The Shrine

Not sure when, but its been rated by the ESRB now, so it looks like we will be getting it soon, hopefully in the next week or so.

Shining Force 2 is an awesome game, there are actually quite a few good Genesis adventure/RPG titles on there, Beyond Oasis is one that I really loved as a kid. Beyond Oasis is in the vein of Illusion of Gaia/Secret of Mana.

The original SNES Harvest Moon came out in Europe last week. That one is also a must have for me.

Meh, I never got as far as I wanted in SF2.

I'd have to abandon the original kingdom after a certain incident and then when you rebuild on the new island I didn't feel like playing anymore, and the monsters got continually annoying and powerful.

It gets to a point where you have to surround and gangbang 1, before it one-shots one of your casters or archers.

Oh hell yes!

Shining Force 2 is a game that is a lot longer than it should have been. You know you got problems when you have characters with ?? attack, defense, agility, and HP because the system is only designed to display 2 digits. Consider that the game is absolutely devoid of any strategic depth, the 'hide hero far away against a boss' gameplay gets boring after a while. While fundamentally there is absolutely no difference between Shining Force and Shining Force 2, I liked the first one better because the pacing was much better. At the end of SF you might still remember who these guys in your party are and why they are there.

Also, I didn't like how in the final battle of Shinign Force 2, Sir Astral is talking about how you must make a stand against Xeon to protect the princess, but the first thing you'd do is cast Egress because chances are too many of your guys already died in the last battle. For some inexplicable reason, the attack animation on SF2 generally looks worse (compared hero of SF2 to Max for example), and there are no special animations like the Max sword-wave.