Shining Force Neo

Great dungeon crawler, shallow overall experience

Reviewed by benkosar on February 22, 2008  |  report this review

I am a huge Shining Force fan, I've played I, II, and III. I've even looked into Shining in the darkness. Imagine my drooling when I heard about this little title.

Shining force Neo however, holds nothing in common, NOTHING, with the strategy gems of it's past. It's a dungeon crawler. Yeah, that's right, a WTF dungeon crawler. Now, that rant aside, it's a very GOOD dungeon crawler. It's enjoyable, tons of weapons and ways to upgrade your char, it's addicting. The characters are large, easy to see, and the action in paced well enough. Then why do I give this game a 2 you ask? I'm glad you asked!

I'm as much an anime fan as the next guy, maybe a little less, but the story is just god-awful. From the first area, you'll be like 'The main badguy is his brother'. Everything leads you to it, that it's so obvious. The script is *horrible*. It's overacted, with annoying anime-ish bad dub voices. The story is cliched, unoriginal, and just hard to get into because it's so LAME.

I found myself early-on, just listening to enough to get the next objective, then skipping the scenes and going for it. Early on I couldn't even stomach that much. I skipped all story and just started wandering to new areas to beat things up. This game isn't rocket science, but the story actually works AGAINST the poor game, that if it weren't titled Shining force wouldn't have as much of a following, but might've had a better chance.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. There's better games that do things better. This is so obviously not Shining force that it's not even funny. If you want a real shining force expereince, pick up shining force on GBA, a remake of the first game. I'd probably avoid this sequel too, Shining force Exa unless you'd *like* to support Sega's tryst into mediocrity.

As a side note, Shining Tears was released around the same time I beleive. Shining tears isn't the strat game that shining force was either, but it's more in the same vein than this peice of crap. The game is real time, and you move your little super-deformed chars to kill the badguy ones. It's much more playable storywise than this game, but it's marred by load times mainly. Still, I'd rather play shining tears with it's load times, than this game any day.