BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND VISUALS CHALLENGE Easy to Medium COMPLETION TIME 25-40 Hours OVERALL 3.5/5.0 Rating definitions

   Sega's Shining series began back in 1991 with Shining in the Darkness, a 3-D dungeon crawler, yet would branch off to other RPG subgenres, with action RPGs such as Shining Tears and tactical RPGs such as Shining Force, the second in the series, and one of the first TRPGs ever to reach America. A little over a decade later, Sega's Amusement Vision development team produced a remake for the series' first tactical offering, entitled Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon, which Atlus localized in 2004. While not perfect, the small improvements make it one of the more enjoyable strategy RPGs of the current generation of games.

   Battles are central to tactical RPGs, and Resurrection does pretty well in this aspect. Combat is grid-based, with the player able to move around a character when he/she reaches his/her turn. By the way, a turn order meter now shows who will take their turn when, allowing for planning if necessary. Anyway, a character can attack an enemy in range, use magic if available (with certain spells going up to four levels, and the player able to adjust spell level if desired), use one of four available items, or end his/her turn. Fortunately, your characters receive experience from performing most any action, with a hundred points needed to level up, and a cap on forty-eight experience points acquired from each action. Various kinds of map terrain, I should mention, can drop your characters' stats by a certain percentage.

   When a character reaches level ten, he/she can receive a promotion to an upper class at a church, resetting his/her level to 1 and cutting off some stats yet allowing him/her to equip more powerful gear. The maximum level a character can advance to before promotion is twenty. Additionally, you never have to waste time on losing battles, since the hero, Max, can cast Egress to teleport to a church, usually in a town, to perform business such as reviving dead characters, buying new items and equipment, changing his battle party, and so forth; Max, however, eventually loses use of Egress, although consumable Angel Wings provide the same effect. If Max dies in battle, it's game over.

Clash of the Titans

   New to the remake is that characters have separate four-item inventories for equipment (limited to weapons and accessories) and consumable items (though the latter inventory can still store an extra weapon the character can switch out as desired during his/her turn). Also new is a card system, where the player can collect various character and enemy cards that a new character, Mawlock, can equip to use in battle for various effects, such as allowing a ground character to act as a flying character. Moreover, battles now grant bonus rewards to players who complete them in a certain number of turns.

   In the end, there are only a couple of minor issues with the battle system, such as the fact that the player must center area-affecting spells on an enemy or character for them to work. The straightforward nature of the battle system might also turn off players well accustomed to more complicated tactical RPGs, although deeper, quite frankly, doesn't always mean better, and combat in Resurrection works out pretty well in the end, especially if overcomplicated tactical battle systems aren't your cup of tea.

   Interaction, though, could've certainly used a little improvement. While changing your battle party isn't nearly as tedious as it was in the original version, and you now have an item box where excess items can stack up to 99, flaws still persist, among them being the maddening number of confirmations needed to purchase items (though you can buy them in bulk this time around), and the need for a character to have an open equipment slot for him/her to equip another weapon or accessory. The fact that the same button used to cancel out a selection is also the same button used to speed up text is a bit annoying, as well, as is the inability to see the effects of gear in your item box or unequipped cards when you're changing those that Mawlock has equipped. The translation is largely spotless, except maybe for "(character) gains 1 experience points," but interaction could've been better in my opinion.

Human fly here!

   The original Shining Force, in its time, was one of the very first tactical RPGs, and while not the first of its kind (a few Fire Emblem titles predated it, I believe), I am certain its mechanisms did not entirely plagiarize from those of other titles. The remake has its share of new features, such as additional characters, epilogue battles, new graphics, and some enhancements to its storyline, and while the overall product still resembles the original version, to count off points for originality simply because the game is a remake would be grossly unfair, and I'm certain many out there would agree.

   The storyline stars Max, a hero with amnesia washed up on the shore, who becomes involved in a bunch of events beginning when the Kingdom of Runefaust brings war to the land of Rune. Supposedly, the idea of an amnesiac hero is overused, but to be quite honest, I can't name many RPGs on the top of my head other than this to feature such a protagonist. Anyway, the story is actually pretty nicely executed, and one feature that especially struck me is that if you regularly speak with your characters at your headquarters after using them in battle for a certain time, they'll reveal interesting tidbits about their backgrounds or the game's world (or, in some unfortunate cases, give you inane trivia). Max himself has a pretty interesting past, and overall, unless you for some reason think that half of all RPGs have amnesiac heroes, the plot works out well.

   One thing that's disappointing, though, is the aurals. While the music is easily a step up from the original Genesis version, and features a few decent and even some original pieces, its instrumentation nonetheless leaves much to desire. Granted, the Gameboy Advance has never been a fabulous bastion of aural quality, but many of the digital instruments used here have been conspicuously absent from games since the NES era, and with good reason. In the end, the developers could've easily made some effort to make the remake sound better.

Yes, with your ruby shades, you can see anything!

   Also disappointing are the visuals. While the color scheme isn't nearly as vomit-inducing as the Genesis version's, the overall graphical execution nonetheless leaves something to desire. The character portraits, however, are easily better than those in the original version, although the chibi two-head-tall sprite design is slightly on the evil side of ugly, and is in many cases inconsistent with the art and sometimes dwarfs the scenery in town (with trees, for instance, being as large as the sprites).The battle shots in which one your characters attacks the enemy or vice versa look alright, though, yet aren't vastly superior to those in the Genesis version. All in all, the graphics designers could've certainly polished the visuals a bit more and taken better advantage of the Gameboy Advance's visual technology.

   Since you never have to waste your time on losing battles, Resurrection is fairly easy, yet can be somewhat tough if you rush through the game. Completion time ranges anywhere from twenty-five to forty hours, depending upon the time spent with character building.

   In conclusion, Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon is a worthy remake of the classic Genesis title, with some nice enhancements to its battles and story, among other things. Sure, it could've easily been better, but it's nothing short of entertaining (and, so I've heard, much better than many of the more recent Shining titles), and a very nice introduction to series, not to mention tactical RPGs.