For a pure and simple dungeon hack, Shining Force Neo did alot of
things right, and many things wrong. The things Shining Force Neo did
correctly (for a dungeon hack) was the storyline. If you've played any
dungeon hacks like Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath, etc then you'll
notice that those games barely have a plot to stand on, with
forgettable characters and generic dialog you could sleep through.
Shining Force Neo atleast has a well thought out plot, simple dialog
and rememberable characters. The skill and leveling up system is far
superior than those previous Dungeon Hacks as well, because in those
games they usally level cap you, and you could only learn a handful of
skills since they capped your skill points after a while too, but in
Shining Force Neo you could gain MORE than 99 levels, and then some. I
ended the game with 130 levels, without a single minute of level
grinding! The graphics are the best dungeon hack graphics I've seen of
last gen.
The overall bad side of things. The storyline is
cliche as you can get if you compare it to any other RPG out there. The
graphics have to many bugs, like extreme slowdowns. The fighting is
extremely repetitive and the game is 47 hours long, for a game with a
repetitive battle system, the game should never exceed 20 hours
atleast. It was crazy how long this game ended up being. This was it's
biggest fault.
Another annoying thing about the game is how
they promote how many monsters they can get on the screen (up to 90!),
which is really impressive, but it hurts the end product. For one, the
game extremely slows down if there is that many (as mentioned above)
and you can't even see what you're doing if there's 50+ enemies on the
screen at a time. During battles I mostly just watched my health meter
while I tapped the circle button over and over again. That was my one
and only strategy within this game.
On one hand, this game
does impress me with some nice ideas and easily trumps most dungeon
hacks I've played, but on the other they totally screwed themselves by
making such a repetitive, long game with bad framerate problems.
----------Battle System----------
Shining Force Neo is a pure action RPG / dungeon hack. The whole point
of the game is to fight through hoards of enemies, gain experience /
levels, get loot and to get through a maze like dungeon.
You
gain experience points after each kill, and gain levels over time. When
you kill monsters they drop gold, items or force energy. Force Energy
is like currency, but you can only buy skills with it. I like this
skill system alot more than all the other dungeon hacks I've played
because it gives you a ton of options on what to upgrade. If you want
to be a mage, you can upgrade all the magic force frames, or if you
want to be a warrior then you can upgrade all the attack force frames.
It's a very simple concept and the biggest "carrot on a fishing pole"
in the game.
Besides bashing the O button a million times
within the game, the only other buttons you'll be using within battle
is the X button that uses items, such as healing water, or keys. The
other button is the Square button that uses all your spells or special
attacks. The special attacks depend on what type of weapon you are
currently carrying. If you are holding a two-handed sword, then you'll
learn the skill "Haste" that speeds up your characters attacks, but if
you are holding a club, then you'll get the skill "Smash" that creates
short impact wave that stuns enemies. After you've used a skill, it has
to recharge, some skills are faster than others. If you are holding a
mage weapon such as a bow or staff, then you can use magic. These
spells cost MP though.
You can take two AI partners with you
on your travels, but there's no multiplayer. I love when games do this,
the only dungeon hack that does this is the X-Men Legends / Marvel
Ultimate Alliance series (that I've played so far atleast). Each
character has their strengths and weakness'. You don't have to keep
them updated with armor or weapons, which is a huge plus for me. The
only person you update items and skills with is Max, this this keeps
the game in constant motion, unlike X-Men Legends where you had to
micromanage each time you got a new item or someone leveled up. My
biggest grief with this game is you can't view your partners skills,
you can only view their HP/MP max, with a description of their
strengths/weakness'. They do all kinds of magic spells and attacks in
battle but you have no idea what they are and what they can do or what
they're good for. That's lame.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Max, a young solider, and son of the famous warrior Gaia.
After playing in a forbidden shrine with friend Meryl, they discover
weird egg shaped rocks. Soon enough these eggs hatch and attack their
peaceful town, so Max and Meryl decide to help out by joining in the
fight. As Max and Meryl, along with Gaia, reach the shrine, they get
attacked by a man behind a mask. The man behind the mask destroys the
treasured crystal shard at the shrine, that fends of monsters. Max and
Meryl goes on a journey to warn the two other towns left in the world
about this strange man behind the mask.
The story was
predictable and silly at times. I wasn't a big fan of it overall, but I
must say that there's more storyline, dialog, plot twists than the last
5 dungeon hacks I've played put together. The story was extremely
cliche, but atleast they put some effort into it.
----------Graphics----------
The character models are celshaded. The most similar game I can think
of in terms of style was Fire Emblem for the Gamecube, but since this
is a pure action game, the characters have more movements and the
enemies show off alot more pazaz. The dungeons were fairly basic in
design, but they looked really good, especially if you compare them to
fellow dungeon hacks like X-Men Legends, Bards Tale, Fallout, Champions
of Norrath or Dark Alliance. As matter of fact, I think Shining Force
Neo trumps all of those games in all levels in terms of graphics.
There's two styles of prerendered cutscenes, I have no idea why.
There's the CGI cutscene, which looks extremely dated to me. Then
there's the anime cutscenes, which look really nice, and there's a TON
of them. To give you an example, Tales of.. games usally have a ton of
anime cutscenes, but none of those amount and length.
The only
really really bad thing about the graphics is if you get bogged down
with to many monsters then the framerate will extremely drop and it
will get really messy. The dialog scenes could of used more animation
too. They got kinda boring with just a handful of animated still, with
only 2 characters chatting at a time.
----------Sound----------
Ok, I'll get the good side out first. The music wasn't bad at all, I
especially liked the mellow tunes during 'sweet' moments or town music.
Dungeon music is pretty forgettable, but I like it how when you come in
contact with monsters the music will ramp up. The bad side of things is
the voice overs are awful. They're not poorly recorded like in Baten
Kaitos for example, but rather they're just poorly acted (ok so was
Baten Kaitos). Everything is overly acted and reminds me of a generic
Saturday Morning Cartoon.
----------World Map----------
The world map is fairly open ended. There's only two real main
continents within the game with a couple of islands. There's only three
real towns within the game. Each town connects to fields that connect
to dungeons. You have to move to each town/dungeon/field by foot for
the first half of the game. After you've visited each town once you can
then start using Warp Gates to get around.
The first town
within the game is your biggest hub. You can buy weapons, armor, items.
You can store items, get unidentified items analyzed, and upgrade your
weapons powers. You can level up your force frames within this town and
this town also the headquarters of your team, where you can switch out
party members and use the warp gates to move across country. The other
two towns are probably bigger, but you can't do any of that stuff, only
chat to characters and buy some items here and there.
The
games biggest feature is the teleport feature. This is one of the first
things you learn within the game. Whenever you are in trouble, or your
inventory is full, or if you want to level up your force frames, then
you can warp right back to town, save up and go right back into battle.
This is similar to Dark Alliance's warp system, but you don't have to
carry bottles with you wasting precious space.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
47:16
Ok, that's a freaking long dungeon hack game. I don't mind 40+ games at
all, sometimes I prefer it, but when all you're doing is button mashing
it gets old fairly quickly. Anyways, after you beat the game you get to
save it. It starts you off back to the first town in the game, and
unlocks a new dungeon, you can continue leveling up or hunt secrets. I
like when games do that.
