If you enjoy slaughtering hundreds of enemies at a time or Bosses with millions of HP... then this game is for you.
You play as Max, a red haired youth who along with Meryl stumble upon a crystal and awaken an evil man with evil desires. This man ends up being Max's older brother and is on a quest to summon the Dark Dragon to destroy the world. (Typical storyline) Max strives to become a Force and along the way ends up meeting other characters who are Forces, each with their own abilities. You can play with Max and only 2 other characters at one time and yes they each level up indiviually so you have to use the characters as much as possible but its good to mix it up and the levels come very quickly. Soon Max must become a Shining Force and go through several Ordeals of Light to become one. There are thousands of items, weapons and armor available and you can collect force energy in order to improve your Force Frame and become stronger or get better defensively. If you upgrade the right stats you can become nearly invinceable as a melee fighter. There are Bow and wands to use but in my opinion the best way to go is Melee. I improved certain stats and soon was taking away hundreds of thousands of HP away from enemies and they barely could even hurt me. I had a Punisher Sword and with each swing I would hit all enemies for major damage. It was kinda slow swinging but I would use Haste and enemies never had a chance.
You can also improve your weapons with the black smith for a very large fee. But both money and force energy is very abundant as you travel the world and dungeons. Controls are easy and selecting items to use happens in real time and really helps keep the flow of the game moving. Plus your supposring characters will heal and use magic on their own and always seen to happen at the right time. The AI in here was very well done. Even on the enemy side, they attacked relentlessly and seem to attack with what was my weakness at the time. You can also warp back to base to refill health bottles at any time which was a life saver at some points. Then warp right back to the original spot you left to continue your quest.
Now for the negatives: Very small inventory stock as you can only carry up to 44 items at one time which includes all healing items. This becomes annoying later in the game as you collect more and more drops from enemies and your constantly warping back to base to unload your inventory to sell or transfer into force energy. Also, the storyline was decent but there were points in the game where there was alot of talking and Max has a very annoying voice. Just some useless SLOW talking from other characters as well. Thank God you can hit the button as speed past the convos. Overall the game was alot of fun. I enjoy slashing through unlimted enemies and having Bosses larger than the screen. The game was addicting at times and definately one of the better Shining games I've played. Dungeons werent to hard to figure out with hardly any puzzles to solve. The game focused more on brute force rather than puzzle solving.