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If you want to know what Shining Force III is all about, please read my review of Scenario II.  This review will focus not on the gameplay or graphics or anything like that, but in how the game differs from its predecessors.

And so it ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.  Did somebody once say that?  Is it a composite quote based on some pop-culture events or political utterances that lodged themselves into my brain while mindlessly consuming vacuous media?  Either way, it’s an appropriate quote to describe Shining Force III: Scenario III (not fun typing that over and again, so from here on out: SFIII:S3(ug, still not fun)), the final episode in the trilogy that began with Shining Force III: Scenario I, and was preceded by Shining Force III: Scenario II.  A trilogy, in other words, and this was the last one.  In my ramblings, sometimes the point is lost or buried.  The point is that SFIII:S3 is the worst game in the trilogy.  It’s still one of the top 50 RPGs of all time, so maybe it’s like saying that Blade II is the worst of the Blade Trilogy.  The Blade Trilogy is so undeniably awesome that being the worst in that bunch is like owning the worst of three private islands.  Hey, you still own an island!  And HEY!  I was just joking about Blade being awesome.

Here is why SFIII:S3 (from here on, referred to simply as SFIII3, because jesus…..) is the worst of the trilogy: 1) Fewer gimmicky battles 2) An uninspired ending sequence 3) Having to grind a LOT more than in previous scenarios 4) Shining Force fatigue.

I played Scenarios II and III back to back to back to back.  So I’ll be the first to admit that, if you were to pick up and play this gem of a series, you might not suffer from problems number three or four.  You might space out the time between scenarios, take a well-earned break after each part to focus on the more important things (i.e. more video games) in your life.  We are talking 80 hours straight, and doing the same sort of thing for that many hours can wear on any man.  There is a lot of exploration (you know, battle-independent stuff) for a strategy-RPG game, but the Shining Force series doesn’t offer complete freedom- you are locked into whatever town or area until you progress the story; there is no backtracking.  So a lot of the entertainment comes from character customization and in-battle challenge.  This is where problems one and two and three rear their heads.

So, after 80 hours, I experienced a bit of Shining Force fatigue.  My fault, maybe.  But I enjoyed my experience so thoroughly after Scenario II, that I wanted to see how they’d top themselves in III.  Sadly, they did not.  But (groan) Return of the Jedi didn’t top Empire and we all accept Jedi, don’t we?  Think of it the same way.  Of course, I feel that this fatigue could have been avoided by addressing those first three problems.  And again, I want to apologize for even mentioning problem number three, as that one may have been my fault as well…… but I don’t think so.

I claim that there is a bunch of grinding in Scenario III that isn’t present in the other two.  This is both true and a bit specious, as the games give you the option to grind for levels at any time.  You can cast the egress spell and replay the same scenarios over and over again until you beat the boss, at which point the story will propel you to the next battle.  Play a battle one hundred times if you’d like, until those giant bats are giving you one experience per kill.  Kill 100 of them and you gain another level!  You can gain so many levels that you eventually stop gaining stat boosts- instead of picking up two strength, a defense point and three HP, you get one HP and nothing else.  The lower the level, the more experience enemies give, and thus after a point, it’s senseless to fight the same baddies over and over.  But there’s a panacea for that- in each the games’ final towns, there is a ten-floor dungeon filled with sometimes overpowered monsters that acts as a “tune-up” for the final throw down with the end-game boss.  The enemies within will always give you enough experience to make leveling less of a chore, and thus it is easy to build weak or new characters, or to simply overpower your party so that the final act is a cakewalk.  This is a smart move, and it makes the game manageable as it becomes more difficult- essentially giving the gamer a built-in difficult setting that affects the stress level of the final fight. 

BUT, and here is where my problem lies- Scenarios I and II don’t require extensive leveling in order to plow through the final boss battle.  I wasn’t able to transfer my ten-year-old data from Scenario I when I began, but my data from II moseyed on over to Scenario III without difficulty, and thus any stat gains and storyline decisions made in the second part bore fruit in the finale.  And from a story perspective it was wonderful- I managed to recruit a character in Scenario III (through a good deal of effort) whose girlfriend I rescued in Scenario II, and lost another character whose life I was “unable” to save due to a lack of Scenario I transfer data.  Such consequences flesh out the world in a way that was unheard of pre-Mass Effect.  It was actually a bit thrilling, and a huge reason why this trilogy-thingie they did really works.  But, as I said, I blew through the final battle with my army at or around a promoted level of ten.  What this means is that I gained my guys up to level fifteen or so (they can first be promoted at level ten.  I gained to fifteen for the stat gains) and then promoted them to a stronger class.  From there I gained about nine more levels for each member of my main army (fuck the reserves).  Excelsior!  Onto the future….. 

You get to Scenario III, and suddenly this isn’t good enough.  Some magical guy can now give you a second promotion once you gain to level twenty, and this is AFTER you’ve already been promoted and had your level reset from 10+ back down to one.  Furthermore, the Scenario III characters all begin on levels post the first promotion, or to put simply, on levels comparable to the ending levels of your characters in Scenarios I and II.  So when the armies finally all meet up at the end of Scenario III, you have the indigenous characters all promoted twice, but everyone from the previous games about ten to fifteen levels behind.  I suppose you could’ve overleveled your characters further in the previous games, but it didn’t make any sense to do so.  So now you have to spend hours in Scenario III leveling them in that same bonus dungeon in the last town.  Have you ever had to gain ten to fifteen levels for two dozen characters while walking through the same nondescript, uninteresting cave?  Maybe in Final Fantasy IV, but other than that?  It isn’t fun, and I found myself watching episodes of South Park on my computer while mindlessly fighting the same monsters over and over.

Maybe I have a little OCD when it comes to RPGs.  Maybe I should’ve just left my SI and SII characters at their already pretty high levels, and foregone the last promotion.  But I don’t know if that would’ve worked, because in the end you are forced into separate fights for each army, and my weakest troops were almost overmatched by the enemies therein.  That might’ve been poor battle strategy on my part- I was at that point in a rush to finish the game and probably just didn’t plan prudently enough to avoid casualties.  Still, the game makes you feel as though you need to gain your heroes to the second promotion, and that requires uninteresting multiple slogs through a boring dungeon.  And to pile onto this complaint….. you spend all this time gaining levels for your SI and SII armies only to have them each fight only once in a rather lackluster multi-tiered penultimate battle.  These are rather uninspired affairs that consist of simply running up to the enemy and whaling away until one of you isn’t there anymore. 

You fight a bunch of these faceless guys in the end.....

I’ll use that as a jumping off point to talk about one of those other problems I mentioned, namely the uninspired endgame.  It should be this epic event, the three armies finally working together to tackle that final foe who has been dogging them for 120 hours of gameplay.  But they meet up, you gain those aforementioned levels, and fight in those aforementioned uninspired battles.  The idea is that the main SIII force must rush the boss temple or whatever, but the door can’t be opened unless two buttons are pressed.  The buttons make the stairs appear and then there is a limited amount of time before they disappear, so the army has to be split up so that the buttons can be pressed and the main army can….. do you get the picture?  So the penultimate battle consists of the three armies each fighting their way to a destination- the SI and II armies to hit the buttons and the SIII army to position themselves in front of the temple to take advantage of the very limited time in which the stairs will remain accessible.  Like I said- the environs are uninteresting and the enemies unspectacular; what makes the whole thing even remotely engaging is the fact that you switch between armies each turn, controlling all three on separate battlefields.  It’s disappointing that you never get the three main characters on the same battlefield at the same time, but whatever.  Okay, so here’s why this is all strange.  My SII army was pretty strong, and bulled through the enemies to hit the switch in just a few rounds.  Next, my main force defeated the temple guardians and played the waiting game at the temple gates.  Finally, many turns later, my weak-ass SI army defeated some priest and hit the switch.  Here’s my very obvious and not at all insightful question- why did my SII army just sit by the switch if they had all this time to make it back to the main army and help out?  The switches obviously weren’t timed- I hit the first switch and then waited and waited and waited for the other switch to get hit.  The entire force could’ve run over to the temple to help out.  Maybe leave one guy behind in case the system reset and they needed to rejigger the mechanism.  Better yet- once the opposing armies were defeated, why not leave one person by each switch and have one gigantic army amass at the gate and flip the switches simultaneously?  Then everyone gets in to fight the boss!  Send a Pegasus knight back and forth between the two switches to make sure that the timing is just right.  It doesn’t make much sense, but you can argue that I’m quibbling over semantics, and that there is no real way to understand the in-game timeline and blah blah blah.  It just didn’t make much sense to me.

So the reintroduction of characters from previous scenarios wasn’t handled in the best way, IMHO as they say.  The story doesn’t pick up much of the slack at that point, either.  Scenarios I and II were filled with betrayals and political intrigue that, while at times predictable, were tortuous enough to keep me in interested as to where the story was going next.  There was a large cast of enemy characters, and it was fun to try and predict who the big bosses would be, and who would bow out of the tale early.  By the end of SIII, you are fighting some evil god and some henchmen that you’ve defeated previously.  It’s a lackluster ending, considering the scope of the battles that came before.  There is a typical love-story tacked on that didn’t really do anything for me, and then the hero travels the globe to find new adventures.   A twist in the ending revealed that the designers had plans for future installments that might’ve been interesting, but overall the endgame is pretty disappointing.

Yet another centaur knight.....

That leaves me with one final complaint, the fact that the battles are more straightforward than in the previous games.  There are a few good ones here, involving a flying fortress that attacks everything in sight and a few battles with shifting terrain that causes the force to be split and adapt new tactics.  But many times the battles simply involve getting from point A to point B.  After fighting on a train and on ships and while avoiding all sorts of environmental traps, the battles in SIII came off as lackluster and a bit lazy.  But again, your mileage will vary depending on what you want from a game.  I’ve said it before, but to me the Shining Force games are about fun battles with light strategy and exploration.  If the battles involve fewer gimmicks, then the strategy comes to the forefront; unfortunately, this is not the game’s greatest strength.

Time for an about face- this game is a lot of fun!  Play it now!  Play Scenario II first if you haven’t.  It’s a pain in the ass to get a hold of, but worth it.  Better yet, play Scenario I and then Scenario II.  But take a break in between!  You don’t want to get burned out, like I did.  As a whole, these games are excellent.  I only complain about Scenario III because it didn’t end as solidly as it began.  It still blows a lot of games of this ilk out of the water.  III is the worst of the bunch, but as I said, being the worst of a bunch of amazing apples still gives you an amazing apple.  Shining Force III: Scenario III is the 37^th best RPG of all time.

OVERALL SCORE: (34/40) Not the Happiest Ending, but an Okay Ending.