Sega's '90s-era Fire Emblem Competitor Was Years Ahead of Its Time

This long-dormant tactical RPG series deserves a new entry

The Aug. 4 Nintendo Direct was all about Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, the tactical RPG coming to Nintendo Switch 2 next month. The showcase revealed a bunch of new info about Intelligent Systems' latest, including new details about how the game's four branching story paths will merge together. While Fire Emblem has been around since 1990, it truly popped off amongst worldwide gaming audiences with 2019's Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which helped bring the subgenre out of the niche and into the mainstream by combining turn-based battles with Persona-like social sim elements. In the years since, other studios have followed suit with excellent tactical RPGs like Ubisoft's Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope in 2022 and last year's stellar remake Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. But the latest Nintendo Direct reminded me there's one publisher I'd particularly love to see get in on this burgeoning trend, and that's Sega.

While the early Fire Emblem games were largely Japan-only releases, the Shining Force series was released for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive in the early '90s in both North America and Europe. Thanks to a hand-me-down console, Shining Force (1992) and Shining Force 2 (1993) marked my first exposure to the genre, and they're still fun to play even all these decades later. (Both games are included in the Sega Genesis library that comes with a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership.) Sega also released Shining Force games for Sega CD and Saturn, but those are much harder to come by through legitimate means these days.

Even if you've only played the recent Fire Emblem games, like Three Houses and Engage, there's a lot that'll be familiar about the Shining Force games, even beneath three decades of dust. You assemble an army of fighters of varying classes: archers, mages, monks, knights on horseback, and axe-wielding warriors. Eventually, there'll be so many of them that you'll have to choose only your favorites and maybe even bench some longtime stalwarts in favor of a dazzling new recruit with impressive skills. And yes, like Fire Emblem, your characters can be promoted after reaching a certain level and obtaining a rare item.

One area where Shining Force stands apart is its oddball characters that don't really fit into a typical RPG class. Sure, Fire Emblem throws the occasional dancer and pegasus knight your way, but Shining Force lets you recruit a werewolf, a robot, a flying jellyfish, a turtle, and more endearing weirdos. Shining Force 2 features a goofy phoenix character called Peter who looks like Sesame Street's Big Bird with a Gen Z broccoli haircut, but he absolutely whips ass the entire game. Appearances can be deceiving.

In battle, you'll deploy your motley crew onto a grid-based map, moving your troops into position bit by bit before the enemy gets their chance to respond. When fighters are in range, the action switches to another screen, with elaborate (by 16-bit standards) pixel art showing off your characters attacking and defending against their foes in stylish fashion. Depending on the map, you'll encounter terrain that can hinder your movement or harm your characters, and you'll either need to take down every foe in sight or just vanquish the enemy leader. The series also featured some memorable map variety, with battles strewn over a series of precariously floating ramps, in a circus tent, and even an homage to Peru's Nazca lines.

While it would be fair to assume Shining Force was directly inspired by Fire Emblem, which came out two years earlier, apparently that's not the case. Developer Hiroyuki Takahashi told GamesTM in 2010: "The tempo of that title [Fire Emblem] was so bad that it wasn't something I even wanted to play." Despite that bold assertion, even at a glance you can tell these games are pretty darn similar. Sega still owns the rights to the Shining series, but has moved it in a less overtly Fire Emblem-ish direction since the Saturn era, releasing a Japan-only trio of action-oriented tactical RPGs for the PlayStation Portable in the 2010s. (At a glance, they're much closer to Valkyria Chronicles than Fire Emblem.) Sega also launched the action RPG Shining Resonance Refrain worldwide in 2018, but it's an entirely different animal than the Shining Force of the '90s.

I'd love to see an updated Fire Emblem competitor with some modern Sega fanservice incorporated into it. Let me recruit Yakuza's Kiryu or Super Monkey Ball's adorable AiAi through secret optional missions! Give me a map inspired by Sonic's Green Hill Zone, or the domed futuristic cities of Phantasy Star 2, or Christmas Nights! The children — by which I mean elder millennials — yearn for more Shining Force.