My favourite strategy game is Shining Force III, Scenario 1 to 3 on the Saturn. I guess it’s cheating a bit as it’s three games rather than one, but the three very well written scenarios (that are full games in their own right) form a complete story, with your saved game used between them. Each game has its own characters, and the games are fully (or partially for scenario 3) parallel to each other chronologically, so the heroes from the different games sometimes meet, and you can occasionally see the same event occur twice but from the perspective of a different protagonist, which was very cool.
Quite humorous too, as the Shining Force III games had a silent protagonist but when protagonists meet in the shared events, you will suddenly find the protagonists of the other games very chatty. The best element of this system is that decisions you make in one scenario affect the others. For instance, a non-player character you have the ability to save early in Scenario 1 becomes a playable character later in Scenario 2 if you save him.
The actual battles are extremely fun. Shining Force III has features that are fairly commonplace now (though far rarer back then), like characters helping an adjacent one on the grid in battle in some way giving a chance of resulting in a better friendship, kind of like the new Fire Emblem game. Though in Shining Force III this is purely battlefield related and gives them benefits such as resistances or stat gains when next to each other from then on.
Different terrains give movement penalties/defence bonuses. Each weapon type has its own set of special attacks that randomly hit (like criticals) that must be learnt, with some exclusive to certain special weapons. There are terrain advantages too. Some of the battle scenarios themselves are very fun, like the ‘protect the refugees’ stage in Scenario 1, which relies on getting to a junction point and perfect timing.
I like that one particularly because it take you out of the strategy role-playing ‘turtle’ comfort zone (where you very slowly push your characters across the battlefield together), and forces you to move forward aggressively to stop the refugees from dying. It took me quite a few goes to get this done back in the day. The character, Medion, in the cut scenes is the protagonist of Scenario 2 (this is one of the shared events I mentioned earlier, he battles the character General Varlent as part of this in Scenario 2).
And then there are the tombs. I love these, they’re almost like a mini-game with even more strategy. Some maps have tombs with items in them and if you have previously gotten a map to that tomb (generally from searching around during the town sections) you have a decision to make as to whether to split some characters off to get the treasure, which makes the main fight more satisfying as you have to make an assessment as to who you can spare for however long the tomb takes to clear without losing the level.
And you also have to work out whether those characters can even catch the thieves to make them spit the items out (your characters cannot unlock the treasure chests so you must wait for the thieves to get them first, and the thieves have a wider movement range then many characters). Plus, you don’t want to kill the thieves before they drop every item (thieves will only drop one item they hold per attack, even if a killing blow is launched).
There are other games that do some of these things better (and a special shout-out to Vandal Hearts I here, which has the best battle scenarios in any strategy role-player ever), but for me, none hit high notes so consistently in every aspect of the game like Shining Force III does.
Unfortunately, Scenarios 2 and 3 were never officially localised, but thankfully fans have translated them and created patches for the Japanese versions to add English text so they can at least be enjoyed via emulation.
There’s also a patch for US/UK Scenario 1 (which had its ending changed as Sega knew Scenario 2 and 3 would never come out in the West) that restores the original cliffhanger ending).
An interesting side note is that this is the game that caused the rift between Camelot and Sega, as Sega started focusing on the Dreamcast while Scenario 3 was still in development, causing major issues for Camelot that eventually led to them working with Nintendo on the Mario Tennis/Golf games and Golden Sun.
Lord Darkstorm
