The title probably isn’t entirely fair. Plenty of Shining Force fans would say the game doesn’t need to be fixed, it’s already a classic, and I would wager that greyskies is among them. Nevertheless, greyskies has brought his Return to Grans hack of Shining Force 2 up to version 1.15. Paradoxically, what makes this hack so distinctive is precisely its modesty. Rather than a serious overhaul of the game or its mechanics, Return to Grans mainly seeks to render a marginally nicer Shining Force 2 experience. The sprites are better, the story text is a little less goofy, the characters are a bit better balanced, and the enemies aren’t quite so easy to defeat.
Does Return to Grans succeed in this goal? Well, first things first, I need to better explain what Shining Force is. A tactical role-playing game, Shining Force 2 features typical JRPG Bowie on a typical hero’s journey seeking to defeat a recently awakened evil. The Shining Force games, while certainly playable, are quite a bit more crude than other tactical role-playing games even of this era. Unlike Fire Emblem, there are no clear odds. Whether a character whiffs an attack, gets a critical hit, or manages a follow-up attack is entirely random. A long, mostly successful fight can be rendered moot by a strong enemy getting a couple of lucky punches in on the hero at the last minute.
Matters aren’t helped by the often-arbitrary nature of the game’s artificial intelligence. Enemies generally need to be baited into going after the player so they can be swarmed by their army. But there’s no real way to tell when enemies are actually in range, since there’s no way to access the greater map. You can only see whatever character is moving at the moment, which includes enemies, for a fraction of a second. The chess level is the hardest in the game, less because the enemies themselves are unusually strong so much as because the chessboard map, a simple grid, has no exploitable terrain or chokepoints, requiring very granular manipulation of the artificial intelligence to prevent them from just rushing the player immediately.
Even beyond these mechanical problems, Shining Force 2 suffers from a fairly mediocre script. It’s hard to guess whether it was any better in Japanese. These are games for children, after all. But greyskies does what he can to make the world feel less arbitrary, including more references to characters aside from just Bowie, giving them as well as the world they live in more personality. The result is actually fairly intriguing- it’s a script reminiscent of something Ted Woolsey might have come up with, just barely quirky enough it could easily be mistaken for the real thing. As greyskies is not an especially talented hacker, his changes are fairly minor- even the title screen doesn’t include an alternate image clearly crediting him, because changing numerical values, game text, and static sprites are quite a bit less complicated than that.
But none of this can really compensate for the game’s core problem of just being too random for its own good. And this is a big part of why Shining Force is so difficult to revive in a modern gaming context. Nearly anything you could do to address these flaws would basically just turn Shining Force into a Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics clone. The simplistic, imperfect gameplay is as much a core aspect of the series as its Tolkien-esque characters, a world with centaurs, elves, dwarfs, and the occasional ancient superweapon that looks suspiciously similar to modern technology. All of this is presented with a simple earnestness that would almost certainly be ruined in a modern corporate environment- which was indeed the fate of the series back in the nineties, with hack-and-slash spinoffs that were more about following industry tends rather than exploring simple, charming fantasy worlds.
With all this in mind, I can understand why Return to Grans exists. Shining Force 2 isn’t a difficult game, but it is a game where the difficulty is mostly due to peculiar artificial intelligence quirks that either pop up out of nowhere or can’t reasonably be planned for. It’s a game of fuzzy nostalgia where even the most die-hard fans will admit the script doesn’t often make sense, like exposition about townspeople being mind-controlled by a demon army when they appear to just be getting threatened. Or a princess being inexplicably presented as Bowie’s love interest despite the two hardly every interacting. The new script lightly riffs on some of this questionable logic without going too far and becoming straight up parody.
Is it better balanced? Well, that’s hard to say. While greyskies has stated that ideally, any character should be usable, I found the same problems I have in every other Shining Force game where, since experience is awarded by damage dealt, once a character starts having trouble dealing decent damage, they pretty much can never catch up. Saving low HP enemies for the sole cleric becomes unavoidable since otherwise they won’t get hardly any experience at all, short of grinding. This is risky, too, since enemies need to be wiped out before they can move again and potentially do major damage and you’re pretty much stuck with just guessing when that will be.
The distribution of classes is definitely odd too- only one cleric and wizard for most of the game, and three archers all joining at pretty much the same time later on. They immediately prove crucial, just because the ability to attack at a distance makes them good at dogpiling and staying out of vaguely defined enemy ranges. Many aspects of Shining Force 2 are just plain weird like this, and Return to Grans can only do so much to compensate for that.
But as critical as I’m being, I still like Return to Grans quite a bit actually. Without the benefit of Sega Genesis nostalgia, I’m quite certain it’s more playable than the original. I never did play the original, although I did try Shining Force CD (it’s the biggest ticket item on the Genesis Mini II), and just found myself giving up in annoyance for some reason I can’t recall. Return to Grans kind of functions like blackjack on the formula. It’s still not really fair, but it’s juuust close enough to feeling that way that I’ll ask the game to hit me again and again. Like it says in one of the new confusion dialog. Retro games. They just don’t make them like they used to.
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