Shining Force III Scenario 3 (シャイニング・フォースIII シナリオ3 氷壁の邪神宮), 9/23/1998, developed and published by Sega

We’ve come to the final Saturn game I will be playing (there are two more Saturn SRPGs but I’ll be playing the PS1 versions of them). It’s also the last of the “traditional” SRPG-style Shining games, other than the remake of 1. I believe that there are some other Shining games that are SRPG-ish but I don’t know if any of them fully qualify under my rules.

I was not able to figure out how to get the carryover stuff to work in Mednafen so I didn’t get any of the “sychrony” stuff from the first two games.

On the whole, I feel like I am not as big a fan of the SF games as a lot of SRPG players. I don’t know if this is because I never had Sega systems as a kid so I have no nostalgic connection with them. III seems to be especially beloved among fans, and while I think it’s a good game, it’s not one of my favorites.

The main character this time is Julian, who appeared in scenario 1. The first few chapters take Julian’s story up to the point where Scenario 1 ended. I found SF3’s storyline very difficult to follow — I couldn’t keep track of the various factions and alliances, and the way you basically play the same time period three times leading up to the Scenario 1 ending didn’t work for me. I know the story is well liked and I think other people appreciated it more than I did, but I just found it clumsy. It also seemed to me like there was all this buildup of tension and suspense over the situation at the end of scenario 1, but in scenario 3 when all three groups reach that point the cliffhanger is solved instantly and you move on to the final “defeat the evil demon” part of the story.

The gameplay is the same as the other two scenarios so nothing new there. It’s the classic SF gameplay for the most part, so it’s enjoyable. I do feel that it is starting to show its age, though, and I wish that they had done a bit of refinement rather than essentially reusing the SF1 system. In particular, they should have added the ability to see who is acting next (maybe for at least the next 3-5 actions), and I would have preferred that the special abilities be MP-cost moves rather than just things that randomly activate on attacks. There are a lot of little issues (for instance, that bow people can shoot through walls) that make it clear this is basically a system that was developed in the early days of SRPGs and hasn’t really advanced much since then.

This may seem unduly harsh but my criticisms are based on the fact that the game does all the basic stuff right and is generally a fun game, but could have been a lot better if they had been more willing to update the old style gameplay.

Some notes on some of the battles:

Battle 3 – you have to face the Valkyrie shooting at you — you can have some NPCs to weather some of the hits but you’ll have to take some of them. This battle also has one of those ruins submaps. I found the ruins submaps a lot more annoying in this game compared to the first two scenarios so I ended up ignoring a lot of them.Y

Battle 4 – Another Valkyrie map. This time you can hide behind walls to avoid the hits, but you won’t be able to avoid everything. Grashia can use his spell to disable the Valkyrie when you get close (Grashia is a weird character, his only two spells for quite a while are Aura and a damage spell that is basically unusable because it takes all of his MP).

You can start using the mithril forging shop basically right from the beginning.

Battle 6 – You can defeat dragons with a new guy to get them on your team but they can’t level up and if they die they are gone for good. But the white dragon boss can be convinced by the character and he is a permanent character who is not bad at all.

Battle 8 – Here you have part of your force on the wall using the cannons. They can defeat the characters shooting their own cannons but eventually they have to destroy the door so that the boss will come out. At first I thought I could leave the cannons alone because they didn’t seem to do much damage, but it’s too much when they both attack the same person and then that person is also being attacked by the ground troops.

Melinda appears as an NPC but she is pointless, she just moves around but never attacks.

Battle 9 – The golems are annoying and it can be hard to avoid their attacks; in the end I had to rush a few characters up to the boss before everyone got taken out.

Battle 10 – You can avoid reinforcements by staying in the darkness away from the light but I didn’t bother, I just killed the reinforcements as they came.

Battle 12 – This has a weird ruin where the thief doesn’t open the chests unless you block him into a movement where he has to stop next to a chest. Rather than restarting the map to get this right I just moved on.

Battle 13 – You have to fight two bosses here, and you have to be careful moving to where Yasha is because it will trigger falling floors that will cut off the rest of your characters from moving. I was able to take out Yasha with bow people and flying units.

So now we have finally reached the end of Scenario 1 in terms of the story. Hopefully I will have the game finished by next week.