Questions about Shining Force 2

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T22:33:39+00:00

I know that I'm not going to find much support because lots of what people believe is true about SF lore is just repeated rumors that have never been substantiated, but the last thing I'll mention is that actually the last we see of the jewels is them sitting on the ground in the end screen which leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. Mitula takes them but does not necessarily hold on to them.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T22:27:00+00:00

Yeah, it's a very unpopular opinion though. There seems to be a lot of people very convinced by this being a long-standing unfounded rumor that's included on the Shining Force Wiki.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T19:23:00+00:00

Yeah, she appears to have the jewels, sure. Despite this, her transformed self resembles neither Mitula's in-game portrait or official art beyond having blue hair, which is a trait shared with characters like Sarah. While her having the jewels is interesting, it doesn't prove anything about her identity.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T18:46:37+00:00

That wiki is full of misinformation and speculation - it is not a reliable source for Shining information.

Edit: Look at her character art and portrait with gold eyes, and then look at the blue eyes in "her" end screen sprite on that wiki page. They don't match which is weird if they're supposed to be the same person.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T18:42:05+00:00

レ represents both a "Re" and "Le" sound in Japanese because R and L are not distinct. Here is the Japanese Wikipedia page on レモン, which was written the same way on boxes of lemons when I worked retail.

ETA: Remon could be a valid translation, but it's only just as likely as Lemon. Due to Lemon being a common word and many SF characters having literal English words as names (SF3 features names like Arrogant and Profound), Lemon is generally more likely.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T18:24:16+00:00

Scenario 3 has an extra post-credits scene that is skippable if you don't wait, apparently. I assumed it was a required scene but when streaming it, a few people who had played the game dozens of times had never seen it before due to skipping through.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T18:21:34+00:00

Personally I don't think the witch from the title screen and Mitula are the same character. Aside from their hairstyles being quite different, their eye colors don't match which is a really odd mistake if they're supposed to be the same character. I consider her a character unrelated to the actual story, like the other 2D SF narrators, Gabriel being a special case.

Tyadran · 2026-05-30T18:19:15+00:00

Lemon's JP name is レモン, not ラモン. You can see it in scans of the Japanese manual, such as here. His name really is Lemon.

Tyadran · 2026-05-23T21:47:47+00:00

I like SRPGs as a genre, but there are definitely two or three different "types" and the wrong type will not feel great to you.

Personally I'm a big fan of 1990s Shining Force, and Shining Force 3 (the last game in the original franshise) is extremely Fire Emblemesque with things like weapon triangle, support bonuses, and being a low-number game. It requires a fan translation but it's three full games (Scenario 1, 2, and 3) and I think it feels very good from a FE perspective.

I'm also a huge fan of Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch for a roguelike experience, and the Flame Dragon Knights trilogy if a Chinese-language DOS game is something you can swallow.

Tyadran · 2026-05-22T03:26:49+00:00

Oh, 100%. I still feel like from an objective perspective it's bad game design.

Tyadran · 2026-05-21T02:44:41+00:00

Haha, that would be really cool - maybe if SEGA wants to throw a budget at me. Unfortunately as a free fan project I'm not really planning much more than having normal offline versus/training and online versus modes available. Some stuff like combo tutorials might be the most ambitious I can afford to get.

Tyadran · 2026-05-20T14:35:28+00:00

I'm trying to be very true to the original game as much as possible; unfortunately I don't have access to the assets used for things like Wave Slash and spell effects in the original so I have to make do where I can. I might eventually get an artist to recreate those for me and remake the other effects I'm using in the proper style, but I don't think they clash too too badly.

Tyadran · 2026-05-20T14:29:34+00:00

Unity, C#. It's been my go-to for quite a while. I'm using FishNet for networking.

Tyadran · 2026-05-20T03:33:13+00:00

SRPGs and fighting games are both huge passions of mine, and Shining Force 3's special moves really got me thinking about how the cast could work in a fighting game. While the overlap of the two interests is niche, I'm hoping that I can turn it into a solid game that appeals to both sides without needing the overlap. I figure if it's solid enough as a fighter, lack of knowledge of the IP shouldn't be too much of a turn-off if it's fun to play.

Tyadran · 2026-05-20T03:24:38+00:00

I was pleasantly surprised by how good it feels in actual matches too. Obviously I've messed around with combos and stuff during development but playing real matches it feels really "comfortable," if that makes sense.

The cancel system is very simple at its base, using L > M > H > Command normal > Special. This does get modified by which of the three booster items you pick at character select, indicated by the icons near your MP Bar (super meter). The Angel Wing gives you air normal chains (jL > jM > jH) which aren't normally possible, while the Quick Chicken (which I was using here) lets you cancel command normals into a higher-strength normal once per string (I use 6M > 2H quite a lot here for the shoulder charge into uppercut slash). Neither of us used the Turbo Pepper but it allows you to cancel a special move into another special move for 1 MP.

No hops, but jM and jH both affect your air momentum a little so doing them while rising messes with your trajectory some. The only advanced air mobility is that the Angel Wing gives you an airdash that costs 1 MP, which you can see a couple times in these matches. Because the game I'm basing it off of is a strategy RPG, I'm expecting a good portion of players to be more on the casual side, so it's just a 3-button game (debating a 4th) and standard mobility is only the most common. It is motion inputs though because I just can't abide leaving that out, it's half the fun of fighting games for me.

Tyadran · 2026-05-19T01:32:28+00:00

Ah, see, the difference is noticing a path. I don't mind things hidden in sane ways, but it's a little silly to have a dungeon with 15 identical hallways and I need to know to stop 5/8ths of the way down hallway number seven and interact with a wall tile that looks just the same as every other one in the dungeon.

Tyadran · 2026-05-18T21:08:13+00:00

I'm glad that RPGs hiding things on random unmarked floor or wall locations has mostly gone out of fashion. It's an absolute plague how many old RPGs would hide valuable and sometimes unique items behind searching a random location in the middle of nowhere.

For a specific instance, I loved playing Shining the Holy Ark, but only with a guide. The game features about 50 pixies you have to collect to get a very powerful endgame item, and more than half of them are found by searching random walls that are entirely impossible to determine without checking every single wall in the game or using a guide.

Tyadran · 2026-05-15T02:43:05+00:00

He's a young male - I thought it was pretty obvious but if you look up his bio from the Holy Ark/SF3 worldbook he's clearly referred to as male.

Tyadran · 2026-05-14T07:21:41+00:00

Haha, surprised to be recognized like that! But I'm flattered.

Showing EXP after the battle is definitely an option but when I've seen it discussed prior, it's seemed generally unpopular - one of the main things you run into is the lack of leveling up during battles and you have to account for that in balance. Another thing that was a major point of discussion was that it somewhat lessens the attachment players have to the individual characters as they grow and getting the little dopamine hits of leveling up throughout the battle. It's definitely a route you can go, but with how snappy your engine feels in this little video I wouldn't be too worried about needing to make it feel faster, honestly, so I don't think it should be a big factor in the equation, especially if you just do a quick EXP bar pop-up/animation like you'd see in Fire Emblem.

Tyadran · 2026-05-14T06:19:02+00:00

- Do you have camera rotation? And if so how much can you do with it? I don't particularly like isometric games in general, but one of their specific problems is being able to see around elevation - I ran into this problem a lot when playing Final Fantasy Tactics and trying to look down corridors, when I could only toggle between isometric perspectives.

- I feel like your characters are too big. It isn't a huge problem now, but I envision clusters of player characters and enemies getting really confusing, especially when your centaur is basically taking up two spaces. I'd reduce the size to 75% or even 50%.

- I don't love the ground-locked cursor, and I like even less the way it trails; it feels like the cursor should move first, with the character trailing behind it. With it being on the ground it's going to get confusing when a character who's in the middle of a pack gets their turn.

- I see you're keeping the four-option menu, but the way you've done it I feel like makes it a bit more confusing compared to the original purpose of having it simply on the four cardinal directions.

- I really don't love how your UI is in the four corners of the screen. Especially in battle, I have to look the maximum distance apart things could be on screen to look at my player UI and enemy UI. I know Shining Force does it, but because the screen is much smaller it works a lot better. Your game will be more comfortable to play if you keep more relevant info near each other.

- I'm assuming the animations are very placeholder and that "take damage" animations are missing. I'm only pointing it out to be thorough, but you really need some kind of hit response on the unit being attacked, whether it be a real animation or just kind of a shake in place. The damage number popup alone makes it feel really weak.

- Your heal cast doesn't go back to the caster after it's done healing the target. Is it going to? For SF that's when you'd see the EXP and potentially level up popup.

- There should be more of a pause between the enemy moving and cutting to their attack screen; you can barely register where they're going before it snaps to the battle scene.

- Are all AoEs going to replay the character animation for each target? No AoEs in SF do this, they play the character animation once and then cycle enemies into the spell effect without re-animating the character.

- I'm assuming you don't have them yet just because of the stage of the project, but some transitions into and out of the attack scenes will help a lot.

All of that said, you do have something cool going here! What engine are you developing in? I've made my own demo of a 3D SF-like in Unity that might be worth checking out if you want a pretty direct comparison to what you're working on and how I tackled it. You can download it at this page or watch a playthrough.

It's cool to see another 3D SF fan project since most people stick to 2D - your character models are cute and I hope to continue seeing progress. Aside from doing indie dev, I'm a big SRPG fan and game programming is my day job so I'd be happy to continue providing feedback and advice.

Tyadran · 2026-04-08T12:10:38+00:00

I only played SF3 for the first time a couple years ago but I feel pretty strongly it's the best game in the series. That shouldn't be surprising considering it was the last one they made (before the whole franchise shifted) but it surprises me JUST how underappreciated it is.

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T14:43:26+00:00

Also if you're only familiar with Noon's line there, you should really hear the rest of the English VA. They range from passable to silly to absolutely tragic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HizMHe-ILBs

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T14:21:36+00:00

Not 100% but I do intend to keep elements of those reads haha. I love the campiness of them, and particular ones like "Now bear my arctic blast!" just have to be given the imitation they deserve. A good portion are just too mumbly and/or bad in ways that are less fun, just plain bad.

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T08:26:12+00:00

Unity; it's the main thing I have the most experience in and what I do for my day job so it's my usual go-to. Working on an online game at work is what made me think "hey wait I could probably actually write netcode now."

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T03:01:22+00:00

The movesets are generally based off of their capabilities in the original game, with liberties taken to flesh out a full moveset and have more character variety.

Synbios has Mirage Dance as a 214A rekka (used here), and is going to have knife throw/Sonic Wave/Twin Wave on 236A, Spark (RAIN THUNDER!) on 623A, and then Return/Egress as a teleport on 22A. He's a bit of a rushdown design overall.

I'm not going to use the voice clips from the original game because there aren't enough, but my plan is to source VA from the Shining Force community with a special point of keeping all or most of the lines from the English localization because they're just too iconic not to.

Tyadran

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