Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1.
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
2.
Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
3.
Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)
4.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)
5.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)
6.
Dead Nation (PS3)
7.
Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness (PS1)
8.
Paro Wars (PS1)
9.
in Stars and Time (Steam)
10.
Tetris Battle Gaiden (SFC)
11.
Super Tetris 3 (SFC)
12.
Battlefield 4 (PS3)
13.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
14.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
15.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
16.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
17.
Call of Duty: WWII (PS4)
18.
Resistance 3 (PS3)
19.
Tearaway: Unfolded (PS4)
20.
Grow Home (PS4)
21.
Grow Up (PS4)
22.
Ratchet & Clank (2016) (PS4)
23.
Dark Sector (Steam)
24.
Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (N64)
25.
Multi-Racing Championship (N64)
26.
Super Smash Bros. (N64)
27.
Puyo Puyo Sun 64 (N64)
28.
Shin Nippon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Road - Brave Spirits (N64)
29.
Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 6 (N64)
30.
Let's Smash (N64)
31.
Mario Tennis 64 (N64)
32.
Ucchannanchan no Honō no Challenger: Denryū Iraira Bō (N64)
33.
Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 4 (N64)
34.
FIFA: Road to the World Cup 98 (N64)
35.
Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 2000 (N64)
36.
Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 5 (N64)
37.
Time and Eternity (PS3)
38.
Pokemon Red (GB)
39.
Dr. Mario 64 (N64)
40. Shining Force Neo (PS2)
I played and quite enjoyed the sequel to this, Shining Force EXA, maaaany years ago. Knowing this was a very similar game, it'd been on my radar for ages, and I was lucky enough to find this copy for super cheap around the time I moved to Japan (so like 5+ years ago XD). After trying and bouncing hard off of a similar game recently, I decided to play this game instead as a simple hack'n'slash RPG like this was exactly what my brain was in the mood for. It overall took me around 50 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware while doing most all of the optional content (though how much of that was by choice rather than necessity is something we'll get into later).
Shining Force Neo follows the story of Max. After doing his military training for two years away from home, he's suddenly called home by his father. Excited that this might mean that he'll finally be allowed to be come one of the Forces, the powerful warriors who defend the realm from all matter of monsters, he heads back at once. However, disaster strikes as the mysterious Legion, long thought destroyed after the last great war 13 years ago, suddenly return and threaten the world once more. It's up to Max, his childhood friend Meryl, and the other Forces they meet along the way to stop this new threat by the Legion and the mysterious Clan of the Moon.
Overall, I'd say the narrative here is pretty weak. It's not the most hideously neoliberal garbage I've seen from this era, but that's definitely where a lot of its biggest sins originate from. There is this remarkable reluctance to ever have any character be truly evil or wicked, and even big societal issues like racial conflicts caused by colonialism are ultimately no more than misunderstandings that require barely more than a conversation to be all worked out in the end. It's a game that's both painfully pro-status quo as well as just having incredibly flat characters on top of it. No character being truly flawed means that no one has any way to improve or grow as a person, and that extends to the story as a whole. Max ends up being this totally enlightened character who just knows the problem to every solution, and it makes story dialogue very plodding and dreary outside of the occasional humor (which is in fairness pretty strong). It's mostly inoffensive, but there are some really gross turns the story takes with certain issues, and basically everything about the final conflict with the main villain is so absurdly convoluted that it was nothing but something I could derisively laugh at by the end. This was clearly a story written by someone who's seen a lot of stories but ultimately has very little idea of what makes a good story work, and so you end up with a lot of scattered plot beats ripped from better stories but with none of the actual setup to make those plot beats remotely effective. Not even their trope-filled love story can execute the most basic of tropes well. Like I said before, it's hardly a story actively unpleasant (which is sadly not the lowest bar you can reach for an RPG from this decade), but it's passable at best and frustrating & gross at the worst, and it's hardly a reason to actually go out and play this game.
The mechanics are sadly not that much more of a reason to show up either. It's a simple hack'n'slash game, but a *quite* simple one. If you're familiar with something like Diablo or the PS2 Baldur's Gate games, you'll be pretty familiar as to how an isometric action RPG like this works. You've got a basic attack, a selection of magic attacks that varies by the weapon you're using, and that's honestly pretty much it. Sure, you can block too, but that's rarely actually a sensible decision in a fight you're trying to win. The actual gameplay is very simple, but it tries to make up for it with the loot mechanics. You find TONS of weapons and armor as you quest around from map to map, as the monster spawners most monsters come from drop them when you destroy them. Equipment can have up to two passives naturally, and these passives cannot be transferred between equipment, so the only thing you can do to make a weapon better is just find another one. Sure, you can boost their stats with money at the blacksmith, but that's just base defense and offense increases. If you really want to be a force to be reckoned with, you'll need to be inspecting each and every piece of loot you find just to make sure you're not overlooking anything.
And that is where the problems begin. You can only carry 50 items at a time including the equipment you currently have equipped. Add in the consumables you've gotta carry (which thankfully act like a Dark Souls Estus Flask, so they're usually hard to increase the amount of but at least a trip back to town refills them for free), and you have about 25~30 items you can pick up before you've gotta head back to town. You thankfully have a town portal button accessible basically whenever you want other than in boss fights, and then you can painlessly travel right back to the spot you used it at for free. However, when most monster spawners drop 4 to 5 pieces of gear each, that means you're going back to town a LOT. There's no junk or mass-sell or identify features in the UI either. You'll need to sell every piece of gear you want for gold one at a time (after deselecting "no" to "yes", of course), and then identify each magical equipment one at a time, and then turn that magical equipment into energy crystals one at a time. In a game that's already 90%+ mashing the circle button to attack, this is so immensely tedious that it's kinda insane that a game from 2005 is still dealing with a problem so obvious.
You'll really want to identify all that magic equipment too, because even the weaker stuff can't be mulched into energy crystals for any value unless it's identified, and you'll REALLY want as much energy as you can. Money ultimately can't buy much, as it's easy to get loads of and raising equipment values at the blacksmith isn't actually that effective. Energy crystals are the currency you really care about because that's what you use to upgrade your stats in town. All sorts of stats and variables to how you fight (from doing more damage to particular types of monsters to taking less damage from certain times of magic and much, much more) can be increased this way, and it's one of the game's most major mechanics for increasing your power outside of new lucky super loot drops. The game does have various weapon types if you want to vary up combat slightly, but not only does one-handed melee work FAR better than basically anything else (in my experience anyhow) due to how badly you need the defensive buff from the shield it lets you carry on top of magic being too unreliable to be your main method of attacking, but it takes SO long to get enough energy to reasonably get even remotely decent at another fighting style that it's barely worth it to even try.
Bad UI, mediocre combat, and to top it all off a terrible grind. The first half or so of the game isn't so bad with this, but, my gods, the back half of the game feels padded to hell with incredibly challenging boss fights that take an age to get to and then can mulch you under a second. It was an interesting challenge of sorts to get strong enough to actually fight those bosses, but the game's mechanics are ultimately so simple that you can't really just play better to beat them. You cannot escape that demand for better gear, so you'll likely find yourself pursuing side content in the game's back half if for no other reason than progressing the main story is just impossible at that point. It may feel nice to finally beat those guys after the awful, grinding slogs it is to even fight them once you're strong enough to even survive for more than a second or so, but it's hardly any *fun*. Heck, those late-game bosses are SO damn tough that the actual final boss ended up being pitifully easy because I had to get SO strong to kill the bosses before him. The game's balancing is absolutely terrible, and bundled along with all the other issues this game has, it turns a mediocre action RPG into a decidedly below average one, and the game doesn't even have the decency to provide any kind of co-op mode to soften the blow of that either.
The aesthetics are mostly nice, at least when they work. The character portraits in dialogue are nice, the voice acting (in Japanese at least) is great, and the soundtrack is pretty darn strong too. Character models look a little funky with how their animations work sometimes, but that's not a super big problem. The much bigger problem is that the game just has SO much slowdown that it makes it frequently difficult to play. Around the halfway mark through the game, monster packs are so large that they lag the game very noticeably, and this is a nearly constant problem in how much more difficult it can make playing. There were countless times where I had no idea if the game was just lagging so hard it seemed like I wasn't moving, or if I was actually turned to stone, knocked down, or just stuck from too many monsters because the enemy models are just so big that it's frequently quite hard to see your character in combat. I'm not usually one to dock a game for spotty framerate, but with so much already wrong with how this game plays, it's just insult to injury on top of everything else already wrong with this thing.
Verdict: Not Recommended. If you've somehow not gotten the picture after reading this far, then I'll say once again that this game is an intensely mediocre action RPG with far too many issues with its execution to possibly be worth your time. Even just on the PS2 (granted not here in Japan), you've got the X-Men Legends games as well as the Baldur's Gate games if you want action RPG fun in a Diablo style but built for a console, and those games even have options for co-op play! I am far from an enjoyer of Shining Force games in general, but with how positive my memories are of EXA, I thought I might really like this one, and boy was I ever wrong on that. This game is a boring, tedious affair that'll just hurt your hands with how much you're mashing the buttons to hurt stuff over its far too long runtime, and your action RPG fun is unquestionably better gained elsewhere on the PS2 (or any console since, for that matter).
