Breakfast with Girls

Continuing on my trend of playing PS2 games long after they were released, I just picked up a pristine but used copy of Shining Force Neo from the local EB Games (ha--first game I've bought there in almost two years) for $25. After making a big stink about it in this thread I figured I would go ahead and give the new action-oriented Shining games a chance. I also loved Record of Lodoss War (probably 75 hours in that game to complete every sidequest and beat every boss) despite normally not having much interest in hack-and-slash action-RPGs, and this was by the same team.

I'm certainly not loving it nearly as much as that game, but I'm not hating it either (except for the atrocious voice acting). I dunno--seems pretty average to me. Very difficult at times, at least early on after the first couple of hours.

Did anyone else play this? What did you guys think?

Blitz6Speed

Its on my To Do list, right after i finish Grandia 3 (im 19 hours into it)

Setzer

I played about 5-6 hours before turning the game off and then selling it. Gameplay was fun and pretty easy to get into but the story and the voice acting was some of the worst I've seen. If you can get past those 2 things you'll probably have fun with this game. I wasn't able to.

Joe Molotov

I think G4 summerized this game by repeating "Hot stuff, coming your way!" about 30 times.

PixyJunket

I finally got my own copy of Shining Tears that's in the queue (it took forever for Fry's to drop the price from $50!).. and will probably get this one at some point. I admit the "look" of the game is really a lot more bland than I'd care for, but ultimately it's the gameplay that I'm after and I really dig this style of game.

Breakfast with Girls

By the way, for those that haven't played it, Shining Force Neo is apparently a sort of loose reimagining of the original Shining Force. The main character is Max, his evil brother Cain (Kane) wears a mask, etc. It looks like they've broken from the Shining "story" with it, but maybe I'm just not far enough along to see any references to the other games.

You can turn off the "conversation" voices (which I haven't just yet, since they're sometimes enough to make me cackle), but the battle voices can't be turned off, and they're just annoying.

The voice acting isn't, like, Shining Force III bad ("This is the end." ), but it is cartoonishly bad.

Superboy

I got it and thought it was pretty average. I'm still waiting for a "real" shining force game.

nickdawgy

I must have turned it off after 4 hours or so. I kept dying in the dumbest places, and the save points were never near where I died. I hated seeing the same cut scenes over and over again, so I caved in and sold it. The voice acting was pretty bad, but it grew on me.

GreenMonkey

Somehow I couldn't bear the thought of playing a game called "Shining Force" without turn-based strategic combat. It's just plain wrong. It's like making the next Civilization game into an RTS.

Breakfast with Girls

You have to warp back to your town regularly to heal/save. If you rely on save points you'll never beat the game. My sacrificial lambs party members die about once every two monster gates, so that's about how often I return and heal. I save about once every four gates. I also almost exclusively use magic--you can stand back and tear down waves of enemies if it's sufficiently powered up.

Once I started getting Force Arts and powering them up, the game got a lot more fun. Now I'm having a pretty good time with it, although my main complaints are that I have to break from the action to save much too frequently and that I have no influence on my party's armor, weapons, spells, or tactics.