YMMV / Shining Force

• Anti-Climax Boss: Even with low level plays, most bosses due to Artificial Stupidity within the mechanics of the game. Here are a few to name:
  • Ramladu. He does have That One Attack due to his insane attack. However, since he has Aura 3, he may cast it at the worst of times. In addition, he will also not engage you when fighting the robots south from you and will not engage until you are a few squares away from him. This means that you can just dish out the enemies below and then prepare and approach him in full assault. Aura 3 is not going to heal him as much and the chances of him being next to his robots are near impossible due to the spacing.
  • Colossus. They are three bosses in one, but they have low HP and can easily be engaged one at a time. They are unique in the sense that they can cast Level 3 spells of the three elements, but by this time, your troops have high enough HP to withstand the attacks, versus when they were more dangerous early on.
  • Darksol. Despite being the Big Bad behind reviving Dark Dragon and the boss of the penultimate battle of the game, his physical attack is incredibly weak, and his only special only does around 15-25 HP damage, which he will cast around 50% of the time. To compensate, he's got stupidly high hit points and getting to him requires either taking care of torch eyes up the center where your party can be easily boxed in or going around the long way.
  • Dark Dragon. Pretty much all of the above. The only spells to watch out for is the Demon Blaze (middle head at all times and the side heads if the only head left) and Bolt 4 (left head only). Ironically, Bolt 4 is almost never used. They are the only monsters that cannot move at all, meaning you can position your units in the proper tiles with less hassle similar to the Mishaela fight without the health regeneration. The fight also regenerates armed skeletons, although 2 can appear at the same time and you can place a unit to block the regeneration tile. If you took out the right-left-middle head, the fight would be too easy.
• Badass Decay: The Rune Knight unit. In the first battle, the Rune Knight boss poses a serious threat to the players with his high attack and movement, allowing him to dart across the battlefield at a moment's notice and pick off weakened player characters (including Max, who by this point is still a Master of None). Rune Knights become a Degraded Boss in following battles, but remain a constant threat to the player up until the end of the first chapter, by which point Max's Magikarp Power is starting to kick in, and the Rune Knights have to resort to using large numbers in order to remain relevant (and failing). By the time they disappear from the game in the following chapter, they've become as trivial as the Goblins they were commanding in the first two battles.
• Breather Boss:
  • The Ghoul from Chapter 2, who follows up the game's Wake-Up Call Boss, the Marionette. By comparison, it's simply a stronger, faster zombie that lacks the magic or healing capabilities of the Marionette.
  • Balbazak is essentially a stronger variation of the previous boss, Elliot, but actually comes across as easier due to his underwhelming army and inability to move (as he's keeping the Force from entering the ship). The boss after Balbazak, Kane, has twice the attack.
• Cliché Storm: A whole stew of heroic fantasy tropes. Slightly averted, as it helped pioneer several of them in gaming.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Chimaeras, introduced in the final battles, are powerful Lightning Bruisers, boasting high defense, high HP, high speed (roughly one in twelve physical attacks from any party member will hit), flight (which allows them to ignore all terrain except walls), and powerful attacks. Level 4 magic spells can defeat them easily, but without them they're very dangerous.
  • Torch Eyes. They always attack with an undodgeable, defense-ignoring ranged laser attack that deals 19-21 damage. Worse, they also have a chance to attack twice. The last battles where they appear have them positioned in an effective kill zone where they can attack you but you can't attack them (unless you use fliers or ranged attackers).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Many examples, but Zylo is the prime example due to his cool design and effectiveness as a unit.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Zylo has extremely high attack, decent defenses, and great movement unaffected by terrain, all while being recruitable a third of the way through the game. While he hits a low point later on due to poor starting promotion stats and lacking weapon boosts, pushing past that lets him be even stronger for the final battles.
  • Domingo. If you feed him experience after recruiting him, he'll quickly gain incredible HP and defense, on top of a decent spell set, with the unique "float" move type that that allows him to benefit from defensive high Land Effect terrain while otherwise being a normal flying character aside from the rare extra-high terrain. He also has higher enemy priority than anyone except Max, letting him distract enemies while other units get experience. He tends to taper off in the late-game due to becoming useless without MP and needing lots of levels to keep up with enemies and get more spells (including not getting Freeze 4 until six levels after he stops gaining stats), but can still be valuable in his niche.
  • Musashi, found through a secret at the start of Chapter 7, bypasses Late Character Syndrome by likely being stronger than anyone in the party at that time, with very high attack, defense, and HP stats. To compensate, he's slow as shit, but this can be compensated for by giving him the Speed/Mobility Ring and feeding him the Turbo Pepper (available one battle after he can join).
  • The Sword of Light and the Chaos Breaker. Not only are they ridiculously powerful swords, but using them can cast spells as well, giving Max an effective ranged attack. Unlike other items that cast spells, they cannot break as they're plot-relevant, turning Max into a Magic Knight with infinite MP. The Sword of Darkness subverts this by being cursed and its effect being a Useless Useful Spell, on top of being available for exactly one battle (rather than three for the Sword of Light and six for the Chaos Breaker).
  • The Evil Ring. It casts Bolt 3 (decent magic damage that hits 14 tiles at once), a power that's otherwise only available to Alef after some grinding. Its uses are limited by its chance of breaking, but that often is more reliable than Alef, especially if given to a knight or any other character with good mobility. There's also a exploit where giving it and the Sword of Darkness to Max prior to the Chaos Breaker event can clear its curse without unequipping it, giving an already powerful attacker a consequence-free attack boost for the rest of the game alongside use of Bolt 3.
  • The Game Boy Advance remake gives you access to Narsha. Her status buffs avert the Useless Useful Spell trope fully—one very useful one is one that buffs movement. This is even more game-breaking if the player is using Mawlock, along with a couple of Knight cards. Buffing him up and then using the cards to attack the map's boss from across the map will win most battles after you get him, provided the force can survive whatever vanguard the enemy has set up.
• Goddamned Bats: Bat creatures, almost exclusively appearing in the earlier stages of the games, can avoid all obstacles and barriers, and have a good chance of putting a character to sleep with any attack. There is no way to cure Sleep, aside from waiting several rounds for it to randomly wear off.
• Once Original, Now Common: Shining Force was released at a time when role-playing games (particularly tactical RPGs) were just gaining steam. Some of the twists in the story are eye-rollingly cliche now, while being still fresh concepts back then.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Evasion rates. As you progress through the games, enemies become more and more agile to the point you can spend over ten turns waiting for that lucky flush that will finally wound a gargoyle!
  • Double attacks. They seem to be completely and utterly random, and can be devastating if you're not expecting them. It's quite possible to lose the very first battle in the game simply by having a Dark Dwarf walk up to Max and hit him with a double attack that does over his maximum HP in a single go, with no possible way to prevent it.
  • While a lot of the dated and clunky mechanics are simply a product of its time, the inventory system feels like it was designed to be as awkward and frustrating as possible. Whenever you open a chest outside of battle (unless it contains gold) the item inside is put into Max's inventory. Each character's inventory only has four slots in it, and that includes their equipment. If Max's inventory is full, he has to put the item back, then either give one of his items to another party member, or throw it away. There's no storage either, meaning items you might prefer to hold on to for later (like valuable Healing Seeds at the stage in the game where common Medical Herbs are still almost a full heal because of your party's low maximum HP) have to be hung on to, cluttering up your inventory until you eventually need them. And the system for passing items between characters is just extra-clunky in general. What's particularly weird is that even Shining in the Darkness would have your hero pass a new item off to the next one of his party members with an open space if his own inventory was full, meaning Force was actively made less intuitive for some reason. Shining Force II rectified this issue somewhat by automatically passing the item to the next party member with an vacant item slot.
  • The completely randomised stat gain on level-up, which can be brutally stingy. It is completely possible (even common) for a character to gain a level and improve none of their stats whatsoever.
  • The design of the overworld battle maps is generally just held up as being outright bad, featuring absurd amounts of pointless empty ground you have to tramp across before being able to engage the next group of enemies, often through dense terrain that slows most of the Shining Force to a crawl, dragging the battles out for about twice as long as they should last. The battle to get from Rindo to Manarina in particular is often cited as one of the most excrutiating maps in the game as you're forced to slog through the desert before you can engage the groups of Dark Mages and Zombies.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: By sequence breaking, it's possible to skip recruiting the party and do a Solo-Character Run, where only ten required party members will be picked up by the end of the game.
• Tear Jerker: Kane's death at the hands of Darksol. Is there any wonder why Max becomes mute after having to go through losing the only family that has in the present day?
• That One Attack: Laser Eye's attack. Every sixth turn it gets, it will do mass damage to units within a 3-square horizontal direction, enough for a One-Hit Kill at that point in the game for anyone except high-health frontline fighters. However, it also hits enemy units.
• That One Boss:
  • Marionette, who is also an Early-Bird Boss—she has infinite MP and can cast Freeze Lv. 3 in a huge radius (which is likely a One-Hit Kill for one to five of your units at this point of the game), and her health is always regenerating, all of which makes her difficult for party that isn't likely to be very strong.
  • Kane, by virtue of having very high HP coupled with high defense, and armed with the Sword of Darkness which can One-Hit Kill party members easily.
  • Mishaela, for essentially being a beefed-up Marionette. Her Bolt spell is more powerful and targets a large enough area that she could theoretically perform a Total Party Kill by herself, which, coupled with a ludicrously high evasion rate and regenerating health, makes her damn near impossible to kill. For insult to injury, she's also a "Get Back Here!" Boss, so she spends most of the battle running away from the force, only to turn around and obliterate them while everyone whiffs their attacks. The only hard counter for this is the Despell spell, which fails 90% of the time and only a few members of the force can cast (and who will get annihilated should they fail). If it works, though, she goes from this to just a tediously long but easy boss fight, since she will never bother with a melee attack, even when her only other option is disabled.

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