ANy one have any recommendations on Similar games to Shining Force the. The RTS/RPG type game play?
If you want something similar to the Shining Forces, have you played Dark Wizard? It was only released on the Sega CD, so it's obscure enough that even Sega fans could have missed it. It's basically a more serious, grown up version of Shining Force. A little less Final Fantasy, and a little more Dungeons & Dragons, if you will. I can't recommend it highly enough. I've played through Dark Wizard more times than any other single player RPG.
The gameplay is really similar to, but deeper and more complex than Shining Force, and the armies more diverse because there are only a handful of pre-rolled characters per play-through. At the start you pick one of the four rulers as your main character, then as their individual plotlines unfold you'll meet up with 2 pretty solid named characters that join your army. The bulk of your team will be chosen/created by you, and the subtleties of what makes which characters better in which situations are really well done. There's at least one
thorough webpagethat I wish I would have had 20 years ago when the game was brand new. Specifically the sections about
Leaders and their monstersand the
races and classesare both things that will make getting started so much more rewarding if you read them while you're still on the first half dozen maps/battles.
Another thing to do early on in the game is to go into the options on the title screen and make sure the battle display is set to text. The side view graphics are kind of neat every once in a while, but holy shit do they slow down gameplay to a crawl. This is a fairly long game (dozens of hours per playthrough, and 4 different main characters with vastly different summoning and hiring options), and keeping the battle display set to real the whole time would be a serious test of patience.
Anyway, like I already said, I really can't say enough good things about Dark Wizard. I rank it right alongside Everquest, Diablo II, Fallout II, and Final Fantasy V.