I don't know if we all have our white whale of gaming, but mine's been the Shining Force 3 games since...well, since I got into games really. I played SF and SF2 on my friend's Genesis when I was first getting into playing games and had a blast with them. When I decided to buy a "next gen" console in the late 90's, I almost went with the Saturn for Shining Force 3, but it was announced dead before I ever dropped any money on it. Not a big deal, I thought, but then I read or heard that the other two Scenarios wouldn't be coming out in English. I was out.
When I first got into PC gaming in 2001/2002 and discovered emulation, I was just counting the days until a Saturn emulator would be released so I could get in on some sweet SF3 action. A few years later a sweet ass, but very illegal emulator was released that played Saturn game with some pretty cool Direct X enabled graphical effects....but it was buggy as hell and sadly that never got worked out. I was going to have to wait as the only other emulator was running these games in pure software and was slow as hell.
Fast forward 8 or so years and here we are. There still isn't an emulator capable of running Saturn games with any sort of gpu acceleration, but there have been massive advancements made with SSF - the one that runs the games purely in software. That, combined with faster PCs mean that you can play through popular Saturn games...if you can stomach the eye-assaulting graphics.
"Grow up man, shit doesn't have to look good. Bump mapping is for chumps." No, you don't understand. This shit is ugly. It's from that awkward age of graphics where people wanted to do all kinds of cool stuff with sprites and polygons but had no business doing so. Sure, if you can bump up the resolution, get some filtering going, and maybe throw some AA in there everything looks great. Except this is done completely in software and you can't do any of those things. No, you're stuck with low resolution textures on (basically a couple of) aliased polygons, and what I can only assume were once some pretty sweet looking per-rendered sprites but now just look like some sort of weird blurry voxels or groups of pixels. The combination is actually hard to watch when you throw movement in....at least on a high resolution monitor.
Nevertheless, this is Shining Fucking Force! And not the shitty ARPG games that Sega's been trying to pass off as Shining Force to the kids these days...this is the real, surround motherfucking minotaurs with your birdmen, ninjas, centaurs, and orphan kids and beat the shit out of them Shining Force. Oh, hey, what's that over there? A knight? Well, my newly promoted Priest chick is about to kick your ass with her staff while my mage fries the fuck out of all your friends. Except that one dude. We're going to leave him with 1 hit point so that my fucked up little pet monster that sucks balls now can level up and tear shit up one day. And damn right I'm going to barge into your house and read all the books on your book shelf. And not in the lame Morrowind way...I'm just going to look at the titles, judge you, and walk out. Unless you have chests all up in there. Then I'm gonna rob you.
So why now? Well, the translation patch for the second two Scenarios have been released recently. What's the big deal? Well, this game was kind of a trailblazer and basically lead the way in linking the three together. There are certain "sync points" (you never actually know when they are) where your actions and decisions play a pretty big role in the latter two games. For instance, in one of your first two battles there are two more or less helpless bystanders. One of them joins you if you save him. The other just tells you he'll "Tell his allies what he saw" and you never see him again. Except in the later scenarios...where's he's a main character and a total badass. That is, if you saved him. Otherwise, he's dead. And saving him isn't easy. You gotta run up to that motherfucker and feed him healing items for the whole battle to keep him going - there's a definite risk/reward thing going on here that was totally nullified by the fact that the second two games weren't originally released here.
The three scenarios tell the events from three different perspectives, so you can expect to play as at least some of your earlier enemies in later games. Again, risk/reward. You might be fighting a boss and deciding to deal with the fact that a mini boss is kicking your ass from behind because you have a feeling that they'll play a part in a later game. Of course, doing so makes winning that battle at all a great deal more difficult. It's a very simple concept and execution, but it adds a lot.
But really, why now? It still looks like shit and the Saturn emulator really needs an interface overhaul and fast forward key. Well, when my pc was kinda dead recently, I was weighing over whether I should get another desktop or just roll with a notebook for work and whatnot. And I kind of came to the conlclusion that the one regret I'd have about not being able to play games on the PC would be that I never played through these.
And watch Sega finally Re-release these games with upgraded everything over here in six months. But really, who's with me!? Let's do this!
Yeah, I fully don't expect anyone to be with me on this.
