Shining Force

There’s two possible games here: one where you spam main character Max’s Egress spell to restart fights while retaining all the EXP you’ve gained, and one where you tough it out and push through even as the enemies far outpace you. The difference is difficult to reconcile because going the latter route directly interferes with one of the game’s strengths: its robust cast mixing together fantasy, sci-fi, and horror influences. Laser-equipped ancient automaton Adam, alien hatchling Domingo, and final dragon survivor Bleu all show up in your party effectively useless unless you’re willing to devote time to grinding them up, which blunts the enthusiasm of bringing them in. On the other side, the game is better balanced than you’d initially think for those looking to run through with a core group of characters with quicker scaling, especially since the back quarter throws two secret units at you that will instantly swing your team back into contention with the roughest forces you’ll encounter. It helps that characters can be bought back from the dead in a game where cash flows freely from every enemy killed; on some level I would prefer if the economy was less overwhelmingly stacked in the player’s favor or if the post-battle pillage threw less amazing freebie weapons their way, but it definitely helps smooth out the curve when the difficulty dials up in the last 10 battles or so.

Even though the secret units seem like they’d be perfect as the lead point of attack in a balled-up formation, the game has some smart ground rules that keep them from overcentralizing the fights. For one: magic is arguably your most powerful asset throughout the game, as the strongest spells can hit 13 different targets at once (more than you’re capable of putting on the field), and magic/energy attacks ignore the target’s defense in exchange for dealing flat-ish damage. By the time you get Musashi, your secret dead-eyed samurai tank,¹ he can get ganked by a group of Torch Eyes (quadruped optical cannon tanks) shooting flat damage from a distance, even while the final bosses can’t scratch him with physical attacks. It helps that characters don’t counterattack on hit, removing Musashi and other’s ability to sit at chokepoints and slaughter every enemy that foolishly comes into range. When you’re in control, magic quickly becomes omnipresent across your party thanks to the presence of many items that give units single spells in exchange for inventory space and repair costs; main character Max turns from a peak melee unit in the early game to a vessel for his unique Chaos Breaker sword with Freeze 3 once he falls off damage-wise. Having dual threats in your party pays off big time when high evasion enemies start showing up as magic has guaranteed hits, giving you a push-pull between sinking low damage spells into these enemies and rolling the dice on whether your best units can actually land a pot-shot. The boon to player tacticians across all layers of these interactions is that they create non-binding, organic strength/weakness relationships between these unit archetypes that fuel party composition and placement decisions, keeping all of your regular units good at many things without making them total wrecking balls (ignoring the fact that they sort of are until the last third, anyway).

The fight against Chaos gets off to a quicker start than most other encounters, with instant clashes occurring within the first round of turns. The robot squid Jet enemies are exceedingly dangerous due to their damage and flying, and this map puts them to good use in range of your spawn point. [src]

Battles heat up most when you’re put on the spot in cramped rooms like the Chaos fight, where ranged enemies can quickly flank you and expose your inability to stagger your troops in a checkerboard formation to keep the AoEs from gashing your ranks. These also work best when the complete slate of enemies gets overhauled going into a fight, like in the oddball circus fight towards the beginning, which drops in new puppet-themed enemies out of nowhere. Battles that hit the mark like these or strain your troops’ ability to deal with flyers/bad terrain come often, but fatigue sets in when certain archetypes get repeated, such as the in-betweener transit battles through mountains and forest that slow the pace to a crawl when they become frequent in the second half of the game. Enemies also tend to turtle in place, making it sometimes trivial to decimate them with no reaction if the turn order lines up in your favor, although enough instances exist where even dangerous high mobility units will chase you down before your first turn, and a couple bosses here or there will roam to kill nearby units. Had this been a 25-battle game with a sharper difficulty curve on the frontend instead of a 30-battle game that gives everything to the player early on and has conspicuous filler/clone missions, we might have had a genuine classic on our hands out the gate.