though i have just now played the game in its entirety for myself, i have some history with it going back into the mid '90s. see, i actually owned a copy of it and had played just a bit of it before a friend of mine offered to buy it from me. he had a new sega cd, and i was far more stoked on squaresoft games; i wanted to buy a copy of chrono trigger (which was retailing for EIGHTY BUCKS!) and, well, lunar got me there. that's pretty much the long and short of it.

still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.

it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.

aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.

one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.

yep. (arguably) the best final fantasy. of course, i felt this way about heavensward, too. if you have any contempt for mmorpgs or subscription-based games, but you love an above and beyond exceptional, emotional jrpg tale, it would be well worth it to overcome those issues and dive in. you can play all the way up to level 60 (which includes heavensward) entirely for free, anyhow. i've never known anyone to not completely fall in love with this game once they give it a chance, and shadowbringers is one of the best things square enix have ever made at its absolute peak.

dank. borderline kusoge in some regards, but it's a weird enough blend of valis, el viento, maybe a little shinobi and/or castlevania, and king of demons to be interesting/cool, full of alien/demonic dream freaks to slash or blast. i mean, its odd anime-cronenberg plot was written by kenichi nishi, known for moon: remix rpg adventure and LOL: lack of love) so... that may speak to this game's underlying quality! the soundtrack, unfortunately, feels like a sort of lazy effort from michiko naruke, who would leave telenet in around 4 years to work on wild arms (which has a fantastic ost). at least it feels 'off' enough that it sometimes manages to enhance the game's overall strange vibe.

the worst final fantasy. so much potential squandered, resulting in one of the biggest unfinished games ever made, full of emptiness and blandness. after this, if it hadn't been for final fantasy XIV (and later dragon quest XI), i might've decided square enix were all but dead to me. just a complete bummer of a game. i'm aware that it's been improved from this initial release, and i even picked up the windows edition on sale at some point, but as of yet i just can't bring myself to give this crap a second chance. i just don't think there's anything a more complete version can do to fix the failures of the game's world design. or its combat. or a story which only exists in pieces roughly stitched together. probably the least interesting story told in a final fantasy, at that. it's a failure parallel to the initial release of XIV, if not even worse.

i have always had a maybe silly amount of nostalgia for this game despite having barely played it in my teens, largely due to the love shown for it in the game magazines i read religiously back then (egm, gamefan, etc). i had my snes and zelda 3, but i was still young and couldn't afford much—shining force 2 was one of the foremost among the many games i coveted.

anyhow, suffice to say this game deserves to be remembered and rediscovered. if you've never played it before (perhaps if you've liked any fire emblem), give it a shot.