Shining Force Neo showed some promise with good ideas, but the repetitive nature and long game killed it for me.
The overall bad side of things. The storyline is cliche as you can get if you compare it to any other RPG out there. The graphics have to many bugs, like extreme slowdowns. The fighting is extremely repetitive and the game is 47 hours long, for a game with a repetitive battle system, the game should never exceed 20 hours atleast. It was crazy how long this game ended up being. This was it's biggest fault.
Another annoying thing about the game is how they promote how many monsters they can get on the screen (up to 90!), which is really impressive, but it hurts the end product. For one, the game extremely slows down if there is that many (as mentioned above) and you can't even see what you're doing if there's 50+ enemies on the screen at a time. During battles I mostly just watched my health meter while I tapped the circle button over and over again. That was my one and only strategy within this game.
On one hand, this game does impress me with some nice ideas and easily trumps most dungeon hacks I've played, but on the other they totally screwed themselves by making such a repetitive, long game with bad framerate problems.
----------Battle System----------
Shining Force Neo is a pure action RPG / dungeon hack. The whole point of the game is to fight through hoards of enemies, gain experience / levels, get loot and to get through a maze like dungeon.
You gain experience points after each kill, and gain levels over time. When you kill monsters they drop gold, items or force energy. Force Energy is like currency, but you can only buy skills with it. I like this skill system alot more than all the other dungeon hacks I've played because it gives you a ton of options on what to upgrade. If you want to be a mage, you can upgrade all the magic force frames, or if you want to be a warrior then you can upgrade all the attack force frames. It's a very simple concept and the biggest "carrot on a fishing pole" in the game.
Besides bashing the O button a million times within the game, the only other buttons you'll be using within battle is the X button that uses items, such as healing water, or keys. The other button is the Square button that uses all your spells or special attacks. The special attacks depend on what type of weapon you are currently carrying. If you are holding a two-handed sword, then you'll learn the skill "Haste" that speeds up your characters attacks, but if you are holding a club, then you'll get the skill "Smash" that creates short impact wave that stuns enemies. After you've used a skill, it has to recharge, some skills are faster than others. If you are holding a mage weapon such as a bow or staff, then you can use magic. These spells cost MP though.
You can take two AI partners with you on your travels, but there's no multiplayer. I love when games do this, the only dungeon hack that does this is the X-Men Legends / Marvel Ultimate Alliance series (that I've played so far atleast). Each character has their strengths and weakness'. You don't have to keep them updated with armor or weapons, which is a huge plus for me. The only person you update items and skills with is Max, this this keeps the game in constant motion, unlike X-Men Legends where you had to micromanage each time you got a new item or someone leveled up. My biggest grief with this game is you can't view your partners skills, you can only view their HP/MP max, with a description of their strengths/weakness'. They do all kinds of magic spells and attacks in battle but you have no idea what they are and what they can do or what they're good for. That's lame.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Max, a young solider, and son of the famous warrior Gaia. After playing in a forbidden shrine with friend Meryl, they discover weird egg shaped rocks. Soon enough these eggs hatch and attack their peaceful town, so Max and Meryl decide to help out by joining in the fight. As Max and Meryl, along with Gaia, reach the shrine, they get attacked by a man behind a mask. The man behind the mask destroys the treasured crystal shard at the shrine, that fends of monsters. Max and Meryl goes on a journey to warn the two other towns left in the world about this strange man behind the mask.
The story was predictable and silly at times. I wasn't a big fan of it overall, but I must say that there's more storyline, dialog, plot twists than the last 5 dungeon hacks I've played put together. The story was extremely cliche, but atleast they put some effort into it.
----------Graphics----------
The character models are celshaded. The most similar game I can think of in terms of style was Fire Emblem for the Gamecube, but since this is a pure action game, the characters have more movements and the enemies show off alot more pazaz. The dungeons were fairly basic in design, but they looked really good, especially if you compare them to fellow dungeon hacks like X-Men Legends, Bards Tale, Fallout, Champions of Norrath or Dark Alliance. As matter of fact, I think Shining Force Neo trumps all of those games in all levels in terms of graphics.
There's two styles of prerendered cutscenes, I have no idea why. There's the CGI cutscene, which looks extremely dated to me. Then there's the anime cutscenes, which look really nice, and there's a TON of them. To give you an example, Tales of.. games usally have a ton of anime cutscenes, but none of those amount and length.
The only really really bad thing about the graphics is if you get bogged down with to many monsters then the framerate will extremely drop and it will get really messy. The dialog scenes could of used more animation too. They got kinda boring with just a handful of animated still, with only 2 characters chatting at a time.
----------Sound----------
Ok, I'll get the good side out first. The music wasn't bad at all, I especially liked the mellow tunes during 'sweet' moments or town music. Dungeon music is pretty forgettable, but I like it how when you come in contact with monsters the music will ramp up. The bad side of things is the voice overs are awful. They're not poorly recorded like in Baten Kaitos for example, but rather they're just poorly acted (ok so was Baten Kaitos). Everything is overly acted and reminds me of a generic Saturday Morning Cartoon.
----------World Map----------
The world map is fairly open ended. There's only two real main continents within the game with a couple of islands. There's only three real towns within the game. Each town connects to fields that connect to dungeons. You have to move to each town/dungeon/field by foot for the first half of the game. After you've visited each town once you can then start using Warp Gates to get around.
The first town within the game is your biggest hub. You can buy weapons, armor, items. You can store items, get unidentified items analyzed, and upgrade your weapons powers. You can level up your force frames within this town and this town also the headquarters of your team, where you can switch out party members and use the warp gates to move across country. The other two towns are probably bigger, but you can't do any of that stuff, only chat to characters and buy some items here and there.
The games biggest feature is the teleport feature. This is one of the first things you learn within the game. Whenever you are in trouble, or your inventory is full, or if you want to level up your force frames, then you can warp right back to town, save up and go right back into battle. This is similar to Dark Alliance's warp system, but you don't have to carry bottles with you wasting precious space.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
47:16
Ok, that's a freaking long dungeon hack game. I don't mind 40+ games at all, sometimes I prefer it, but when all you're doing is button mashing it gets old fairly quickly. Anyways, after you beat the game you get to save it. It starts you off back to the first town in the game, and unlocks a new dungeon, you can continue leveling up or hunt secrets. I like when games do that.