Shining Force 2 review and personal opinion

miladinoski · March 24, 2009

Posted Image Shining Force II: The Ancient Seal is an awesome RPG that every older dedicated RPG gamer remembers and and likes it, even just a bit. It's developed for the Mega Drive/Sega Genesis consoles and developed in 1994 as a sequel to the original game and in 4 localised versions for different zones in the world: Japan, USA, Europe and Brazil. If you search eBay for Shining Force II you'll find that the original cartridges plus the manuals of the game are really expensive because of it's rarity.

This game is different from the original in removing the chapter system and you can free-roam to locations where you've been previously in the game for grabbing any items (like rings, boosters etc.) you forgot or missed previously or recaptchuring the old moments. Many, many characters are available and you can change them between the battles in a special vehicle you'll meet somewhere in the middle of the game, named the Caravan so you can build the Shining Force as you wish, because you can't have more than 12 characters in the battles.

As I heard, it's also available on the WiiWare, the XBox and PS3 in its original form and it's highly addicting and popular even 15 years afterwards!

Plot:

A thief named Slade wants to steal the jewels of Light and Evil located and put by other devils in an ancient shrine in which they hid the powers of Zeon. Because the ancient barrier between the jewels was broken by Slade the thief, terrible storm happens and a devil posseses the King of Granseal?which is soon exorced by Sir Astral, called to investigate the situation. The devil goes and possesses the king of the neighbouring kindom, the King of Galam.

Bowie discovers that he is the chosen one to fight the evil and defeat it using his and his friends' strength which will become more and more through the game. Soon after a second battle to go to find Sir Hawel they are captured by the army of Galam which blindly follows the orders from the possessed king who goes and crushes the forces of Granseal but in the last fight in Granseal, Bowie gets the Jewel of Evil which attaches to the previous won Jewel of Light so Zeon can't regain his strength faster without it. Unfortunately, the Princess Elis is captured...

Graphics:

For a game made in 1994 and offered for a console they are quite impressive and imagine what they were back then! The drawings of the faces and the battles are really well done.

Sound:

8-bit sound effects, couple of MIDI songs but ofcourse they get boring after a while, I just turn Banshee on with some hardcore trash metal music in the background while I play it

Gameplay:

Fantastic gameplay and awesome characters, only a new-age gamer (blah) wouldn't want to play these games because of something called graphics. Yuk!

In this game, magic chars are what they are, their attacks with weapon are weak, but they can summon gods or powerful spells like "blaze" or "freeze" or "blast". Healers have powerfull healing spells like aura and even weapons and rings can be used to attack, heal or boost the stats of a character. If you are an older-than-15-years-old RPG maniac you must be either stupid or ignorant for not playing this fantastic master piece.

Screenshots:

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