Shining Force NEO Review - PS2

When Shining Force Neo hit shelves in 2005, it met with a certain amount of resistance. Though the “Shining” name had shown up on all kinds of Sega games, “Shining Force” always denoted turn-based strategy-RPGs, games of a slow and tactically deliberate flavor. When the franchise came back as a 3D hack ‘n’ slash, it raised a little ire from the school that reckons console gaming peaked around 1994.

Hopefully, two years later, folks have had time to get used to the idea. The sequel to Neo, Shining Force EXA, doesn’t deserve to be dragged down by its name. It’s bright, it’s flashy, it’s fast-moving and chaotic. These are not bad things, no matter what the words on the box meant a decade ago.

What’s “EXA” Mean, Anyway?

Like Neo, EXA resembles the handheld Shining Soul series. It’s not quite a cooperative action-RPG (like the legendary Secret of Mana), but there’s plenty of company besides the two main characters to back them up on dungeon expeditions.

The nominal hero, Touma, is a sword-swinger at heart, while his female counterpart Cyrille is in the sorcery line. Behind them is a gallery of sidekicks, from an armored centaur knight to a pair of cutesy twin magicians. Those the AI controls, although as a rule they’re smart enough to keep themselves out of trouble.

Often there’s a choice of which hero to use, but EXA’s scenario sometimes forces you to play with one or the other in a particular situation. The two build their skills and equipment independently, so there’s an incentive to split your time 50/50 – if one hero lags behind, they’ll get shellacked the next time they have to go to battle. There might be too much of that incentive, in fact, since favoring one character in the early game can quickly leave the other one hamstrung.

Excommunicated Antagonisms?

Keep both heroes’ skills up to speed, though, and the hacking should go pretty smooth. The action in the field is easy to get your head around, but it’s just involved enough, in the right ways, to keep it from getting repetitive.

There’s a huge arsenal of different weapons and equipment to gather (all stylishly represented on each character’s 3D model), plus a multitude of skills to build up and acquire. You don’t have total control over the AI sidekick characters, but it is possible to fit them with sets of equipment that gear them towards particular strengths.

The dungeons themselves are, in fact, not all dungeons. Much of the game world is a big, interconnected field map, with big hordes of monsters and background bits to smash, plus a lot of room to explore for hidden items and areas. The outdoor locations are remarkably pretty – detailed modeling and textures create some gorgeous views, and the automatic camera direction shows them off to impressive effect. For ease of travel, most areas are riddled with teleport points, to save on needless backtracking

On top of the hacking and slashing, there’s a layer of strategy gameplay in the form of customizing the “Geo-Fortress.” Not too far into the game, our heroes take control of a sort of high-tech castle-cum-Starship Enterprise. Attacks on the fortress pop up regularly between quests, and you can upgrade different aspects of the fortress’ systems to make defense an easier job. Better shields, for instance, ward off damage to the castle’s weak points, while building up the cannons lets you Yamato-gun big groups of enemies. Inside, there are other fun extras to activate, like a virtual dungeon for quickly building up your characters.

Excursion Assaults?

As for why the giant starship/castle/whatever comes into play…well, this isn’t exactly a classic of Western literature. EXA’s cast has a lot of visual personality – the character artwork has more shading and depth than your standard big-eyed Japanese cartoon stuff – and some of the cinema scenes are good for a chuckle, but otherwise this is pretty familiar material. There’s a magic sword, a tragic hidden past, a couple of evil empires…you know the drill. If the story and characters were a bigger part of the game, they probably wouldn’t be able to carry their weight, but they work fine as something extra backing up the action in the foreground.

Touma’s the most fun, because he’s the one character playing against type. He’s an idiot, like so many RPG heroes, but instead of a well-meaning or angst-ridden idiot, he’s a cheerfully arrogant, self-interested idiot, who’s after the legendary whoopty-doo sword for no reason beyond he wants to be king of the world. It’s fun to see someone in one of these games finally act a little bit like a real human might – it’s not much, to be sure, but you take what you can get.

Exorcist Accepted?

Typically, the American character voices are up and down. They’re not so bad as in Shining Force III, which was allegedly dubbed by its QA staff, but they still have their share of weird kinks in the rhythm – some of which you can blame on a choppily-edited script, of course. A few other rough lines come from cinematics edited with the Japanese voices in mind. Those, of course, are no longer available in the American version.

Normally this wouldn’t be such a great loss, but the Japanese version had an all-star cast – Akio Ohtsuka from Ghost in the Shell, Paku Romi from Fullmetal Alchemist, and some other big names (to the anime die-hard set, anyway). The Japanese voice track would have been a nice extra, if Sega had been able to keep it in the game.

EX Alpha?

EXA obviously has its share of flaws. (It would be remiss not to also mention the criminally wimpy crossbow sound effects.) There’s no reason to hate it for simply being what it is, though. For what it is – a colorful, action-packed dungeon hack – it’s as much of a credit to the Shining Force name as any 15-year-old strategy game. Perhaps it’s been long enough for some people to finally see that.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Michael Benson