I wrote a Shining Force review for GameFAQs, but I'm a little hesitant to post it. First off, it's a long review. It's over 3,000 words (unless Microsoft Word is screwy) and I'm not sure what to cut. Second, I'm going to be posting this with about fifteen 8's, 9's, and 10's for this game. I want to be able to tell why I felt the way I did when everyone else in the world, except Dark Gaia, loves this game.
I posted this at another forum, but couldn't get an answer out of anybody. Could I get somebody to too look at this and give me any notes on what I should leave out or change?
This is for GameFAQs, so the overall at the beginning doesn't match the overall at the end.
---------------------------
The Nintendo Didn't Have It, But the Famicom Sure Did...
5/10
When I got this game in the mail, there was a note with it that read something like "You won't believe how much I went through with this game. I even had people e-mailing me for a Buy It Now price. But it's yours, and you won it fair and square". (Of course, I wasn't the one who actually bought it since I'm too young to eBay). It seemed quite popular. I thought it would be for a reason. I popped it in, and the way the game played was awfully familiar. Why was it so familiar? Because I've played it before.
Now, some think this is the first of this kind of RPG. It's not the first. I don't know what the first is, but this isn't it. Why? 'Cause I know of a game that played like this that came out well before it.
What's the other game? You might have heard of it and not even know it. Own a Gamecube? Own a copy of Smash Brothers Melee? Unlocked Marth and Roy? Yup. You've heard of it.
Yes, this is how Fire Emblem played. And having to play Fire Emblem without knowing a word anyone is saying left me out of the plot. Dark Gaia says Shining Force's plot is a ripoff on Fire Emblem's (wouldn't be surprised). Haven't a clue what's going in Fire Emblem, so I really can't say anything on that one.
But the plot here is still boring. When the game is turned on, we see a short cinema. It's done fairly well, but the it's the "Light fights Dark for control of the world, Light wins, Dark cast into another dimension, Dark vows to come back in a thousand years, Dark is immortal but Light isn't" crap I've seen in at least ten other games. The actual game starts with a centaur named Varios training Max, the main character of the game. Varios runs off, so does Max, Max goes and thumps some monsters, and returns to his town to find everyone dying or dead. He runs into a guy named "Kane" (who's name changes spelling throughout the game), who's running off with something we never hear of again. It seems that he's on a mission to "revive" (last I checked, the intro said he wasn't dead) the evil Dark Dragon. So, Max rounds up some friends and takes off to stop the "revival" of Dark Dragon.
If that's not enough, dialogue is boring and there's jack squat in terms of character development. A basic idea of their character is given once in a while when a new character is obtained, and some in the manual. After that, they're little more than robots programmed only with a fighting program. Ever feel for a robot programmed only to fight? Not me.
I found all the dialogue before the fights totally pointless, since I knew what was going to happen in the end. For example, every single time the good guys are supposed to beat the bad guys to something, the bad guys always get it. The only time the good guys get something is when there's not a... erm... "race" to get it. By the third "race", I knew how it was going to come out. Of course, Sega had to somehow keep the ball rolling. But they didn't have to make a storyline that's so predictable.
I should have known the dialogue wouldn't be that good when I found that each and every time I turned the game on (until I figured out how to skip it), I had to sit through some little elf girl rambling on about the evil "Dark Dragon".
Speaking of Dark Dragon, think about the name. "Dark Dragon". That doesn't even sound evil to me. It doesn't even sound like a name. Seriously, I think I'd be pretty embarrassed if I were supposed to be the physical form of all evil and I somehow landed a name that sounds like something out of Mega Man. Of course, I'd be pretty embarrassed if my name were "Dark Force", too. That's why I go by his Phantasy Star name of "Darkfalz". Funny how altering a few letters changes the name from sounding like a common noun to pure evil. Shame Sega didn't do that with Dark Dragon. And if a horrible name wasn't enough, he doesn't even look like a dragon. Now... Dragonlord. THAT was evil in the form of a dragon. THIS is not. You could have done better, Sega.
And all that's just the boring as hell plot. Now let's talk about the actual game.
This game is played on a "play area", where all the characters on the board must be moved around in a strategic (if you call being able to blow into the fight and hack your way through "strategy") manner until a character gets in such a range (usually touching the other, but some can attack from afar) they can attack another. They can then attack with their main or use magic if they can. If they don't make it to an area where they can attack, they can stay there and do nothing, move and do nothing, or use an item.
Unlike Fire Emblem where anyone could be moved in the player's turn, here the players move in a certain order judged by their speed. Seems like it was to add strategy, but it actually did the complete opposite. You can be much more brainless about where you put your characters, because you can have people lure and surround the enemy without much risk of getting one of your people surrounded. If all were done in one turn, you'd have to think much better about where you want your characters. And this speed system isn't perfect. Every now and then, that Dark Mage that originally went well after Ken gets another turn in between Ken's turns, and Ken's dead. Why? Got me.
The characters fight the enemies they run into, and eventually go up a level. When they reach level 10, they can be promoted. For example, promoting a Mage makes them a Wizard. They seem a bit stronger when promoted, but otherwise not much about them changes.
There's also magic in this game, but later in the game spells take up WAY too much MP. A healing spell may cost the character 20 MP when they only have 30. Even then, it doesn't heal that much HP.
When I first played this game, I really enjoyed it. I liked how much it felt like Fire Emblem, and I could understand the plot. But the worst thing happened, and down the road it did a 180 on me and begun to get really boring. My opinion of a strategy RPG is one where my brain has to be used. Sure, there should be warm-up stages, which is what I was hoping the first few stages in this would be. Well, the brainpower needed to finish a stage never really increased. Just about every stage ran on the "you find it, you smash it" type of play. Most of the time I could just charge into a fight at full speed and thump everything in my way without much thought.
From what I played of Fire Emblem, it's hard. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason it never came to America. Now, Shining Force is noticeably easier than Fire Emblem, but went way too far in trying to be easier that Fire Emblem.
The easy factors far outnumbered the hard ones. First, the AI can be really stupid sometimes. I might have one character standing by himself, and all the enemies will either stand there and do nothing, run, or go after a mob of seven characters ("Yoooo-hoooo, I'm right heee-eere!"). Perhaps some CPUs are programmed "Go after the leader and disregard anyone else unless they get in the way".
Second, people who can attack from a distance are very numerous, even seeming to outnumber the people who have to be right up to an opponent to attack. Of course, mages and archers can attack from a distance. Then there's the centaur knights who are coming out of your hair in the game (half of them at the beginning, where they're inferior by the end), and they can be equipped with spears which allow them to stand one unit away from an enemy and attack them. May not sound helpful, but it helps against the enemy counter attacking you in the next turn. It also allows you to use, say, a river or table to your advantage. Plenty of times the enemy just sat there and let me pelt them. I can understand it if they were a boss, but this happened frequently to normal characters.
Third, a couple of minor things relating to each other make things much easier. For example, if somebody dies, you can just retreat and revive them. In Fire Emblem, there was no retreating from a fight and when someone died, they were gone for good. This adds onto the being able to mindlessly blast your way through the game. Retreat. If Max goes down, it doesn't matter how many other people are still standing, you're sent back to the last town you visited, minus half your cash. Any levels earned by the characters are still there. Just revive anyone who's downed, and bust right back in. Of course, you can also just use Egress and avoid losing your cash. Letting Max fall or using Egress also allows you to level up your characters. Seems the only reason for a save system is to allow you to quit when you're tired of this game for reasons I found obvious.
That's because most of the people obtained in the game are impossible to play as. Characters obtained at the beginning become too inferior by the end, and can't level up. Of course, ones obtained later in the game are usually far too weak to fight, and of course are extremely hard to level up to a point where they can fight without boring yourself to tears. Sega seemed to have noticed that, and put in three non-centaur-knights (one's a centaur, but he isn't a knight) characters that mow down everything in their path. As a result, by the end of the game I only had four (including Max who can't be thrown off the party) non-centaur-knights who could do much anything.
I hear there's a Samurai I missed on my only play through the game who's supposed to lethal. I never had the interest to play through the game again, so I wouldn't know if that's true or not.
This game took me two months to beat. That's not because it's hard (which I found it far from). First off, I deleted my first game after a few weeks of play. Secondly, it lost my interest after about a month for Bionic Commando (When a game loses my interest for another game I've beaten the snot out of several times before, that is not a good sign). When I decided to get on and finish it, the game was just barely keeping my interest.
The controls also contributed to my not wanting to play this after finishing. In most RPGs, getting people to talk involved a simple press of a button. Here, talking involves pulling up a menu, going to the "talk" button, and listening to what they have to say. Wouldn't it just be easier to be able to walk up and press a button? We've got three buttons here, Sega! And if that wasn't annoying me, Max has this weird tendency to wait for a split second before finally moving. Worst of all... I'll just tell a story and you tell me if this sounds like fun: I walk up to a box and open it, only to find Max's stash of four items is full. So, I have to pull up that annoying menu, find Max, pick an item he doesn't need, find someone who has an open spot, give him/her the item, close all the windows, open the box, and find a Medical Herb. Wouldn't it just be so much easier to have the game send that Medical Herb straight to someone who has an open slot, considering it's a totally useless item by the end of the game?
On the play area or in towns, every-damn-body looks like something out of a desktop theme. They're short and squat, as if stuffed into a box. Now, they have to fit into a box, of course. But did they have to be as wide as they are tall? For example, there's an enemy that's supposed to be a machine with a ball floating above it. Only that ball doesn't look like a ball. It looks like a metal cookie. They also lack color and detail. When a character talks a mugshot is shown as the character's mouth moves to talk. The mugshot looks fairly good, but there is a slighty bad thing about them. See, when a character is promoted, they may don totally different headgear, have a new suit of armor, etc. on their sprite and battle animation, but their mugshot looks exactly the same. Out of at least twenty-five characters I received in the entire game, a whopping three had mugshots that changed upon promotion.
In battles, graphics get no better. All you'll see of your characters are the backs of their heads, with a few exceptions. Your enemies include knights in pink skirts, winged knights in pink skirts, and what's supposed to be an evil mage but looks a lot like Dark Kat. Speaking of funny looking bosses, there's a elf-witch you fight in the second half of the game. At the beginning of the scenario with her, she taunts you with a mugshot and all. When you engage in an attack with her, she looks nothing like she does in her mugshot.
All the centaur knights and mages are palette swaps of each other, as well as a few of the other, less common types of characters (some character were unique, and had their own images). In fact, on the play area half the characters look like palette swaps of each other with some slight graphic changes. Now, I've yet to see an RPG that didn't use palette swaps, so I'm letting that part slide. What DID irritate me about this is how lazy they did it. I've never before seen characters you play as who are just a different colors from each other (I see enemies like this all the time, but this is the first I've seen playable characters done that way) Sega decided to make it so the player can't tell who's the original. That means nobody even looks like their mugshot. Take Ken. In his mugshot and his picture in the manual, he's not wearing a helmet. When I fist saw him wearing one in the battle mode, I thought "Where the hell did that come from?"
For me, almost all the animations fall under three categories; lame (one animation looks like the guy is slowly slamming his palm into the opponent. Yeah, that looks like it's gonna hurt), take too damn long (like a couple of guys who insist on doing a slow-bo 1080 before slamming their axe into the opponent for a whopping 1 damage), or "okay" (like a guy shooting another guy with an arrow). A few are done pretty well. While I've never got him to do it (no clue how to), Max seems to have an interesting attack animation where he does a stance, then slams his sword into the ground, hitting the opponent with a shock wave. Just as cool is Zylo's before he's promoted. He leaps into the air and comes crashing down on the opponent. They're neat, but nothing to make me give the graphics a 10.
For whatever reason, I've reviewed a few games where I was the only one who didn't like the music. This is one of those times. The music that plays in castles wasn't too bad. I actually liked it for a while. That was, until I noticed it was only about 5 seconds long. Some songs are suppose to sound fast-paced or "something major's happening", but come out nothing short of irritating. The most annoying song for me, hands down, is the music that plays on those fields between towns. A pitch that's too high, a bass that was best left out, and an annoying tune don't exactly appeal to me. When a fight is engaged, the music that plays is the exact same for each and every fight in the game, even the final boss. What is this, Final Fantasy? Speaking of the final boss, the final boss's play area has music that's totally unfit for what's happening. It sounds like music I'd hear in a "dramatic" circus act. Oh sure, that's what most of the songs in the game sounds like, but this is the final boss. The final boss, dammit! Thank God for the Mute button.
And if irritating music isn't enough, Sega threw in irritating sound effects. When a character talks, they make a "blibby" noise of varying pitches. What is this, Golden Sun? Shame it isn't. It could be turned off in Golden Sun. Most of the sound effects I was hearing in this game were those annoying "doink doink doink"s when everyone was walking around the arena, or "whacks" when someone hits the other in battle.
Scorings
Plot: 3/10
Gameplay/Fun Factor: 4/10
Control: 5/10
Graphics: 6/10
Sound: 3/10
Overall: 4.5/10
Y'know, I had very high hopes for this game. It started out good, which is why it got a score as high as it did. But along the way, I was "treated" to gameplay that only got more boring as it went along, very strange controls, and sound that hurt me. The only reason I didn't give this a 4 is because that picture with Mae, Lowe, and Max in the manual is simply adorable, which scored a little gravy with me.
Oddly enough, a thought just came to mind. The ones who didn't like this seem to be the ones who played Fire Emblem first. Might be a coincidence, but it might be telling us something...
I posted this at another forum, but couldn't get an answer out of anybody. Could I get somebody to too look at this and give me any notes on what I should leave out or change?
This is for GameFAQs, so the overall at the beginning doesn't match the overall at the end.
---------------------------
The Nintendo Didn't Have It, But the Famicom Sure Did...
5/10
When I got this game in the mail, there was a note with it that read something like "You won't believe how much I went through with this game. I even had people e-mailing me for a Buy It Now price. But it's yours, and you won it fair and square". (Of course, I wasn't the one who actually bought it since I'm too young to eBay). It seemed quite popular. I thought it would be for a reason. I popped it in, and the way the game played was awfully familiar. Why was it so familiar? Because I've played it before.
Now, some think this is the first of this kind of RPG. It's not the first. I don't know what the first is, but this isn't it. Why? 'Cause I know of a game that played like this that came out well before it.
What's the other game? You might have heard of it and not even know it. Own a Gamecube? Own a copy of Smash Brothers Melee? Unlocked Marth and Roy? Yup. You've heard of it.
Yes, this is how Fire Emblem played. And having to play Fire Emblem without knowing a word anyone is saying left me out of the plot. Dark Gaia says Shining Force's plot is a ripoff on Fire Emblem's (wouldn't be surprised). Haven't a clue what's going in Fire Emblem, so I really can't say anything on that one.
But the plot here is still boring. When the game is turned on, we see a short cinema. It's done fairly well, but the it's the "Light fights Dark for control of the world, Light wins, Dark cast into another dimension, Dark vows to come back in a thousand years, Dark is immortal but Light isn't" crap I've seen in at least ten other games. The actual game starts with a centaur named Varios training Max, the main character of the game. Varios runs off, so does Max, Max goes and thumps some monsters, and returns to his town to find everyone dying or dead. He runs into a guy named "Kane" (who's name changes spelling throughout the game), who's running off with something we never hear of again. It seems that he's on a mission to "revive" (last I checked, the intro said he wasn't dead) the evil Dark Dragon. So, Max rounds up some friends and takes off to stop the "revival" of Dark Dragon.
If that's not enough, dialogue is boring and there's jack squat in terms of character development. A basic idea of their character is given once in a while when a new character is obtained, and some in the manual. After that, they're little more than robots programmed only with a fighting program. Ever feel for a robot programmed only to fight? Not me.
I found all the dialogue before the fights totally pointless, since I knew what was going to happen in the end. For example, every single time the good guys are supposed to beat the bad guys to something, the bad guys always get it. The only time the good guys get something is when there's not a... erm... "race" to get it. By the third "race", I knew how it was going to come out. Of course, Sega had to somehow keep the ball rolling. But they didn't have to make a storyline that's so predictable.
I should have known the dialogue wouldn't be that good when I found that each and every time I turned the game on (until I figured out how to skip it), I had to sit through some little elf girl rambling on about the evil "Dark Dragon".
Speaking of Dark Dragon, think about the name. "Dark Dragon". That doesn't even sound evil to me. It doesn't even sound like a name. Seriously, I think I'd be pretty embarrassed if I were supposed to be the physical form of all evil and I somehow landed a name that sounds like something out of Mega Man. Of course, I'd be pretty embarrassed if my name were "Dark Force", too. That's why I go by his Phantasy Star name of "Darkfalz". Funny how altering a few letters changes the name from sounding like a common noun to pure evil. Shame Sega didn't do that with Dark Dragon. And if a horrible name wasn't enough, he doesn't even look like a dragon. Now... Dragonlord. THAT was evil in the form of a dragon. THIS is not. You could have done better, Sega.
And all that's just the boring as hell plot. Now let's talk about the actual game.
This game is played on a "play area", where all the characters on the board must be moved around in a strategic (if you call being able to blow into the fight and hack your way through "strategy") manner until a character gets in such a range (usually touching the other, but some can attack from afar) they can attack another. They can then attack with their main or use magic if they can. If they don't make it to an area where they can attack, they can stay there and do nothing, move and do nothing, or use an item.
Unlike Fire Emblem where anyone could be moved in the player's turn, here the players move in a certain order judged by their speed. Seems like it was to add strategy, but it actually did the complete opposite. You can be much more brainless about where you put your characters, because you can have people lure and surround the enemy without much risk of getting one of your people surrounded. If all were done in one turn, you'd have to think much better about where you want your characters. And this speed system isn't perfect. Every now and then, that Dark Mage that originally went well after Ken gets another turn in between Ken's turns, and Ken's dead. Why? Got me.
The characters fight the enemies they run into, and eventually go up a level. When they reach level 10, they can be promoted. For example, promoting a Mage makes them a Wizard. They seem a bit stronger when promoted, but otherwise not much about them changes.
There's also magic in this game, but later in the game spells take up WAY too much MP. A healing spell may cost the character 20 MP when they only have 30. Even then, it doesn't heal that much HP.
When I first played this game, I really enjoyed it. I liked how much it felt like Fire Emblem, and I could understand the plot. But the worst thing happened, and down the road it did a 180 on me and begun to get really boring. My opinion of a strategy RPG is one where my brain has to be used. Sure, there should be warm-up stages, which is what I was hoping the first few stages in this would be. Well, the brainpower needed to finish a stage never really increased. Just about every stage ran on the "you find it, you smash it" type of play. Most of the time I could just charge into a fight at full speed and thump everything in my way without much thought.
From what I played of Fire Emblem, it's hard. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason it never came to America. Now, Shining Force is noticeably easier than Fire Emblem, but went way too far in trying to be easier that Fire Emblem.
The easy factors far outnumbered the hard ones. First, the AI can be really stupid sometimes. I might have one character standing by himself, and all the enemies will either stand there and do nothing, run, or go after a mob of seven characters ("Yoooo-hoooo, I'm right heee-eere!"). Perhaps some CPUs are programmed "Go after the leader and disregard anyone else unless they get in the way".
Second, people who can attack from a distance are very numerous, even seeming to outnumber the people who have to be right up to an opponent to attack. Of course, mages and archers can attack from a distance. Then there's the centaur knights who are coming out of your hair in the game (half of them at the beginning, where they're inferior by the end), and they can be equipped with spears which allow them to stand one unit away from an enemy and attack them. May not sound helpful, but it helps against the enemy counter attacking you in the next turn. It also allows you to use, say, a river or table to your advantage. Plenty of times the enemy just sat there and let me pelt them. I can understand it if they were a boss, but this happened frequently to normal characters.
Third, a couple of minor things relating to each other make things much easier. For example, if somebody dies, you can just retreat and revive them. In Fire Emblem, there was no retreating from a fight and when someone died, they were gone for good. This adds onto the being able to mindlessly blast your way through the game. Retreat. If Max goes down, it doesn't matter how many other people are still standing, you're sent back to the last town you visited, minus half your cash. Any levels earned by the characters are still there. Just revive anyone who's downed, and bust right back in. Of course, you can also just use Egress and avoid losing your cash. Letting Max fall or using Egress also allows you to level up your characters. Seems the only reason for a save system is to allow you to quit when you're tired of this game for reasons I found obvious.
That's because most of the people obtained in the game are impossible to play as. Characters obtained at the beginning become too inferior by the end, and can't level up. Of course, ones obtained later in the game are usually far too weak to fight, and of course are extremely hard to level up to a point where they can fight without boring yourself to tears. Sega seemed to have noticed that, and put in three non-centaur-knights (one's a centaur, but he isn't a knight) characters that mow down everything in their path. As a result, by the end of the game I only had four (including Max who can't be thrown off the party) non-centaur-knights who could do much anything.
I hear there's a Samurai I missed on my only play through the game who's supposed to lethal. I never had the interest to play through the game again, so I wouldn't know if that's true or not.
This game took me two months to beat. That's not because it's hard (which I found it far from). First off, I deleted my first game after a few weeks of play. Secondly, it lost my interest after about a month for Bionic Commando (When a game loses my interest for another game I've beaten the snot out of several times before, that is not a good sign). When I decided to get on and finish it, the game was just barely keeping my interest.
The controls also contributed to my not wanting to play this after finishing. In most RPGs, getting people to talk involved a simple press of a button. Here, talking involves pulling up a menu, going to the "talk" button, and listening to what they have to say. Wouldn't it just be easier to be able to walk up and press a button? We've got three buttons here, Sega! And if that wasn't annoying me, Max has this weird tendency to wait for a split second before finally moving. Worst of all... I'll just tell a story and you tell me if this sounds like fun: I walk up to a box and open it, only to find Max's stash of four items is full. So, I have to pull up that annoying menu, find Max, pick an item he doesn't need, find someone who has an open spot, give him/her the item, close all the windows, open the box, and find a Medical Herb. Wouldn't it just be so much easier to have the game send that Medical Herb straight to someone who has an open slot, considering it's a totally useless item by the end of the game?
On the play area or in towns, every-damn-body looks like something out of a desktop theme. They're short and squat, as if stuffed into a box. Now, they have to fit into a box, of course. But did they have to be as wide as they are tall? For example, there's an enemy that's supposed to be a machine with a ball floating above it. Only that ball doesn't look like a ball. It looks like a metal cookie. They also lack color and detail. When a character talks a mugshot is shown as the character's mouth moves to talk. The mugshot looks fairly good, but there is a slighty bad thing about them. See, when a character is promoted, they may don totally different headgear, have a new suit of armor, etc. on their sprite and battle animation, but their mugshot looks exactly the same. Out of at least twenty-five characters I received in the entire game, a whopping three had mugshots that changed upon promotion.
In battles, graphics get no better. All you'll see of your characters are the backs of their heads, with a few exceptions. Your enemies include knights in pink skirts, winged knights in pink skirts, and what's supposed to be an evil mage but looks a lot like Dark Kat. Speaking of funny looking bosses, there's a elf-witch you fight in the second half of the game. At the beginning of the scenario with her, she taunts you with a mugshot and all. When you engage in an attack with her, she looks nothing like she does in her mugshot.
All the centaur knights and mages are palette swaps of each other, as well as a few of the other, less common types of characters (some character were unique, and had their own images). In fact, on the play area half the characters look like palette swaps of each other with some slight graphic changes. Now, I've yet to see an RPG that didn't use palette swaps, so I'm letting that part slide. What DID irritate me about this is how lazy they did it. I've never before seen characters you play as who are just a different colors from each other (I see enemies like this all the time, but this is the first I've seen playable characters done that way) Sega decided to make it so the player can't tell who's the original. That means nobody even looks like their mugshot. Take Ken. In his mugshot and his picture in the manual, he's not wearing a helmet. When I fist saw him wearing one in the battle mode, I thought "Where the hell did that come from?"
For me, almost all the animations fall under three categories; lame (one animation looks like the guy is slowly slamming his palm into the opponent. Yeah, that looks like it's gonna hurt), take too damn long (like a couple of guys who insist on doing a slow-bo 1080 before slamming their axe into the opponent for a whopping 1 damage), or "okay" (like a guy shooting another guy with an arrow). A few are done pretty well. While I've never got him to do it (no clue how to), Max seems to have an interesting attack animation where he does a stance, then slams his sword into the ground, hitting the opponent with a shock wave. Just as cool is Zylo's before he's promoted. He leaps into the air and comes crashing down on the opponent. They're neat, but nothing to make me give the graphics a 10.
For whatever reason, I've reviewed a few games where I was the only one who didn't like the music. This is one of those times. The music that plays in castles wasn't too bad. I actually liked it for a while. That was, until I noticed it was only about 5 seconds long. Some songs are suppose to sound fast-paced or "something major's happening", but come out nothing short of irritating. The most annoying song for me, hands down, is the music that plays on those fields between towns. A pitch that's too high, a bass that was best left out, and an annoying tune don't exactly appeal to me. When a fight is engaged, the music that plays is the exact same for each and every fight in the game, even the final boss. What is this, Final Fantasy? Speaking of the final boss, the final boss's play area has music that's totally unfit for what's happening. It sounds like music I'd hear in a "dramatic" circus act. Oh sure, that's what most of the songs in the game sounds like, but this is the final boss. The final boss, dammit! Thank God for the Mute button.
And if irritating music isn't enough, Sega threw in irritating sound effects. When a character talks, they make a "blibby" noise of varying pitches. What is this, Golden Sun? Shame it isn't. It could be turned off in Golden Sun. Most of the sound effects I was hearing in this game were those annoying "doink doink doink"s when everyone was walking around the arena, or "whacks" when someone hits the other in battle.
Scorings
Plot: 3/10
Gameplay/Fun Factor: 4/10
Control: 5/10
Graphics: 6/10
Sound: 3/10
Overall: 4.5/10
Y'know, I had very high hopes for this game. It started out good, which is why it got a score as high as it did. But along the way, I was "treated" to gameplay that only got more boring as it went along, very strange controls, and sound that hurt me. The only reason I didn't give this a 4 is because that picture with Mae, Lowe, and Max in the manual is simply adorable, which scored a little gravy with me.
Oddly enough, a thought just came to mind. The ones who didn't like this seem to be the ones who played Fire Emblem first. Might be a coincidence, but it might be telling us something...

