Shining Force NEO

[RedCydranth]

I've known about the creation of this game for some time and that it IS coming to the U.S. I have been a huge fan of the SF series since the days of Sega Genesis. This game isn't in the same style as Shining Force I-III but its certainly a great looking game.

Here's a link to an article about its US release:
http://moses.gametrailers.com/viewnews.php?id=18705

And here's the sweet trailer:
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1443

You'll have to go through an ad before you see it and it may take a while to load but its worth it.

Who else thinks this looks sweet? Who has played past Shining Force games (The Shining Soul series blows in comparison.)? I'm getting this, how about you?

[DJZen]

<3 teh shining force. I'm definitely looking forward to this.

[Erdrick Holmes]

ABOUT FUCKING TIME!

[SomethingBig]

What do the JApanese think about it? Shining Tears was crap.

[Erdrick Holmes]

What do the JApanese think about it? Shining Tears was crap.

Did you actually play it or did you just get that from the review of it on XPlay?

[Chzn8r]

Shining Force 2 is one of the greatest RPGs known to man.

That is all.

[Ryth]

What do the JApanese think about it? Shining Tears was crap.

Did you actually play it or did you just get that from the review of it on XPlay?

I know I played Shing Tears...and...well Neo better be better than that 'game'. I myself am excited! Hopefully the outcome will be the oppisote Shining Tears'.

[RedCydranth]

Anything thats not Shining Force (Tears and Soul) are sub par compared to the original. I hope Neo will revive the series. The Gameboy Remake of SF1 was decent but it added too many things that weren't in the original. Still a better game than most other GBA RPGs.

The soundtrack of Neo, from what Ive heard myself and from people who have heard more say its phenominal, reminicent of Suikoden II's woderful orchestrations.

I will be the first in my area to buy this game and I have high hopes for it.

[Erdrick Holmes]

Shining Force 2 was the best SRPG ever made. Screw you, FF Tactics.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

Anything thats not Shining Force (Tears and Soul) are sub par compared to the original.Shining in the Darkness was the original, not Force.

[SomethingBig]

Did you actually play it or did you just get that from the review of it on XPlay?
X Play should definitely have more detailed reviews. Actually, I just heard bad stuff from my friends and IGN. It doesn't look all that appealing, anyway.


Shining Force 2 was the best SRPG ever made. Screw you, FF Tactics.
That's so very true.

[Erdrick Holmes]

I still wanna play it, I find it hard to beleive that Sega makes a bad game. Thats kind of an Oxymoron now. I'll play it myself eventually.

[Chzn8r]

Shining in the Darkness was interesting, at least.

Shining Force was good, but I didn't like the linearity, or many of the characters. The GBA remake is better in my opinion.

Shining Force 2 was the pinacle of the series, though many will argue in favor of SF3 and it's other episodes. It's hard to love it though when Saturns (and specifically that game) are so rare now that I haven't really gotten to play it. From what I saw of my bro playing, it had horrible horrible horrible Virtua-Fighter looking battle sequences. Like, the ruts of early polygonal game graphics. They should've stuck with beautiful pseudo-3D sprites like what's used everywhere else in the game.

As for the spinoffs (the Gamegear and Sega CD games, etc...) I don't really know. My bro liked Sword of Haja, SFCD, and Holy Ark though.

And about SF2 vs FFTactics... I dunno. My two favorite RPGs.

[RedCydranth]

Kawaii, you are correct, SitD did come first. but that was a dungeon crawler that was mediocre to the Shining Force series. But thank you for the correction.

Shining Force NEO' main character is named Max, just like the SFI's main characyer. I wonder if this is a retelling of the SFI story, but in a new battle system. Time will tell.

I don't think that SF:RoDD was the best remake in the world but it was okay. Mawlock made the game far easier than it already was, and the inclusion of the card was completely irrelevant to the entire SF game. I think they just wanted to have the "collect something" aspect that is in far too many RPGs nowadays. Zuiko and Narshe were decent additions as they were fun characters to play with and din't change the storyline too dramatically.

[Erdrick Holmes]

Actually, I think SF1's main hero was Robin.

Was SitD the first appearance of Dark Dragon?

[SomethingBig]

I still wanna play it, I find it hard to beleive that Sega makes a bad game. Thats kind of an Oxymoron now. I'll play it myself eventually.
That new Shadow the Hedgehog game looks like a disgrace to the Sonic franchise, as much as I love Sega.

Shining Force 2 was what probably got me into the RPG genre. I remember watching my brother play it, then hating it because you couldn't jump. :D I was 7 or 8, back then.

[Chzn8r]

Shining Force NEO' main character is named Max, just like the SFI's main characyer. I wonder if this is a retelling of the SFI story, but in a new battle system. Time will tell.

I thought we already knew that it's a retelling. But I may be remembering wrong.

[Vyk]

Oh gosh. I shoulda came to this thread sooner. I grew up on the Shining series. Played all the American releases. Even part of an obsessed Shining based message board. So I can tell you some pretty reliable information. Though if it's wrong, don't blame me ^_^

Anyway, Sega had announced some time ago, that even though the main character shares the same name as Max of the original Shining Force (there is also Kain, one of the main enemies in the original) those names are only used as a harald to the original characters. Its not a re-telling, and if I remember correctly, its not even in the same world as the rest of the Shining series. A lot of people had assumed that Max supposedly came from the past, that this might be a story of his life in that time. Sega said no. If they lied, sorry. But this game is supposedly completely stand-alone.

Though I really don't approve of Sega tacking on the name of Shining Force to it (since its basically not a Shining Force game) I'm still eager to test it out. Though I honestly can't stand the character art. Oh well. Back to lurking again.

[Aphelion]

I'm not a big fan of Shining Force myself, but I've played SF: Ressurection of the Dark Dragon and Shining Soul...They're both good games, though I heard the latter can't be compared to other Shining games...

I'm looking forward to this, just to see if the Shining series can still support the fame it gained on the previous generations.

[Erdrick Holmes]

I thin Sega should just remake SFIII sence the only way you could play it now is on a Saturn.

[Vyk]

Uh I play ISO on my compy ^_^;; And RotDD and SS are nothing compared to their predicessors x_x; Get the originals for emulator or something. Even the GameGear (which were ported for SFCD and are now coming to cell phones) games win over the GBA titles >.<

[Erdrick Holmes]

Yeah but it's impossible to play the SFIII game without a Saturn. Even Saturn emulation is impossible unless you havee a freaking BEAST of a computer.

[DJZen]

Saturns really aren't that hard to find, just look on ebay.

[Vyk]

I wouldn't really call my computer a beast... It is pretty new, but without a graphics card its not much more special than any other computer. Though I suppose it has a fairly fast processor. It seems capable of handling whatever it takes to run a Saturn game. So I guess it'd be doing the work of 2 or 3 processors? Can't remember. But really in my opinion, especially with typical computers these days, your biggest concern for Saturn emulation is the sound. My computer cannot re-create that sound. The games sound like crap most of the time, but otherwise run quite fine ^_^;

Er... sorry for going so far off topic XD I doubt anyone needs any precursors to play NEO since it's not supposed to have much to do with the other games.

[Erdrick Holmes]

Hopefully Sega puts more of an effort into getting this to the US fans. We got screwed on SFIII as it was rare and expensive. Plus Sega crews the US out of the other Shining games anyway, with bad translations and crap.