But no, those four are the on FantasyAnime are the only old games in English available. I've only finished two of those four, and have visited a third briefly.
Mother, brother and I visited family in the US back in the day. An aunt bought us a Sega Game Gear console, Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, and this tetris like game. Man, that Game Gear sure was thirsty. Six AA batteries gave you a pittance of game time. It really pains me to think of all the batteries that I went through.
The Sword of Hajya was the first RPG I played, and was rather fun to boot. The 'cinematic' action sequences were probably the drawcard of the game. Characters would be depicted as cutesy manga-like characters in portraits and on the map, but when it came to battling, they'd suddenly be depicted realistically. 'tis an interesting idiosyncracy - kinda like the US cover shown above (you wouldn't expect to be dealing with manga characters in the game based on that cover).
Ah, that's more like it! The odd assortment of characters was entertaining. Humans, centaurs, dwarves, bird-men, and other anthromorphs all made for an interesting looking army. Ah, yes, that was another feature - you'd build an army as you beat levels and gathered new allies. Also, just as it was getting visually boring, you'd have the opportunity to promote your characters, so that they'd receive a new title, something like 'Knight' to 'Paladin'. This would coincide with a new look for the character. New and better weapons could also be discovered or bought.
The game had its share of oddities though. The colouring of characters would be counter-intuitive - say on the map, a character would have brown armour, but in their battle sequence, their armour would be green. Next up, our main protagonist is named Deanna. That takes the epicness out of everything.
I've just remembered something that plagued me back in the day. Certain characters would have a spell called 'egress', where you could retreat from a battle. The whole point of the spell was to allow characters to be able to level up, since you kept any experience points earnt. I didn't know back when I was a youngling. Thus, I'd go through a game without levelling up, eventually getting stuck on a certain map, when the difficulty level of the map would overcome my undeveloped characters. Every time I reached that point, I'd restart the entire game. More dead batteries =(
Recently, I discovered Game Gear emulators and ROMs, and so, I wiped my slate clean of that particular unfinished game. Hurrah!
Seeing that there were was another Shining Force game on the Game Gear, I decided to give it a go.
Final Conflict I didn't enjoy as much as The Sword of Hajya. Besides the lack of nostalgia driving me on, the characters seemed dull and the gameplay was very much the same. By dull characters, I mean another silent main protagonist but with blonde hair this time. Blonde! While Deanna had a bad name, at least he had pitch black hair to make a difference. Ian (not a bad name, but not one suitable for a game hero) is just plain stereotypical (tbh, I don't know of many main RPG characters with blonde hair... just my intuition writing here).
The fact that I didn't complete the Shining Force: The Legend of Great Intention ROM on the Sega Genesis probably didn't help. A few characters (or many, I'm not sure) from that game feature here (I've a feeling that there's quite a bit of character sharing in this series*). No nostalgia points for me. Mmyes, despite the Genesis games appearing to have slightly better graphics and more extensive gameplay (town exploration in particular), I just fancied the more simple graphics and gameplay of the Game Gear games.
Returning to Final Conflict now, it was pretty much more of the same. One small difference actually was that there more difficult levels, there'd be stronger enemies and tighter spaces to work through. Required more egress action.
I don't plan to explore the other games in the series. My experience with Final Conflict suggested to me that the fun experienced with The Sword of Hajya was feeding off nostalgia, and my anger regarding the Game Gear consuming so many batteries.
*The Sword of Hajya, called Shining Force Gaiden II in Japan, is actually a sequel. Unfortunately, there's no English translation of Shining Force Gaiden.
Pictures are all sourced from Shining Force Central.
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