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EXA doesn't force players into choosing whether to be Toma or Cyrille-it forces them to play both. This is a change from the first game, since Neo only featured one main character for the player to control throughout the campaign. Her partner, a centaur knight, takes most of the physical abuse while she dances around at a distance lobbing balls of fire and ice at the bad guys. Cyrille, meanwhile, is a ranged attacker with a variety of spells at her disposal. Paired up with his partner in battle, a female elf with a bow, he's more than capable of bringing the pain.
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Toma is the player's brute, able to sport a multitude of weapons and take a fair pounding while slicing through monsters like Jack the Ripper armed with a Ginsu knife after a week-long crack binge. You charge into a room, pull out your weapon (or ready your spells) and just beat the holy hell out of large groups of nondescript enemies. There's always been something strangely cathartic about hack-and-slash games. Players will stop caring about the plot after the ten minute mark-which means the gameplay had better be damn interesting.įortunately, it is. No one in the RPG business even tries to come up with interesting stories anymore, and EXA pretty much confirms it. Players take control of Toma, a young swordsman, or Cyrille, a young mage, and guide them on a lengthy quest to find Shining Force and save the world. It has a generic story that ties itself into the Shining Force universe by including the legendary sword Shining Force, and it has a few centaurs running around, but other than that, it's an SF game mostly in name. Apparently, enough of you felt the same way about it, because the title sold well enough to spawn a sequel, Shining Force EXA.ĮXA is eerily similar to its predecessor in most ways. Sure, it wasn't the one we all wanted, but if you were into Diablo-styled games on a console (or a fan of cult classic Record of Lodoss War on the Dreamcast), then Neo was a heck of a lot of fun. Once the initial shock wore off, gamers were treated to a really good game in Neo. Neo wasn't an SRPG at all, but instead a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. However, in typical Sega fashion, they couldn't simply give the fans what they wanted (another SRPG), but instead had created an entirely new game and stuck the Shining Force name on it. Sega fans got their wish a few years ago when Shining Force Neo was announced. It moved over to the Saturn, which was the beginning of the end (the saga of SFIII is a long and strange story) and then basically fell off the face of the Earth, despite the fact that it turned up in every internet thread ever created about classic franchises Sega should revive.
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Lots of nifty mythological characters made up the player's army, battles were fought on grids…it was one of the coolest series to ever appear on the Genesis. Once upon a time, Shining Force was one of the best Strategy RPGs around. They've done similar things with Sonic the Hedgehog (the problems there would be an article in and of itself), and criminally ignored classic franchises like Nights and Panzer Dragoon ( Panzer Dragoon Orta was the one time Sega has actually gotten all this right-so why haven't we seen more Panzer Dragoon games?)Īnother example of this problem, and the focus of this review, is Shining Force. See? Sega annoyed not one but two groups of fans there-that takes skill. There are fans who'd kill for a traditional Phantasy Star RPG (and no, the sad excuse for one available in Phantasy Star Universe doesn't count) and other fans who'd be just as pleased to see another version of Phantasy Star Online instead of what passes for a PSO iteration in PSU. Yet, while Nintendo still makes consoles that cater to their hardcore legions of fans (and games that those fans vociferously want), Sega opted out of the console hardware business after the Dreamcast and seems almost single-handedly determined to take its classic franchises and pervert them in ways that do little more than alienate their core audience.ĭon't believe me? Here are but a few examples: Phantasy Star went from a traditional role-playing game to an online dungeon crawler, to a card game, to a different online dungeon crawler. Both corporations were once gaming giants who've seen their stock fall in recent years, both created some of the greatest videogame IPs of all time, and both are still players in the industry. Sega is a weird company-almost the antithesis of Nintendo.