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The best video games I have ever played would have to be the Shining Force series on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis), the glimmering jewel of which was Shining Force II. These games were the first role-play games (RPGs) that really impressed me, I had played RPGs like Sword of Vermillion, Landstalker and Phantasy Star and while I enjoyed playing them, I felt something was missing.

When I played the Shining Force II, I felt compelled to play it; previous RPG games had never got me so obsessed. I found that the game had all the best bits of the alternative titles and a little bit more.

The graphics were bright, fun and they looked great with loads of different characters, scenery and portraits of certain individuals.
The sound was brilliant with different tunes depending on if you were in battle, in a village, in a castle and so on; the tunes were not tinny, repetitive and just plain annoying as others, at the time, were.
The game had a good balance of being just difficult enough, it wasn't so difficult that you gave up after being stuck on the same place for days on end, neither was it so easy that you completed it in hours.
Like all good RPGs it took a long time to complete but you never got bored because the storyline was engaging and vast, you were always meeting new characters, taking up new challenges and battling monsters.

What made the game excel was the attention to detail. I think that the best things about the game were the characters, the church and the battle system.
The characters had individual skills that meant each character was valuable in varying situations and they had different personalities that made you feel loyal to certain characters when you had to choose your army for battle later in the game; this almost made you feel bad about not selecting certain people.
The churches were where you went to heal people, revive fallen allies, remove curses and promote your party members. When a character reached level 10, you had the option to promote them, this meant that their skills would change, sometimes drastically, making them more specialised but this could have a detrimental effect to other skills. For example, their attack could double, but their defence was halved, this meant that you had to think about when you were going to promote people.
The battle system was a turn-based, grid system but not in the traditional sense.
Instead of one army moving and fighting and then the other people were chosen at random from either side until everyone had had a turn and then next time round people were chosen in a different order. This meant that you couldn't gang up on one monster at a time because you didn't know who was going to move next, you had to be a bit more tactically minded.

All these different and, at the time, innovative ideas culminated in what I feel is the perfect RPG that has been unsurpassed since its conception in 1994. But don't just take my word for it, at http://uk.gamespot.com, the public rate it at 9.3 out of 10 (from 292 votes) and there are literally thousands of websites dedicated to the shining force series (just type "shining force" into Google.com). For a more in-depth explanation of the game try going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S hining_Force_II.

Learn more about this author, David Lawrence.
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