Shining Force II

Nobody in my neighborhood would touch an RPG. Walk into Blockbuster on a Friday, and the shelf was picked clean of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and X-Men, those games never came back. Later I found out people just stole them. The boxes stayed, the carts didn’t. It made no sense, but it meant that the stuff nobody thought was cool was always there. Shining Force II was always there.

So I rented it. And I kept renting it.

This is the game that broke me. Not the Genesis, not the cartridge, it reached past the controller and grabbed something. The story kicks off with a boy (I called him something dumb, probably) and his school friends, Chester the centaur, Sarah the elf, Jaha the dwarf, sent to help their teacher Sir Astral. Then everything goes sideways. The Demon World is trying to resurrect Zeon, the King of Devils, and to do it they’ve turned neighboring kingdoms against each other, possessed the king, and kidnapped Princess Eliza (incentive!). Oh, and the master thief Slade stole the Jewels of Good and Evil. The evil one bonded to your neck. You’re stuck with it.

It sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon, and it is, but it’s the kind where you actually care about the next episode. You pick up more weirdos as you go. Kazin the mage, who joins after soldiers torch his home and kill his mentor, his BLAZE spell doesn’t hold a candle to Volcanon’s power, but he’s your first taste of magic and it feels good. Peter, the phoenix, screams sonic bursts and throws tornadoes from those rainbow wings, and he never needs a priest to revive him because he’s a phoenix, duh. Claude the golem is a walking wall with zero personality and I love him. And Zynk, a metal golem from the future with stretchy arms and a chest laser, because why not. Time travelers belong in fantasy worlds now.

The controls are so simple you don’t think about them. You move, you attack, you cast a spell. And you can save during battle. No running back to a priest. No losing an hour because you got flanked by a demon. That tiny option is the difference between a game that respects your time and one that doesn’t, and Shining Force II had it in 1993.

I’ve played through this entire game more times than I can count. I come back to see if I can find all 30 characters, if I can stand another round against that final boss. The final boss. You fight him while standing on his breath. His breath. That’s the logic this game runs on, and I am here for it. The secrets are everywhere. Hidden characters. Weird items. Stuff you’d never find without a guide or a second playthrough.

Shining Force II isn’t just some old RPG. It’s a permanent fixture. It’s the one that made me look at the Blockbuster shelf differently, and it’s the one I still boot up when I want to see if I can save the world one more time.