Shining Force Neo done

[Don]

The ending was probably the 2nd cheesiest ending ever, right behind Grandia's "soandso died to teach us the power of love... oh never mind she got resurrected". Predictable and cheesy, but a good game nonetheless. Apparently all the Power of Light was good for was Egressing people out while any Joe Smoe Power of Dark guys can warp around all day.

The party member's usefulness is directly related to how annoying their voice is, which means your party is stuck as Meryl and Chiquitita if you want to actually beat the game without doing excessive leveling up. With Chiquitita in your party you never have to worry about stats like resist stun, knockback, and knockdown which is good because you're never going to resist them anyway. Meryl can take infinitely more damage than Max due to her off the scale physical/magic defenses. Spark/Ice Demon, probably the harder fights in the game, will need about a minute just to go through one lifebar on Meryl as opposed to 3 seconds if you were in her shoes.

On an unrelated note, SFN is the only game I know of where you can be doing 5 digit damage to one enemy in one level and then 8 digit damage to another enemy in the same level.

[SineSwiper]

8-digit damage? Why not divide by a thousand on all figures?

[Don]

Well, you do start out doing 2 digit damage and it ramps up to about 5 digit damage in a fairly reasonable manner. Problem is that you got all these Force Arts that does exponential damage on certain types of enemies.

For example take a Dark Master, highest level elemental enemy. Its only attribute is Darkness so only the Darkness Pursuit (increase damage to darkness element by 250%) Force Art applies to it. You can hit those guys for 5 digit damage which is appropriate since they have about a million HPs.

Now you take something like a Devil Brother which is Winged, Demon, Armed, and Armored so Winged/Demon/Armed/Armor Slayer all applies. Further although the game claims it adds 250% damage it actually works in some kind of exponential factor. Compound that with stuff like Apocalyse which does a 16 hit combo with each hit doing about 25% more hit than the hit before and you get an 8 digit damage critical hit halfway through a combo on Apocalyse. Currently in the optional dungeon the highest HP enemy I've ran into is around 10 million HP on the Titan Forces which won't even last through the 3rd hit on Apocalyse. I guess if there is a need to actually use the 16th hit on Apocalyse I can hit for 9 digit damage but I've yet to find anything that lives through even half a combo of Apocalyse.

I'd say up until you beat Ice Demon (2nd trial of the Shining Force), the game is quite challenging. After you beat Ice Demon you get the double defense Secret Arts which lets you get away with wearing 95% resist element gear and become utterly unkillable, and after beating Balrog and becoming a Shining Force you also get all the Slayer Force Arts which leads to some truly rediculous damage output.

[Tortolia]

And in the first few Shining Force games, most things barely broke 100 HPs. Heh.