really something that can be ignored? If it was one game sure, but when it’s the whole history of that world, I’m either going to have to stop playing Shining games or accept the new story for what it is. And that pains me, especially when I think of how the franchise could have been treated imagines Shining Force IV on the PS2 with an all new storyline, or one that was consistant with the old games

14

Where should I begin?!

The worst inconsistencies present in the Shining series were the result of poor translations; on top of that, Camelot has rewritten its series timeline once that I know of, which didn’t help. And to make matters worse, Sega is now rewriting the history of the series.

Shining Soul had a few plotholes and drew upon non-existent story ties. Dark Dragon wasn’t a bio-weapon created by the ancients no matter what Shining Soul tells you. And Bulzome wasn’t one of Dark Sol’s minions. The stories of the GBA Shining games combined to form a story arc separate from Camelot’s original timeline.

The irony is a lot of people bought Shining Soul because they associated its title with quality when the game itself was far from good. Shining Soul 2 was actually much better in every respect, but didn’t sell nearly as well because buyers wouldn’t allow themselves to be fooled for a second time.

15

That pretty much was what happened with Lunar. All the designer interviews were pointing to the Saturn/Playstation remakes being the definitive versions with everything they didn’t get to do the first time around. But I liked the old stuff and besides they introduced plot holes while doing their remakes. :stuck_out_tongue: But if there is ever a Lunar 3 it will likely go off the remake storyline rather than the original.

It was really irritating back when it first happened, but it’s been several years now and introduced a whole new generation of Lunar fans to the series so in the end it’s not all that bad. Sometimes people misremember things, get timelines confused, or newer fans don’t understand these strange “non-existent” events that old-timers refer too, but eventually the dust settled and having different timelines didn’t matter as much anymore. You could hardly tell people who became Lunar fans through the remake that their version sucked when that was what drew them to be fans in the first place.

There hasn’t been a new Shining game on console (I’m not counting handhelds) since Shining Force 3 and that’s a long time. Assuming they’re good games on their own terms, irrespective of what franchise they belong to, Shining Tears and the new Shining Force will likely gain a new set of fans completely unfamiliar with the older games, and for them their concept of the Shining series will be what those two games create. But once they’re there in that fandom (if Lunar is any indication), some of them will likely turn back to the older games, hunting them down on ebay and such, to get their fill for more Shining.

Even though having a radically redesigned Shining Force might be a disappointment for the hardcore fan, I think eventually the lines between old and new will blur and people will just deal with and accept having multiple timelines. New installments don’t come out very often, so even if Sega makes all future Shining games follow a revised storyline, it will take years to catch up with the number of installments in the original. By that time, they just might start over again. That might not be ideal either, but just because they could be starting a new timeline doesn’t mean they’ll stick with it. For all we know the two PS2 games might just be a couple of gaidens in the grand scheme of things when some new producer/marketing director takes over at Sega.

16

If it’s any form of consolation, I was surveying a report of the Shining Tears T.G.S. exhibition published in Famitsu - Famitsu is the dominant authority in Japanese games journalism - and apparently the video demonstration of the game was greeted with rapturous cheers throughout and after it! That’s a promising indicator that something is being accomplished correctly!

I must concede that scrutinising the plot synopsis for the new Shining Force game was… agonising. But if it’s only the allusion to the original Shining Force quintology provided in the name that proves so offensive, bear in mind that the game remains in pre-alpha development, and so names can quite easily be changed.

And considering the Shining series’s apparent degeneration to a “Final Fantasy clone”… the battle scenes appear far too congested and hectic to ever be simply a replica of the Mannequin Mode that characterises SquareEnix.

I’d also agree with Rune Lai’s assessment that this Shining Redecoration Deluxe Edition is more of the product of the current incumbent of Sega’s marketing strategy rather than a permanent and irreversible change in emphasis - it might change again by the next board reshuffle, and Tears and Pseudo-Force will, as far as plot continuity’s concerned, vanish into a Plot Hole. Remember that there was an executive at Sega of America determined to turn Sonic into a racoon, because he liked Rocky and Moosewinkle! O.o That was never realised, and the same could well apply here.

To be quite honest, I doubt whether Sega actually is countenancing this shift in emphasis voluntarily… bear in mind that the Shining titles have always been Sega games (Sonic! Software Planning/Camelot only schismed from Sega after Shining Force III) - why would they want to bastardise their own creation? To be quite honest, I can detect the suggestion of a third party’s interference… Sammy.

Joy. :’(

17

Do you really think that Sega is beyond changing the gameplay of the Shining Force series if Sega thought it would mean greater sales? Instead of trying to make a good game, Sega is hell bent on pleasing the masses. If the new Shining Force flops, then it will teach Sega a much needed lesson; sales figures is the only language that Sega understands.

18

After having seen the trailer for the new Shining Force, this confirms my belief that Sega blows, and I continue to be happy that I was wise to jump a sinking ship early on.

Back to Star Ocean 3.

19

I just saw the trailer that Parn is talking about, and the new footage for Shining Tears. Check out Shining Force Central (the forums are having some problems at the moment, but the site still works despite the mySQL error).

Both games actually look really good IMO. I like the art style in both of them.

The problem is, the new Shining Force game could almost belong to any series. It doesn’t look much like a Shining game, let alone a Force title. I’d almost say that it looks like it belongs in the Skies of Arcadia world more than the Shining world.

Shining Tears looks like a lot of fun, and the art style resembles Camelot’s Shining games, even though it clearly has it’s differences too. The 2D graphics should make a nice change compared to most recent RPGs… Shining Tears is proof that 2D can still look just as pretty as many of today’s 3D games, in its own way.

grumpily Hmm… the new Shining Force might be worth a hire I suppose…

20

To this day I don’t know what characterizes the Shining games.

In fact they seem as close to one another as Final Fantasy…

Granted I only played two and the rest were just screenshots…