Shining Force EXA - anyone play it?

[Roufuss]

I know there were a few people who really got into Shining Force Neo, and I had a bunch of leftover credit at EB so I decided to pick this up as part of the b2g1 free.

For all intents and purposes, it seems to be a decent dungeon crawler... reviews averaged around the 70's, but I don't really trust reviews for non mainstream RPG's at all (case in point, Tales of the Abyss was critically acclaimed by fans yet only averages a 78 on metacritic?)

Just wondering if anyone gave this a shot? It seems to be something I'm going to dig, as I'm a huge fan of Diablo style games where the emphasis is on slashing through tons of enemies while leveling your stats and characters.

Game is supposedly over 50 hours long, tons of stats, nice cel shaded graphics, lots of variety... the bad things seems to be shitty voice acting, and slowdown when too much is on screen.

Anyone else give this one a shot? I always wanted to try Neo, and the b2g1 free along with my credit puts EXA at a price even cheaper than I could get Neo at so I went for the newer version.

I'm also wondering how long before someone says "I wish this was like the old Shining Force games", which is what a lot of reviewers bitch about. I almost wish Sega changed the name to something else, review scores probably would have gone up if people didn't compare it to the old games.

[The Mana Knight]

I thought Neo was all right, but what killed it for me was the difficulty ramped up too quickly, so I just stopped playing. I heard EXA was much better difficulty wise, so I have interest in picking the game up.

What's holding me back now is that I'm currently sucked into next generation and playing on an HDTV (which my PS2 doesn't do well), so I haven't thought much about buying it. Also, I have way too many RPGs to currently play and haven't beaten over 60% of them.

Although Wal-Mart doesn't seem to lower prices much, they have WAY too many copies of the game in-stock, so they'll have to get rid of them at one point. I still hope to get the game for $40 or less.

[Roufuss]

It was also that I had heard EXA (and Neo) were tough games that got my interest piqued as well... too many RPG's I've been playing lately I've never even seen the game over screen, or come close to it.

It'll be nice to have something with a challenge in it.

I basacially paid under $20 for the game when all is said and done (between b2g1 free and my credit) and well, this EB didn't have anything else I could grab :lol:

My PS2 does fine on an HDTV with component cables, so no worries there.

[The Mana Knight]

I basacially paid under $20 for the game when all is said and done (between b2g1 free and my credit) and well, this EB didn't have anything else I could grab :lol:Yeah, I would have bought the game too at that price. I was at EB today participating in the B2G1 free sale, but don't remember seeing it. If I did, I would have definitely got it as my free game (ended up with Guitar Hero II instead, since I never got it, despite owning the first).

That reminds me, I need to use my component cables on my PS2 now (since I now hook my PS3 up via HDMI).

I've actually seen a few Game Over screens in RPGs lately (Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga comes to find), but normally its for me doing something stupid. :lol:

[Draekon]

I thought Neo was all right, but what killed it for me was the difficulty ramped up too quickly, so I just stopped playing. I heard EXA was much better difficulty wise, so I have interest in picking the game up.

You'd be correct in what you heard that EXA has a more streamline difficulty. Although I still hear by some people that it's a difficult game. After playing NEO though, EXA was pretty simple for me in knowing what I should train in arts wise and such.




Anyways, I've bought and beat Shining Force EXA. I completely think it's better than NEO in just about every way and would recommend it over NEO unless you're looking for which is more difficult than the two. Another thing is that I actually played it in the PS3 using HDMI and everything ran great and looked great but the slowdowns were about the same as compared to NEO which can get annoying if you're a bit anal about that. Granted I would normally be but with how NEO/EXA is played it didn't bother me a bit.

Personally I'd grab it for $20 easily. I'll probably even play through it again some day. Possibly sooner than later because I need to finish that damned locations guide on GameFAQs that someone kept bugging me to make since I did one for NEO. -_-

If you have any specific questions feel free to ask as I've done pretty much everything in the game.

[Roufuss]

Is the hour count accurate? I've heard people getting over 50 hours easily.

[Draekon]

Is the hour count accurate? I've heard people getting over 50 hours easily.

Personally it was about 40 hours for me I think but in earlier posts in GameFAQs that have been since purged I've posted my time and some people said they took 50+ hours with some even clocking in around 70. Though that's an estimate from me as I left my game on a few days straight so it's somewhere up in the hundreds on my save. I had also breezed through the 50 floor training grounds just getting to the next exit after I beat the game and bonus dungeon. So if you kill everything on every floor you'll clock more hours in with that or if you bother farming Mythril to train characters Power Arts which is also something I didn't bother doing.

Also since you re-load on death some peoples hours saved may be higher than what they are. As it's easy to die at any part of the game pretty much. So save often or you may be replaying the last hour of gameplay you just finished. I learned to save from NEO but still had succumb to this happening a few times.