SEGA’S SHINING FORCE MAY HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE FIRST TACTICAL RPGS TO BE RELEASED BUT OVER 30 YEARS LATER, ITS UNIQUE WORLDVIEW AND CAST OF MEMORABLE CHARACTERS ENSURE IT HAS LOST NONE OF ITS SHINE

WORDS BY ASHLEY DAY

Turn-based tactics games have arguably never been bigger. In 2022 alone we had Triangle Strategy, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks Of Hope, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Tactics Ogre Reborn, to name just a few, with Fire Emblem Engage squeaking out this January. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was one of the most popular genres on the planet. But it hasn’t always been that way. Go back to the early Nineties, long before even Final Fantasy Tactics or XCOM had debuted, and a decade before Fire Emblem first came to the West, and the genre was virtually unknown. That is, except for one shining example.

The Shining series made its debut in 1991 with the release of Shining In The Darkness for Mega Drive. This Sega-published dungeon crawler was the brainchild of two brothers, Shugo and Hiroyuki Takahashi who had previously worked at Enix on the early Dragon Quest games before going independent. Working under the name Sonic Software Planning, they collaborated with Climax Entertainment to create Shining In The Darkness, which took the Dragon Quest formula and presented it from a new, novel viewpoint; the first-person perspective.

Much as Phantasy Star had done on Master System, Shining In The Darkness wowed Mega Drive owners with an improbable immersive view. It was a real head turner, and when coupled with a deep sense of exploration, it made for a compelling RPG experience. It’s easy to see why it was popular, which makes the decision to follow it up with a completely different genre of RPG quite surprising.

Shining Force debuted on Mega Drive in 1992 and retained the world of Shining In The Darkness, a fantastical realm of wizards and warriors populated by a distinctive mix of humans, dwarves and anthropomorphic beast-men, but switched the perspective to a top-down one so you could command a large army rather than a small party of two or three. Though the similar Fire Emblem had released on Famicom a couple of years earlier, the Takahashi brothers say they were inspired not by this but the much more obscure Silver Ghost, an RTS-RPG hybrid released for PC-88 in 1988. The young designers were impressed by the way Silver Ghost allowed players to oversee and command multiple characters at once and thought this would work well in a turn-based game.