/vr/ - Retro Games

Having your heart torn between waifus

I try maybe once every other year to get into Shining in the Darkness, but I never feel like drawing a map so I always get lost, killed, and discouraged.

>>6530797
so you've marathoned the whole first hour?

>>6530814
Give or take. First impressions are great so far.

>>6530797
>charming as FUCK

>>6530797
Enjoy it and II when you get there OP they are fantastic games. Chess battle in II is fucking badass.
>>6530813
Just look up a map online. Unless you are a 10 year old with more time on your hands than you know what to do with you don't need to be drawing a map on graph paper in this day and age.

>>6530797
a good time

>>6530797
A great game and a tear jerker ending.

>>6530797
>as FUCK
Cut out the zoom talk

>>6530797
You're in for some fun and some grinding (If you make Max use Egress before killing the last guy, you can come back to the battle and continue leveling-up [and you should max out to level 20 before promotion])

>>6531682
>[and you should max out to level 20 before promotion])
Don't be gay. There is absolutley no need to slow the game to a crawl to use a cheap strategy that takes twice as long as playing legitimately would.

>>6530797
It's pretty satisfying SRPG action. I love those bird dudes, even though they take a decent effort to make them decent units.

>>6532017
you can make it all the way to kane with minimal repeats and no promotions. i usually end up redoing his fight because thats when you get blue, and he needs some tender loving/feeding/grinding to get good, and you can make just about everyone hit 20 there. i dont really think it slows anything down by not promoting immediately at 10. having the bonus stats and then blowing up enemies after a few promo levels feels great.

Missing. You will miss a lot. Remember savescumming is for casuals though.

>>6530797
The first game is really flawed but has the best story/writing/tone. Basically there are a few characters that can get so powerful they can solo the game. If you really want powerful characters, you should replay battles (use egress before killing their leader) to grind up a bit and promote your characters as late as possible. In Shining Force 1, you can promote characters at level 10, but you can wait until level 20 to do so. The reason you want to wait is that they will become more powerful while leveling up in their promoted form if you wait. It's a strange mechanic, but hey it's old.

Shining Force 2 is a much better game. More viable characters and more promotion paths. I don't remember characters being obscenely broken in SF2, but there are some great ones for sure.

This pic of mine is 14 years old, played on an old version of the GENS emulator. I think this was the last time I played Shining Force, but they still are dear to my heart.

P.S. Anri is my waifu

>>6530797
A fun game with some really nice looks.

>>6532017
It's good that SF is a series where grinding is almost unnecessary. I never did the level 20 thing, and it's still easy enough. Which is good too because it means you don't get bogged down if you don't want to.
Downside is that some characters will join you hopelessly underlevelled and if you want to use them you need to grind. SF3 was better about that.

>>6532130
The egress tip is really good tbqh, when I first played I didn't know that was something you could do without downsides.
>broken
Far as I remember you can make Slade into a pretty good killing machine, and on my regular run May decided to become an ICBM, it's still possible for sure.

>>6532113
Yeah the Kane fight is probably the best fight for grinding to level 20 with how much XP you get there too.

SF2 Pegasus Knights, what more do you need. Play Shining Force 2 and Uncharted Waters: Golden Horizons. IMO, two of the greatest games ever made.

>>6532254
>Uncharted Waters: New Horizons
Planning to, spaniard waifu and the idea of a somewhat SRPG pirate game has me convinced. But I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Weren't they planning to do some remake of it?
>Pegasus knights
>tfw couldn't change May into one to give her even more range

>>6532262

They've since made an free-to-play/pay-to-win Online version of Uncharted Waters you can find on steam. The gameplay concepts are sound but it will never live up to what it could have been with its shitty UI and 1998 graphics.

>>6532297
>ftp/ptw
Well there goes any enthusiasm for what that could've been.
But then it's not like the old game wasn't fun already. I do remember it being a bit confusing with how loading supplies worked, I recall it telling me I had none, but then when I tried to buy some it just said my hold was too full, despite nothing being there.

>>6530797
Looks like Link on the box art.

>>6532130
SF2 was a fucking letdown. Sleeping beauty ? Wile E. Coyote ?! Really ?
SF1 story is told 100 times better.

>>6532321
Retarded over simplification, as if the princess being asleep has anything to do with the greater arc of the story. Her being asleep is a byproduct of the story, not the driving force for it. Both of them are great games, telling different stories from different continents of the same world.

>>6532321
Part of the charme of SF2 were the over the top cutscenes.
I like SF1 more too, but they're both fun, same for 3 while we're on that

>>6532324
>>6532326
Dark dragon epic fight
Vs
EGADS !

sure.

Also, I HOPE YOU LIKE CAPS
LIKE, TOM CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL

>>6532330
Are you really gonna shitpost like that in a Shining Force thread of all things?

>>6532336
let me guess, you like random encouters and save-scum crafting

>>6532340
Are they really random encounters when they happen in the same spot on the map everytime and are avoidable?
>crafting
That was annoying, but then also not necessary at least, and then Scenario 3 of 3 did away with it completely with just giving you one super weapon from that special ore instead of having you play the lottery.

I'm just saying I would gladly do a playthrough of 1 again
I would certainly not do another of 2. Way too much annoyances.

>>6530797
>Shining Force
More like Shining Farce, lol!

>>6532230
its especially good because enemies are like 1 turn's movement away. its immediate engagement, unlike the fucking overworld maps with ten tons of tress and mountains making you crawl across a pointless field for 6 straight turns just to engage. circus, balbazak's harbor, the boat, kane, chaos (to level any stragglers or to feed adam if you want him), ramladu's robots (to catch anyone up or to max out if thats your thing). best battles for grinding, both for stage of the game and experience they offer, and for the closeness of enemies.

>>6532321
sf2 actually got to HAVE "cutscenes" of characters DOING things. it had actually CHARACTER rather than a dry read of minimal stuff. apart from boken, the chicken, and the play, sf1 had very little worth exploring and experiencing. sf2 made story events bigger and more lively, as well as side experiences. sure sf2 ending was pretty awkward, but the entire main game was pretty great.

>>6532330
zeon's fight was just as epic.

>>6532340
how they handled mithril weapons was objectively terrible. needing to collect all of the hidden mithril was pretty great, but the rng for crafting them was beyond retarded, especially considering the loop needed to GET there. there are no random battles in sf2. there are scripted battles that you can reactivate by stepping in specific places.

>>6533835
At least they fixed it somewhat with 3, it felt like you had a fairly reasonable chance to get the good items some of them were not just flat out better either. So you could get by without savescumming. Especially when they just give you all that other ore in the last part which has no RNG on what you'll get.

>>6533835
Both games have little issues. SF2 goes through a phase fairly early on where you're just battling random dudes with no rhyme or reason to them. Why am I being mugged by random monsters on the way to Hobgoblin Cave? SF1 has the decency to make single battle get you one step closer to putting the boots to Dark Dragon. SF2 has a lot of the natural upgrades you'd expect to see in a sequel like the 'cutscenes', but there's fat that could have been trimmed.

As for the final fight, I don't agree. The buildup to the final fight wasn't quite there in SF2 and King Galam just didn't feel right as the preceding man given the lack of buildup for him to boot. Odd Eye would have worked better as the last man before Zeon as the last loyal soldier. You didn't even know Galam was alive at the time. Whereas Darksol has been flipping you two fingers the whole game and I was certainly eager to kick his fucking head in when the opportunity came. And to top it off, he pulls a Khan 'From hell's heart I stab at thee' on his way out. You know what King Galam does? Absolutely nothing by comparison. Bitches he hasn't got enough power then gets eaten.

On the subject of 'SF1 did it better', SF2 didn't have as many 'weird' characters as SF1 did. Guntz, Domingo, and Alef being standouts on that front. SF2 removed a bunch of classes and then made each class only practiced by one race. All the wizards are elves, the only playable human is a swordsman...

>>6534018
they're both the same in regards to overworld battles. you're interpreting sf1 as "better" because the design of it is that you never come back to an area, so fighting your way through in a linear one direct feels more natural. in sf2 you do the same thing, you fight your way through. "demons" or whatever are overrunning the country and you clear them out as you progress. you could also even rationalize it as "the wilds" and naturally occurring monsters making travel hazardous (typical fantasy setting trope). sf1 has plenty of battles that are just "the gap from location A to location B" with no real "generals" or dialogue stuff.

you're absolutely right about galem and odd eye. however, the FINAL battle is equivalent. epic entrance, a BLACK hp bar, lots of baddies. dark dragon fight just fades in, AND you can surround ALL 3 HEADS and make quick work of him. sure, dark dragon was neat and cast level 4 spells and stuff, but the actual battle was much less engaging. hell, your party starts off split up, so can even more easily dive in and kick his shit in. zeon's fight started with YOU surrounded, and choke points in each direction. also if you try to go straight for him, he has protective baddies/fodder first, as well as laser flowers to the sides. unless you have fliers, you cant surround him either. dark dragon does have the cool unique kill animation for max though.

the character comparison is better than you give it credit for. i'll absolutely grant you the race/visual comparison, but unique/different soldier is pretty even. i'll cont next post about that

>>6532320
It's not just the boxart. Max has a green tunic not too disimilar from Link. The details are pretty different beyond that though.

>>6534018
>>6534123
so sf1 has gong, zylo, kokichi, guntz, domingo, bleu, musashi, adam, hanzou. not counting jogurt because he's a joke. not counting lyle because he's basically just an archer. not counting alef because she's just a mage with the same spells as the others, just learns bolt quicker and maxes it (she's a waifu though, and wins in regards to unique sort of race, but race isnt the thing here, animations/actions are). im hesitant to count gong, but he cant equip weapons, so he's slightly different from other healers. honestly its been so long since i fed him to max levels, that i dont even remember if he does provide competent damage. so thats 9 characters.

if we DONT include special promo classes, sf2 has slade, kiwi, peter, gerhalt, zynk, and claude for 6. if we include special promo classes, we also add rohde, taya, jaro, sheela, and lemon, for a total of 11, AND you can have 2 of each of those 5 with promo items.

and actually in terms of race, they're pretty even too. sf1 has human, dwarf, centaur, elf, rudolf (basically a beastman though), birdman, beastman, armadillo, jellyfish, dragon, fox (basically just beastman), and robot. so thats 11, 12 if you count alef as different from zylo (or only 10 if you count khris as the same), 13 if you count jogurt's joke existence, 14 if you assume japan samurai/ninja arent just human or whatever. but a core 11

sf2 has human, elf, centaur, dwarf, rat, turtle, phoenix, beastman, birdman, robot, and golem. thats an even 11, only down to 9 if you force kiwi and slade to count as beastment. its not that different. you might say "but you get to meet mermaids in sf1!" yeah, but you get to meet a variety of beastmen AND bird people in 2.

>>6534018
also you're wildly misremembering classes and races. both games, archers are elves and one centaur. sf2 also has rohde as a brass gunner type human. who uses swords in 1? humans, dwarves, and birds. who uses swords in sf2? humans, dwarves, and birds. centaurs are the knights in both games, but sf1 has kokichi and gunts also using their weapons. sf2 is just knights and pegasus. sf1 healers are humans, plus khris. sf2 healers are elf and human. the only thing different is the mages in sf2 are all elves, but sf1 had 3 different races.

lets cover "class" total based solely on the abbreviations/type. sf1 has hero, warrior, knight, mage, archer, healer, monk, birdman, werewolf, wing knight, steam knight, magic creature, assault knight, dragon, samurai, robot, and ninja. thats 17. (18 if you count jogurt's waste of space).

sf2 has hero, priest, knight, warrior, mage, thief, tort, phoenix, ranger, wolfman, birdman, archer, robot, golem. thats 14. BUT thats not including the ones that join as an advanced class for brass gunner, sorcerer, pegasus knight, master monk, and baron. that would bring the total to 19, which exceeds sf1.

Daily reminder that Mae is bae.

>>6530797
A comfy if simple SRPG series. Make sure to play Shining Force CD as well, it's a remaster of two of the Gaiden games.

>>6531429
Prove your age right now.

>>6532130
>I don't remember characters being obscenely broken in SF2
>Posts Slade
>Peter is an absolute murder machine

>>6532130
>>6534461
yeah, slade and peter had some crazy overtuned stats. rick usually did really well for me too, but lacked in defense. also boost and aura casters had a guaranteed exp source, so they could out level everyone if you felt like grinding that hard.

>>6534261

I would have liked them to remove all the weird dogfaced girls or whatever they're supposed to be and replace them with more centaur ladies. Although Mae is good enough by herself really. She needs a spinoff series.

>>6534136
Oh yeah, I just mean at a glance from the thumbnail his headband winds up looking like the hat.

>>6531183
Chess battle is a meme. My favorite is the harpy pool.

>>6534261
Correct

>>6534602
As much as I'm for more centaur girls, I think part of the charm of the series is that you have this melting pot of different races.
It's a shame that it kinda got lost over time, take 3 for example, just about all the NPCs are the same human sprite. Mind you you still get a ton of different characters and that's fun, but the towns could've used some variety to help with it.

Course then it got completely lost by some of the newer installments, but that's another story.

>>6534461
They didn't add a "freeroam" mechanic to CD that wasn't in Gaiden right? It's more traditional of just going from battle to battle instead of exploring towns and whatnot?

>>6535212
>It's more traditional of just going from battle to battle instead of exploring towns and whatnot?
Correct.

its my first time playing shining force 1 as well but playing it on my genesis mini. so far having fun but man im happy there no permadeaths cuz this stage fucked me up hard

I think I said last thread that I was gonna draw something, so here's some circus battle. And liberties taken in armor design.

>>6535293
Yeah that one can be a bit tough the first time around.

>>6535470
>forgot to cleanup the arms on the guy that is thrown
Nevermind, here you go.

>>6535293
We understand, the Marionette batters everybody the first time. You won't have to deal with another battle that hard for a while. Unless you've neglected Max, in which case the next battle is going to be absolute shite for you.

I actually just started playing Shining in the Darkness after playing Mario Tennis and checking some forums i found out that the series has an awful translation, does the translation affects the story and characters that much or is just autism bs from fans?
Also the character art is fucking awesome.

>>6535823
I'm relatively convinced it's mostly a bit of autism.
As far as I know some things got lost in translation for the first game, which got reintroduced or written back in in the GBA remake, but I also heard that was the writer changing the story a bit after a few years.
That is to say, if it was butchered horrendously, I never noticed through all three games. The stories are generally simple enough anyway.
>art
The art is great, I wish there was some comprehensive artbook somewhere tbqh.

>>6535881
>I wish there was some comprehensive artbook somewhere tbqh
Good news and bad news
>Good news
There does appear to be an artbook, Shining Force Central says there's the Encyclopedia Shining Force which is the closest thing on the site to an SF1 art book.
>Bad news
Doesn't appear like anybody has scanned the fucking thing so god only knows what it actually is.

>>6536141
What a shame, the best I saw around was the tiny pictures that are on the forums or a few of the sega books and strategy guides that feature some SF or SitD stuff.

>>6535823
PYRA CASTS SLOW !

>>6534461
>>6534531
I agree, while making my post I was thinking of Slade and Peter being super strong. However, they pale in comparison to Bleu or Domingo in SF1. When Bleu is grinded up, he can solo the entire game. Domingo is a flying caster with freeze 4, which I remember being absurdly strong in the game (Anri carried my first playthrough because of it).

Like I said it's been many years since I've played, so you all probably have much more optimized data/information than I had in the mid 2000's.

I typed out all of the above, but I forgot about one character in Shining Force 2: Karna. I remember I had a Karna who had a really large mana pool and could cause Aura 4 (full heal on the map) as many times as I wanted. She could also tank the last boss easily. I guess she would be obscenely broken.

>>6535470
>>6535479
Assisinate Tony Taka and become the new Shining artist, please.

>>6537029
karna learned boost and aura. sheela has boost, frayja learns aura. as long as they hit targets, they can guarantee 49 (or 48 or whatever) exp every turn and surpass fighters that dwindle down to 1 exp for kills.

however, slade and peter can eventually one-shot damn near anything. i wouldnt count casters among the op for their spells, thats sort of cheating. i've never felt like playing catch up with domingo (since by the time you get him, anri is ahead) but somebody in another thread mentioned that he gets really good hp and defense too, so maybe he can count as an exception to the rule. in my recent playthrough like last month, while powerful, bleu only seemed to surpass arthur in defense. comparing arthur and slade is pretty accurate.

>>6535479
Those kick ass dude! Are you taking requests?

>>6537395
That would require for Sega to actually start making SF games again in the first place.

>>6537605
Depends on what it is, but I don't have a ton of time to draw, nor am I terribly experienced in actually drawing people, so no promises.

I love Shining Force and it bothers me deeply that everyone else who loves it wants to fuck horses and foxes.

>>6537615
I'd like to see the Marionette get some love please. For the boss of such a memorable fight, there is absolutely no art of the thing.

>>6537646
Could try, I think the issue is that there's really not a ton on it beyond the sprite.

>>6537643
Nah man, I want to fuck ladies in armor that happen to be their own cavalry

>>6537654
It got a face in the GBA remake though I'll grant you it's still not a lot. It looks kinda like Mishaela.

>>6537803
I think if I am gonna do that I might just work with the shade like there too or like it is on the original sprite

>>6537643
Are you honestly implying you wouldn't fuck them?