SEGA’s ongoing Shining Force Cross have been given it’s third update in the form of Shining Force Cross: Elysion. Originally announced back in 2009, Shining Force Cross has gone to be one of SEGA’s strongest earners from sales and revenue generated from their own amusement centres and this latest expansion promises new character types for the player, new stages and of course, bosses and enermies. Unfortunately like many of SEGA’s arcade titles, the title has been left to stay in Japan and would be another in the long line of arcade titles people would like ported to consoles. Click after the break to see a video tutorial of the new features added to the title.
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These sub-par Shining games stay in Japan for a reason. Hopefully one day Sega will return to the original winning formula, but for now they seem set to destroy the integrity of the franchise.
Any particular reason why you consider Shining Force Cross subpar? It’s a major arcade title developed by AM2 and seems to have a lot more quality and effort than Shining Hearts or so on have. Plus the art direction, especially in Cross Raid, was fantastic I thought.
The reason I consider them sub-par is that they are not ‘Shining’ games, pure and simple. Almost nothing about these games, from Shining Soul onwards, bears any relation to the original franchise. The only reason Sega attach the ‘Shining’ prefix is to sell a couple of copies. I don’t know if you’re watching the same gameplay video as me, but from my view the mechanics look a mess. The strategy RPG system has been completely ruined.
But this is not meant to be a SRPG, its an ARPG.
I think it would be fair to remember that the original game in the series, Shining in the Darkness, was not even a SRPG. Far from it, it was an extremely tedious, unremarkable and repetitive dungeon crawler. It was actually the second game Shining Force that put the series firmly in most people’s mind as a SRPG.
But this would be incorrect. When SEGA Japan launched the Shining series, the series was meant to be their RPG that included any form of RPG to rival both Square’s Final Fantasy series and Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series. Note both Shining Wisdom and Shining the Holy Ark that were also neither SRPGs released around the same time as the original Shining Force trilogy.
My only gripe is that due to the popularity of the name Shining Force, SEGA has stopped using Shining _____ as a form of titling and simply calling it Shining Force _____ though this recently changed with the SRPG released in Japan in which the game was called Shining Blade.
I would not say just because it is different in terms of gameplay that it should be looked down on, a title can be radically different and yet be extremely good. Look at Phantasy Star Online as opposed to the original Phantasy Star series.
Of course if you are talking about the world and mythos behind Shining, that is an entirely different matter. Without having seen Shining Force Cross in extreme depth I cannot comment on that but at least with Shining Soul I felt they had successful recreated the art design and style of the original series.
I’m going to make a very controversial statement but the last decent Shining Force game I played was Shining Force 2 on the MD/Genesis, I never played 3, I gather that’s good 🙂 But anything after that has been very sloppy!
Whould be a great game for PS VITA because the game uses a touch screen in the arcades just as Boarder Break does. The dual analog sticks that the PS VITA provide and graphical capability whould make these games posible on the hardware.
Apparently, SEGA has just announced they are going to launch a digital platform called
‘SEGA Dreamload’, hopefully this is not an April Fools joke but it probably might be, the article is on the ‘Sega Addicts’ site where they have an official Sega press release statement, or so they claim.
this is an arcade game, it looks like a console game, not just graphically, but gameplay wise, wow if only we still had arcades 🙁
Level up with the prism flower battle and the xp points from the flowers are always the same..Bc that is the only battle with those monsters….also on shining force 1 the battle with just robots at the fortress….also. always the same xp points….with both battles they never go to just 1 xp…..remember in 1 robots….and 2 prism flowers. Works on all versions…this is the truth….I still play both games for20 years now.