Morrigan
It's nice to know that another has those feels for Shining Force. Back in the day, it was kind of my gold standard for gaming. I had seen a lot of good things thanks to the variety of stuff on offer, since there was the home computer scene alongside the consoles. Shining Force just held a very special place in my heart, though.
It had that quirkiness, that idea that no one's concept of fantasy was a bad one, that I loved so much. The first Phantasy Star (which I recommend wholeheartedly if you've never played it) had that magic to it, too.
It's interesting, because when I want to recommend Shining Force to someone. I never know which version to recommend. The GBA version has a better translation, but they took some liberties with it (Max talks!) which are kind of odd! Plus, they kind of messed up the balance of the GBA version. I think they even took Bleu's ability to be promoted away, and Bleu was one of my favourites! Gosh darn it, SEGA.
The problem with the Genesis one, of course, is that the translation is so broken it can take a few replays to fully understand what's actually going on. It's like Final Fantasy VII in that regard. So I never know which to point people at, I usually tend to begrudgingly go with the GBA version, despite the balance issues, since I imagine people might not take so kindly to the confusion of a completely broken translation these days.
The thing about Shining Force though is that it had so much in it, it was so good. And I think the frustrating part of it is is that I imagine what would happen if it'd been allowed to continue on its own course. If the first game had been the standard for all that followed.
Respectful inclusion of ethnic minorities? Non-binary people? LGBTQ people? And then with anthros, robots, and flying machines on top
because why not. It was just unusual, because... I don't know how to put this.
Can I segue a little?
I mentioned this before, I'm sorry if it bothered anyone. I usually dislike fantasy because often a species or the colour of a creature's hide denotes whether they're Good or Evil. I don't like that. I really don't! I'm actively bothered by that because it feels like an artefact of the prejudiced mind, a mind that feels the need to separate behaviours by their physical appearance.
Shining Force had a tiny bit of this, but for the most part it was much better about it than any other fantasy game I'd played.
Oh, you can actually have good and bad dwarves, and they can be good or bad only depending on motivations and allegiances? Perhaps they're only bad because they've been misled by a very charismatic person who's effectively indoctrinated them into a cult? Or because they have negative perspectives which have never been challenged allowing them to be used for more nefarious purposes?
You mean, it's not just their race has a Universally Good status versus another's Universally Evil? Really? Egad!
And that's kind of a thing.
I think that a lot of what we're seeing is endemic of a certain kind of thinking that just makes me feel uncomfortable. This is why the misogynistic, otaku-baiting waifu crap in so many modern games is so bothersome.
It's indicative of the wrong people leading creative teams, people who can't see past their own prejudices. And those prejudices then seep into the worlds they're creating and become imbued within those worlds as some kind of Truth. Aside from a few blips, Shining Force didn't have that.
There's just something so pervasive about what fantasy has come to mean that it almost invites this thinking.
I blame Tolkien, to a degree. He helped to popularise this thinking with Lord of the Rings. The rewrite of The Hobbit didn't help, either. Originally in The Hobbit, Smaug wasn't evil, he was just greedy. Gandalf wasn't good, he was openly a bloody dragon racist (not even joking), the king of the dwarves wasn't motivated by good, simply greed. And the reason Gandalf chose a hobbit was because he knew they were annoying, greedy, and clever. He knew that the hobbit would steal from and generally piss off the dragon enough to give people a reason to kill it.
Essentially, in the original Hobbit, Bilbo didn't steal because he was compelled to by an evil ring. He stole because "Ooh, pretty! I want pretty!"
"You put that back!"
"Nuh-uh! Gonna mock you now!"
"FINE. I'll go on a burninating rampage because I have uncontrollable rage fits which are triggered by dirty, low-down thieves like you!"
"Yeah, that's what the old dragon racist said would happen!"
The rewrite painted a very different picture.
S'funny, because in the original take on The Hobbit, you'd probably want Smaug as a landlord. Sure, he'd charge high rent, but he was fairly honest in protecting those who gave him money because Smaug valued the long game. "I can keep making money, here, if I protect them. It's not hard to scare off the things that threaten them. So if I do that, I keep making money!"
Smaug was basically a Wall Street dragon.
Well, before the rewrite turned him into Captain Evil, Lord of the Grand Cliché.
I think Tolkien popularising this did really bad things to fantasy. We also had the likes of Conan, which didn't really help things either. I mean, fantasy could've gone down the route of Dragonriders of Pern, which was a much more open-minded, lovely proposition, but...
Well, let me put it this way... The Hobbit was a tale that warned about the perils of greed, but Tolkien was a greedy bugger himself who didn't heed his own warnings. He was willing to poop all over his own works to create something that would sell.
Now, a lot of my favourite fantasy writers stick by their six-guns and don't alter their vision just to make money. This was true of both Anne McCaffrey and Terry Pratchett right up until they died.
The point of all this, I guess, is that for whatever reason the kinds of fantasy settings that tended to be bigoted as all heck, objectified women beyond reason, and were generally crappy beyond reason were more popular than those that had a more hopeful outlook and treated their people better.
It's kind of like...
How can I put this?
There's this idea that appreciating sad stories where bad things happen to people make you smart. There were two studies about this that actually said that the opposite is true. If a person is clever, they tend to be tired of all of the terrible things happening in the world around them. In fantasy, they tend to look for more uplifting, optimistic, equal worlds and stories that have happy endings.
So, basically, the myth that smart people prefer stories rife with misery, cultivating hatred, and culminating with an ending that just serves to hurt the reader more? It's precisely that, a myth. The thing is is that people will buy into this myth (marketing, yay) because they want to appear intelligent, which will make them more popular. And thus the rise of pseudo-intellectuality.
I think there's a point in all of this, somewhere.
Basically, things like Eastern and Western games that generally aren't great to people are an artefact of all this, I think. It's a cynical business perspective that's trying to appeal to the mainstream, which keeps this ball of shite rolling. You have marketing quite effectively conditioning their customers into thinking that this is what they want, so that's what they continue to look for.
So you have worlds where good/evil is defined by hide colour and species. You have worlds which objectify women by making them damsels in distress or by putting them in chainmail bikinis which are slavered over by a horny camera. It's a depressing reality.
What I want is something that takes the spirit of Shining Force and brings it into the modern era. That looks at how many of us feel, now, about wanting more equality and uses that to create a world and a story that would be aimed at all of us.
An inclusive world, an equal world, and a world that might struggle but where everything does culminate in a happy ending.
A world where you can have black dwarves, dragons, transgender robots, and whomever else the creators can imagine. A vastly diverse cast of all kinds of people whose 'good' or 'evil' are defined by motivation and perspective, not by anything physical.
A world where there aren't damsels in distress, at all. Where people can be capable. One where the male power fantasy isn't the ideal that rules everything. A world where the people can be able-bodied and minded, rather than just occupying the role of troglodytes in mud huts who wait for the incredibly typical Glorious White Heroes to save them from their troubles.
If you want an example of this? Consider Faerun versus Eberrron. Faerun is the popular setting, and yet in Faerun only a handful of people can use magic. They use their magic to save the poor widdle people in mud huts who can't help themselves. This leads to uninteresting stories of hackneyed heroism that I can't help but roll my eyes at.
Eberron, on the other hand. Oh, Eberron is a thing. See, everyone in Eberron has some magical capacity. They use it for work, for play, and no one is useless. If you're a great evil, you're going to be up against masses of people who're capable spellcasters. So... Good luck with that!
In Eberron, evil has to be more insidious, like in this real world of ours. They're usually movements like political ones, or cults, and it's often a dark mirror of our own world. Usually it deals with a lot of spying, subterfuge, and undercover work as you try and piece together the mystery of what's going on, and unravel whatever crazy conspiracy is afoot.
It's like Fallout, as well. Chris Avellone isn't a writer I like (sorry, Avellone fans!). He wants to continually bomb people back into the stone age because he doesn't think that people deserve to have society, civility, and happiness. He's a nihilist with some worryingly Alt-Right-ish views.
I don't agree with him.
I'd like to take the good ending of Fallout Tactics. Um... Just a moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4ewKOcVW2E
I'd like to take the good ending of Fallout Tactics and run with it! You have a fledgling society that's made up of all kinds of people! All genders, ethnicities, and more. You also have super mutants, ghouls, sapient deathclaws, and any robot able to prove its sapience is given rights as a citizen. You have a central council of people with representatives elected from each group running this new government and...
Your job is that you're an agent. You help sway the power, keep things equal, or if you really want to... bring it all down, I guess, because choice and agency. I'd value a story like that where I'm having to try to play all the sides to help everyone feel happy, accepted, and in an equal position to strengthen this society and help it to thrive.
I think that's a much, much more interesting story than. "Oh, hey. Another vault. I'm leaving it. And it's a wasteland. There's stuff to kill. I guess I'm some kind of power fantasy hero. Whoop."
I think there's kind of a deep-seated problem, here. It's huge, even. I think it's kind of a pervasive, cancerous idea of what a fictional world should be. An idea that's become all too popular. That it should be about power fantasies, it should be unequal, it should be about survival, and it shouldn't have a happy ending.
Why?
That's why I tend to posit Shining Force as my example. What if we'd continued from there and just built upon that?
What if everyone could be equal and good/evil really was just a matter of opinion rather than anything else? What if we were to write actually interesting stories that weren't juvenile, but also stories which were inclusive and utterly fantastic?
Just because you have robots, anthros, flying islands, and whatnot doesn't mean you have to be completely juvenile.
SEGA got that.
I wish other developers did too. I think that's what I'm trying to say. A fictional, fantasy world can be
fantastic and not juvenile at the same time. It really is a juvenile, immature thing to dress women up like strippers, to say that these creatures are 'evil' due to the way they look... Were these worlds made by preteen children who'd been exposed to some really toxic ideas of how the world works? It feels like that. That's honestly what most of fantasy feels like, to me.
And yet, does it have to be? You can have airships, and various forms of *punk, you can have science-fantasy, and friendly dragons, and you can still be mature about it! I mean, why not?
Edit: One thing I want to clear up is that, yes, I am suggesting that overwrought plots with unhappy endings are immature. Consider how 'edgy' kids can be, not even the teens by younger kids these days too tend to think it's 'cool' to be edgy. It's like Absol is their spirit animal.
And yet somehow the wires got crossed and we started to think that 'edgy' stories where people suffer and die are mature. They're really not. They really, really aren't. You only need to read a bit of Terry Pratchett to understand how completely untrue that is.
In fact, I'd say the opposite. I'd say that if you can tell a compelling story where you put an end to suffering, no one dies, and you actually improve the state of the world by the end of the story by doing something that shifts the world rather than by performing some heroic act? That's mature.
An immature story, for me, is one where muscular white guys and women in bikinis save the damsel in distress by killing a dragon. This is supposed to help cure the kingdom, but it turns out the dragon's curse will outlive it and no one can do anything to stop it, The End. That's an immature, juvenile story, to me.
What bothers me about all this is how these wires did get crossed and we think that this is somehow mature, grown up, and even intellectual??? No, not really. It's just 'edgy.' Games Workshop makes fun of this regularly with Warhammer 40k, and the grim, darkness of its future.
Then so many people took Warhammer 40k seriously.
Excuse me while I flop on my desk.
*headdesk*
People took Warhammer 40k seriously, I see people trying to create a 'mature' 40k where the themes are handled 'tastefully' and every little part of me cringes and winces.
That's what we're facing, today. I think that's the root cause of what's wrong with fantasy and fictional worlds.
To me, mature is nuanced. You need context to understand it. It isn't incredibly black & white, with divisions clearly laid out by physical appearance. That does seem very immature, doesn't it? I mean, that's how you tell stories to children. Why is it how we're appreciating stories as adults?
Aren't we grown up to appreciate that a person can be anything based on their attitude, rather than implying that they're something based on their appearance?
Then I remember that there are people who push that black people are responsible for more crime than white people using fake evidence and nonsensical arguments and I feel very, very depressed.
Those people are very immature, frankly. Very small-minded. Very depressing. Why is it that fictional worlds can only target that particular demographic of spiteful, bigoted, and -- let's face it -- juvenile people?
Being grown up is accepting that people can be different but that we can all still be equal, and that's okay.
Edit: Okay, one last thing. Sorry!
One of the things that really made Shining Force special for me is that it really felt like the world wasn't falling apart at the seams but rather that you were dealing with an insidious cult. That was the weird thing about it, the enemy forces you dealt with felt insidious rather than overt.
And even through the broken translation I got the idea that that's what they were going for. That it wasn't just Good vs. Evil, it wasn't "My ethnicity/species is X, so I'm moral. Your ethnicity/species is Y, so you're not." or whatnot. It was more that Dark Dragon was using an enemy nation (Runefaust) to push his desires for conquest.
It was... weird for a JRPG. I'll say that. I mean, yeah, it had dragons, flying machines, werewolves, and all sorts of crazy stuff going on but it also felt like there was this undercurrent of something special, there.
I miss that.
The reason you were fighting Dark Dragon was because you didn't want his cult to sweep the land and take over. And, frankly, how some of his underlings behaved (Kane, the Marionette lady, et cetera) were very cult-like indeed.
And, hey, you had people of all races, species, and whatnot on both sides. It was just the division of whether you thought Dark Dragon's cult was on the right track or not. It was still a JRPG aimed at children, so there wasn't really a chance to infiltrate his cult, to pretend to join it to figure out what was going on, but there was still that undercurrent there that it was more than just your usual male power fantasy.
I mean, after all, most of the kingdoms didn't want to do anything to move against Runefaust in Shining Force. You were kind of an underground resistance movement in a weird, strange way.
Shining Force was odd. I really wish we could have mature games that took some of those ideas and ran with them.
