As a fan of strategy RPGs, I have enjoyed spending time with Climax's classic Shining Force since it was released on the Wii's Virtual Console--but it has also served as a sometimes tedious reminder that, while the genre really has not in many meaningfully fundamental ways over the last 14 years, it has seen a number of appreciated refinements.

At its core, Shining Force is much like the turn-based SRPGs of today--meet characters, add them to your party, and move them around tile-based battlefields as they (hopefully) defeat enemies and level up. Its premise is also similar (and similarly forgettable) to its genre-mates. As far as I can recall, some kind of evil and/or supernatural force is attacking the kingdom or territory in which you reside and, inexplicably, the king decides to send you and a rag-tag band of adventurers (including the requisite warrior, knight, mage, and archer) rather than his existing standing army, which actually hangs out just outside the castle.

Anyway, that stuff doesn't really matter, and its sameness can be easily overlooked. What is a bit tougher to overlook are some annoying gameplay quirks. At the beginning of the game, and in between battles, you must explore town areas, talk to certain NPCs, and perform various housekeeping tasks--for example, paying to heal your characters who died in the last battle. Unlike most modern SRPGs, which simply present the time in between battles as cutscenes and abstract menus, Shining Force requires what feels like unnecessary legwork.

These in-between segments use a similar control interface to that of the battles themselves, which ends up being cumbersome when all you need to do is go talk to some guy to get your next mission. The process does give some context for the interesting seamless nature of the game's structure--battle and non-battle sequences take place essentially on the same environments without any real artificial transitions between them--but in the end it simply feels pointless and cumbersome.

What I found to be most frustrating about Shining Force, however, is its attitude towards turn-based battles. Turns alternate from player character to enemy character rather than from player side to enemy side, and I was never able to get a handle on what exactly determines the order. This serves to deemphasize certain tactical elements of the game--it is tougher to plan a party-wide attack plan when you aren't exactly sure when you will be able to move each member of the party.

As an aside, I feel compelled to note what a relief it was not to be accosted by tutorial messages every 30 seconds. Unlike nearly every similar game released these days, Shining Force simply lets you read the manual--presented, as with every Virtual Console game, in handy electronic form--or figure it out yourself. Have people gotten dumber in the last 15 years? Why do developers, particularly on consoles, feel so compelled to overexplain things these days?

Even with its nagging quirks, I found myself genuinely enjoying Shining Force after I had gotten accustomed to what now feel like exploratory steps in the early years of a genre. It isn't up to the standards of the more refined games that followed, but fans of the genre who haven't played Shining Force and are willing to overlook its downsides may want to check it out--particularly because there are so few other games in the segment available on the Virtual Console.