[Show Intro] Jala Hey, thanks for coming! I'm glad you're here. Come on in! Everyone's out on the patio right now. Looks like a couple of people are in the garden. I can't wait to introduce you! Can I get you anything? [turned away] Hey folks, our new guest is here! [Intro music] 00:00:01.85 Jala Hello world, and welcome to Jala-chan's Place. I'm your host, Jala Prendes, (she/her) and today I am joined by Daniel F. (he/him), designated as Daniel F because there's another Daniel that was on the Dishonored episodes. It's not that Daniel, this is a different one. 00:00:17.00 Jala Hi, Daniel, welcome to the show. 00:00:18.10 Daniel Hi, how are you doing? 00:00:20.46 Jala Yeah, ah we're hanging in there. ah We're on the cusp of yet another hurricane ah coming, grazing through a round in the Gulf. So um it is turning away from us, so that is good news. 00:00:33.18 Jala um But we will still have some wind and rain, which is going to be starting sometime today. So um yeah, we'll see how this goes. ah Anyway, how are you doing today? 00:00:42.60 Daniel doing really well. Yeah, I just ah had some early morning appointments. So now we're we're sitting down and we're having a great chance to discuss one of our favorite topics here. 00:00:51.47 Jala Absolutely. So we are going to be talking today about Shining Force 3, which is um a game that I have ranted about on various podcasts for a very long time um and is something that you have played probably more hours in Shining Force 3 scenario one than I have in like collectively any three of my top video games. 00:01:15.31 Daniel Yeah, I have a few a few thousand hours into the into the first scenario. 00:01:18.38 Jala Yeah. Yeah. 00:01:20.14 Daniel It's been a long time, and it's been a lot of runs. I quite enjoy the game, so we play it quite a bit in this house. 00:01:24.85 Jala Yeah. Yeah. And so this is your first time being on a podcast. So I'm very excited to have you here with me, especially since um there were a lot of people interested in being on the show with me. However, the time requirement to go through this game is so high because there's basically three separate video games included um that I couldn't get anybody pinned down because they're all also podcasters who do their own other shows. And like that's that's a big ask for a guest spot. right So um it took me going into the Shining Force 3 translation project server and going, hi, I'm trying to do a podcast episode about this. Does anybody want to talk about it? 00:02:04.18 Jala and then 00:02:04.60 Daniel Pick me, pick me. 00:02:05.01 Jala you Yeah, yeah, right, right. So I am I'm very grateful that you are here with me today. So um this episode for people who are tuning in ah to just get like the flavor of what this video game is, ah this ah whole episode is going to be spoiler free. It is the overview of what this is and ah you know just talking a little bit about how it plays, what it looks like, how it sounds, all of that good stuff. The stuff you would find normally on any of my episodes before the spoiler wall. ah But we are making it its own dedicated episode so we can kind of have a little bit more time to talk about it and dwell on just like generalities about this game before we go into each of the individual discs and their narratives. 00:02:49.38 Jala because this is a fantastic game with a interwoven narrative that will take a lot of time to talk about. So it's going to be four episodes, y'all. So this is my first four-parter on my show. um So. 00:03:04.63 Jala I'm excited to begin talking about that. But before we do that, I just wanted to say, usually I kick to my co-hosts or my my guests on the show to talk about the things that they do. I already talked to you, Daniel, beforehand. um You ah have done stuff in the past, but you don't have anything out that's current right now. um This is your reentry into talking about stuff and putting out some kind of content on the Internet is my understanding. 00:03:32.13 Daniel Yes, I am currently working a full-time job and raising a family and it's been a lot of effort and time, but now my kids going into school. So I'm going to have a bunch more time now coming up to start doing more streaming and online interviews and different things. I hope to get into podcasting at some point too. So I'm really excited to get my feet wet and get in here with Jala and get some experience under my belt. 00:03:56.36 Jala Yeah. So that's exciting. And, uh, so we will definitely keep an eye on that and have you a back of several times in the future, of course, a minimum of three other times just for this one topic. 00:04:08.11 Daniel absolutely yes i'm excited this is an amazing game and it deserves all this attention absolutely any game you want i love the system it's a great system too 00:04:10.47 Jala Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And so, uh, I also know I have a shoe in for every other Saturn game I want to talk about. so Right. Right. 00:04:24.38 Jala Yep, yep. So um as for the show, you can find us on Ko-Fi.com slash Fireheart Media. You can kick us a few bucks ah if you decide that you want to do it monthly. We have some different subscription tiers starting at $2, and they all have different bonus episodes attached to them. So you have cutting room floor, which is extra content that is either for this show or a Monster Dear Monster ah that we didn't get to fit into any of these shows proper. 00:04:52.90 Jala We also have A Glass Darkly, which is where Dave and I read to y'all some of our fiction. So you get to hear us narrating our own work, doing kind of an audio book style chapter by chapter read of some of the different stuff that we've ah written. 00:05:09.18 Jala And then we also have OmakeBox, which is a very random story focused podcast that is just Dave and I talking about little stories from our past or weird things that Dave says that I'm just like, what are you talking about? I'm losing my mind. 00:05:25.56 Jala and um These started out as like these little 30 second audio clips that I used to post into my Discord server. And then people are like, I didn't realize how much I needed these little sound bites of you telling these random stories. But that's what this is. It's kind of like a compilation of that sort of vibe. so Because I am always telling stories on every podcast. So so yes, ah we have those available at Ko-fi. You can find us there. But without further ado, let us talk about this game. Yay. 00:05:58.61 Jala So what is ah Shining Force 3? Let us begin there. It is a tactical RPG for the Sega Saturn released episodically in three installments in late 1997 and 1998 in Japan. There were six months in between each of these releases. So you had half a year to finish each one before the next one dropped. 00:06:20.30 Jala So scenario one was the only installment to see a release in the west and that came out in mid 1998. The US release included some minor changes to the script near the end in order to resolve the cliffhanger ending. Although they say that in like the stuff that I've read it doesn't feel like it resolves anything. 00:06:40.33 Jala um So I don't know, like not to me anyway, like the time that I played through the official US release of this, it doesn't ever feel like, oh yeah, I feel like that was totally the end of the game. 00:06:51.53 Daniel Where's the conclusion, man? Where's the conclusion? 00:06:53.63 Jala Yeah, it definitely wasn't where it left off. um But anyway, Camelot also released Shining Force 3 premium disc. And that was a bonus for Japanese players who mailed in the proofs of purchase from each of the three installments of the game. So like when I bought my import copies, they were missing the UPC because they absolutely got that premium disc. Why wouldn't you? 00:07:18.29 Jala So ah this disc contains concept art, character models, movies, interviews, ads, a save game creator, bonus battles against enemies like Dark Dragon and Xeon and the Kraken from Shining Force 2. And um it has all of these different things that you can do. And in those battles, you can also play um any of the characters that you ah use from any of the save data that you load in. 00:07:43.01 Jala So it's a very cool little release. we Well, we'll kind of dig a little bit more into that later. Uh, this was developed by Sonic team in Camelot and published by Sega. Hiroyuki Takahashi, the president of Camelot was the producer, writer, and lead designer known for the shining series, as well as golden sun. And of course the Mario sports games, because Camelot's been in the Mario sports games mill ever since. 00:08:08.39 Daniel Mario Golf man. That was a great game. 00:08:10.48 Jala Right? So ah let's talk a little bit about our history with this game. um How about you talk for a little bit, Daniel? I've been talking for a minute. 00:08:20.05 Daniel Absolutely. So I got this game originally when it came out. I remember seeing an advertisement in a magazine back in 1996 or 97. There was an advertisement for the game and I saw a picture of Saraband. Didn't know it was Saraband at the time, but saw a picture of a guy in a town. And I said to my mom at the time we were driving, we'd just gotten a magazine from the store. And I said to her, mom, I want to get this game. And she said, oh, that's nice, dear, because she was busy driving. And I went and stopped at nothing. I made sure I yeah saved up money from Christmas and from chores. And when I finally found a copy available at Toys R Us, I went down there and that was the only thing on my mind. I picked that game up. I haven't looked back since. It was fantastic. 00:09:02.88 Jala So did you, up i'm ah I'm assuming that you had played the other Shining Force games beforehand in this, that you were like a Shining fan or no, where was this your first one? 00:09:11.86 Daniel I had friends that had Genesises, but I didn't have anything outside of a Nintendo before I got my Saturn. 00:09:17.90 Daniel So we had the Nintendo and NES system and I had the opportunity to play Shining Force One at a friend's house and thought, oh, this is really cool. And that was all I thought of it until I saw that magazine article and I was like, oh, this is one of those games. 00:09:32.59 Daniel This is going to be a lot of fun. 00:09:33.14 Jala Gotcha. 00:09:33.63 Daniel And that's yeah, it's my actual first one that I ever owned of the series. 00:09:37.80 Jala That's kind of wild. um I actually don't know. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has played Shining Force 3, who that was their first, like their introduction to Shining Games. 00:09:49.06 Jala um Pretty much every other person that I know that has played Shining Force 3 is like a ah series fan who you know came to it because it's, yeah. 00:09:56.13 Daniel One I am a serious fan I have gone back and played through shining force one and shining force two I never beat two But I played through a bunch of it and got most of the way through it and I really enjoyed those games But three just sticks with me so I 00:10:00.84 Jala Mm-hmm. 00:10:09.36 Jala Oh, yeah. We will absolutely talk about that, of course. Coming up in a little bit here, we'll have lots of time to talk about that and wax poetic. But ah as for me, I started my whole RPG craze with Shining Force. Shining Force was my very first rpg of any stripe so um i played Shining Force i was the uh Sega kid so i had all of the Sega systems eventually i ended up getting an SNES i had an NES before we got the Genesis so like i had an nes and i did get an SNES eventually eventually i got a Gameboy Advance but i didn't have an original Gameboy So like, you know, mostly I was on Sega consoles. 00:10:47.69 Jala So that meant that um it was slim pickings when it came to RPGs of any kind. And so, um yeah, like when I saw Shining Force, I was like, Oh, what is this? I think my sister actually is the one who had rented it from the video game store or the video store. 00:11:01.33 Daniel Back when those were a thing. 00:11:04.43 Jala right right um And so, yeah, like she rented it, but then I started playing it. And I was just like, I watched the little opening cut scene that they had, you know, with a little animation in that music. And when that music first kicked in, I was just ah automatically hooked. And I'm like, Oh, 00:11:22.01 Jala I have to play this game. I have to play all of this game. And then, of course, when I found two, I had to play that game. I had to play all of that game. And then, you know, I've told my sob story about the Sega CD many, many times. 00:11:33.90 Jala But for Shining Force CD, I was able to locate, because I had the Sega CD as well, I was able to locate one copy of it and it was like $15 at the Toys R Us. 00:11:45.19 Jala They had one copy left. I bought the copy on the way home. I was trying to take it out of the the box and then the disc snapped in half and they didn't have any other copies there and they they called around and there were no other Toys R Us that had it. 00:12:00.56 Jala And so I never got to play that game. And I, to this day, I have never emulated it and played it. um I'm kind of waiting until I can get a new PC, and then I can like start streaming again, and then I can stream it, and then you know have like, here's my first time playing this game, being a Shining fan, and never having been able to play it. 00:12:19.35 Daniel That's awesome. Yeah, I haven't had a chance to play the CD version. 00:12:22.73 Daniel of The Sega CD, I would like to get into that at some point, too. 00:12:26.00 Jala Well, it's my understanding that um one of the major differences because, you know, that was a kind of like ah a port over from the Game Gear and was that like you don't have towns to wander around or anything. 00:12:36.62 Jala It's like battle and then just like a menu where you do your your shopping and stuff and then it goes to a battle again. 00:12:37.67 Daniel OK. 00:12:42.34 Jala So that's one of the differences. But um in either case, I still want to play it anyway, and I will eventually just not right now. 00:12:48.72 Daniel Yes. 00:12:51.91 Jala But then, of course, when I got a Sega Saturn, I was desperate for anything because the Sega Saturn had such a troubled release and like troubled existence in the US, especially the entirety of the time that it was there. So like when I saw there's a Shining Force game, I was like, 00:13:09.56 Jala that. I've got to get that, and I've got to play that. and I played the heck out of it. and Then when I was like, there's more of it? Of course, because like the story's not over. you know like so I see it, and I'm looking on the internet. I don't know if Google was around yet, but I was looking on whatever the search engine was in 1998. 00:13:26.34 Jala And I was like, ah where's the rest of this? And then I tracked down Japanese copies. And thank God that Mugi had the ah Shining Force Central website because they had the translations of all of the text, all of the the different conversations and stuff um on the website. 00:13:45.72 Jala And so that is how i I printed it. 00:13:46.21 Daniel Mm hmm. 00:13:48.20 Jala I still have my printouts from way back in the day I printed it. And I was going through that on a piece of paper while I was playing my Japanese import copies that I bought off of eBay many, many years ago. 00:13:57.89 Daniel Well. 00:14:00.50 Jala And um so, yeah, like it was this whole thing just to try to play this game. And I played the heck out of it. And then I was like so sad because since only the first part came out and it was near the end of the lifespan of the Saturn in the U.S., 00:14:15.81 Jala not nobody I knew until like I started podcasting about video games, nobody I knew had played that game ever. And I was trying to like tell people, you should play this game. And you know of course, graphically, um it's definitely of its time. 00:14:30.02 Jala And a lot of people for a long time don't didn't like the look of that game you know because it's it's very like polygonal, rough, early 3D kind of looking. 00:14:35.26 Daniel Yeah. 00:14:40.75 Daniel You can tell the triangles are there. 00:14:43.06 Jala Yeah. Right. But everything is like blocky and triangles and stuff like that. um You know, definitely of the era. And the thing is, is that now all of the the next generation of folks, that's what they grew up playing. 00:14:57.51 Jala So it's their version of the n NES or their version of the Atari. So they're like, oh, I have such nostalgia for that. I'm totally down for playing that. I'm like, oh, new people who I might be able to get to play this game because they like this. 00:15:08.28 Daniel Yeah, let's... Come, come, we will show you. We will show you the amazingness. 00:15:13.83 Jala Right. 00:15:14.03 Daniel I actually, just interjecting here for a second about scenarios two and three, I have played through scenario two twice and scenario three once. 00:15:21.68 Daniel So I actually haven't even completed those very many times because I got my copies of scenario two and three much, much later, only a few years ago. 00:15:25.35 Jala Ooh. 00:15:29.77 Daniel But I was able to find good deals for them on eBay. And my wife was like, yeah, I guess $30, that's not too bad. 00:15:35.79 Daniel Yeah. Okay. Let's pick those up. So I was able to get those in the premium disc all for under, I think, $150 Canadian dollars. So that was a pretty good deal. 00:15:42.09 Jala Awesome. Yeah, that is a pretty good deal because um I want to say at the time that I was looking for it, just finding the premium disc by itself for under a hundred US dollars was a steal. 00:15:52.28 Daniel Yeah. 00:15:54.60 Jala And I found it for under a hundred whenever it was I was looking for it. But yeah, I definitely like when I, every once in a while I'll go on eBay and I'll look for shiny force three stuff just to see, you know, if anything rare and special has come out that, you know, like somebody is selling, um I'll go and I'll look and I'm just like, 00:16:11.84 Jala These are real cheap compared to how much I spent on it back in the day. 00:16:16.30 Daniel Yeah, I got mine just before COVID hit, just before that, like 2016, 2017, right before COVID hit and the price has skyrocketed on those, I was able to find some. And there's someone in our Discord that actually has a bunch of the cards for Shining Force 3. 00:16:29.82 Jala Oh, awesome. 00:16:30.65 Daniel So there's collector's cards and I'm going to buy one of the Julian ones off of him at some point. 00:16:35.51 Daniel So that's pretty exciting too. 00:16:35.58 Jala awesome cool very cool very cool yeah yeah so uh let's get a little bit into the spoiler free summaries of what each of these scenarios are so um it's hard to kind of talk about the entire story like in so in broad strokes 00:16:38.55 Daniel I'm looking forward to that. 00:16:54.91 Jala There is a big evil. Of course, there's a big evil. There's always big evil in these JRPGs of this era. ah There's a big evil that's out there that is going to be resurrected. And there are people who are trying to resurrect this big evil. There is also, at the same time, a lot of political strife happening. And that's what the primary thrust of the game is, is all of the political strife happening and all of the different wheels and deals and and betrayals and and different stuff that's going on in the kingdoms of ah Aspia. 00:17:25.11 Jala It's Aspia, not Aspinia. Aspinia is the capital, right? 00:17:28.00 Daniel Yeah, Aspia, yeah. 00:17:28.97 Jala Okay. Okay. Because um the capital is Aspinia, but it's Aspia as the name of the the Republic. The Republic of Aspia and then Destonia, the Empire of Destonia. 00:17:40.24 Jala And um so the Republic had split off from the Empire a very long time ago. 00:17:42.84 Daniel Close to 25, I think, in that ballpark, though. 00:17:45.05 Jala I say very long, like 20 years, I think it was. ah Something like that. Oh, okay. 00:17:50.83 Daniel Yeah, somewhere around there. 00:17:51.96 Jala Something like that. like not It's fairly young. like It's within the the lifetime the life the lifespan of the people. like The people who originally fought to break away from the Empire are still alive at this time, and they are currently the people who are running the Republic. 00:18:07.09 Jala And so ah the Empire wants the Republic back. The Republic is struggling. They have their own internal struggles because of things like famine and you know struggling as a nation trying to find its own identity and voice and and ah develop its own economy that can stand on its own two legs. 00:18:26.03 Jala in the face of the massive Empire. So ah we've got the struggling Republic. We have the Empire that wants to annex it back. And then you have a lot of things that go down around that. And your shining force scenarios, there's there's three different stories that are told with three different shining forces. And each of the different segments of this game, scenarios one, two, and three have a different protagonist. So the first one, 00:18:52.64 Jala is Synbios. He is the son of Lord Conrad of the Republic. Conrad is the one who kind of fomented that rebellion and that splitting off of the Republic many, many years ago. and so ah This is the son of the guy who you know split off from the Empire. 00:19:11.73 Jala And then the second one is Medion. Prince Medion is the bastard son of the emperor. ah So he has two older brothers that are through the official queen, but then Medion is the son of the emperor with, or sorry, not queen, I guess, empress, sorry. ah But Medion is the son of the emperor with a maid. 00:19:35.50 Jala And so even though he is the best of the three, and everybody in the kingdom loves him, and he's absolutely the most handsome, we are going to talk so much about like the how many times everybody talks about how hot Medellin is. 00:19:42.87 Daniel And he's the most handsome of course. 00:19:51.64 Jala It is wild. But anyway, um even though that is the case, Um, he's still just like third wheel to everything. And like his, his brothers treat him like crap and the higher ups and stuff. There's always like, you know, all the political machinations and stuff going on. So, uh, there are various people who are against him in positions of power. And, um, in so far as his relationship with his father, that is kind of a large thrust of of his section in scenario two, especially the later half, uh, as we'll talk about when we get there too. 00:20:25.69 Jala the third installment of this series. um And then Shining Force Scenario 3, Shining Force 3 Scenario 3 follows Julian who is a mercenary who actually comes from the Shining and the Holy Art game like he's ah a little character in there. ah He's like a little boy and he lost his father in there to a Vandal and this Vandal ends up being a major player in Shining Force 3. So there's like a connectivity here between Shining the Holy Arc and Shining Force 3. 00:20:57.49 Daniel And he's also a character that you encounter in Shining the Holy Ark helping to tie those two games together. 00:21:02.50 Jala um so so yeah and So Julian is a character that pops up everywhere. This guy just kind of shows up in scenario one, and then he has a very interesting way of exiting scenario one, 00:21:17.55 Jala just kind of pops up in a way that just kind of made me really laugh when it first happened in scenario two and is in scenario two for a little bit until he wanders off to go do his own scenario. And then that's all of scenario three is is his scenario, the wrap up of this massive story between these these kingdoms and this larger power and all of the different things that are at work all at one time. So um this game is really cool because it Is like I'm sure there was some other game that did similar, but this is the only game I can think of that I ever encountered where it was one cohesive story told in separate installments of a game under the same heading like the like the most. 00:22:04.65 Jala the The one that I can think of that does this but came way later is .hack. dot .hack had four installments to it. and It was one RPG that followed one story throughout, but it didn't have different protagonists on each of the different disks. This one has different protagonists and you're following a story and advancing the story with each disk. 00:22:26.32 Jala ah But you're going with different teams that are doing different stuff. It's kind of more like how Resident Evil 6 has different campaigns and in each of the campaigns, the characters will sometimes meet up in different parts and end up helping each other. 00:22:42.52 Jala um at different points in the story. And so like, you know, you're playing as Leon and Helena, and then suddenly Chris and Piers show up for a second, and then they give each other information or do whatever, and then they wander off to go do their own, you know, their other thing, you know, and, um you know, each person, each team has their own prerogative and is doing a different thing. And they're all kind of working towards the same common end goal. 00:23:07.00 Jala but they have their own path to get there. And it's kind of more like that. But again, these are games that came out way later. The fact that this game came out in 1998 and was like this is really wild. 00:23:18.81 Daniel Yeah, it's ah unlike anything else I've ever seen in the gaming industry at all. 00:23:22.98 Jala Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's very ambitious. And the thing is, is that um because of the setup, I will say so with dot hack, I got really bored with dot hack. I played the first two of them and then I just kind of fell off because it was just too much of the same thing. 00:23:39.00 Jala Right. 00:23:39.08 Daniel I borrowed a PS2 from a friend of play .hack 2 myself, and I got into it for about six hours. 00:23:47.01 Daniel And then I also got really bored with it. 00:23:49.36 Daniel This is very repetitive, not very much fun, interesting story, but outside of the story, I just wasn't feeling the gameplay of it. 00:23:56.51 Jala right. And it's it's another one that sits in its own very, very aged at this point space because it's trying to mimic like early um MMOs. But um yeah, so dot .hack, I kind of fell off that one because um it's the same characters going through and it's just like, It feels too drawn out, right? But the the difference between that and what Shining Force 3 is doing is that, again, you have these little smaller scenarios where you are playing to a point in the narrative, you know, like a crescendo, right? You're playing to a crescendo. You get to this massive part. And um each of these different um different 00:24:36.74 Jala groups is doing its own story and and going through its own path. And so you're not treading over the same ground. And the thing about the game is that um it will we'll talk about it more in depth when we get to each of the scenarios. But um the game is very good about giving you different objectives and different ways of going about yeah the the thing. 00:25:00.09 Jala right It doesn't have just the same type of battle. Oh, so you know since the Kraken battle happened in so you know Shining Force 2, they're definitely going to have a Kraken battle in every single one of the... 00:25:11.24 Jala No, that's not a thing. And like some of the challenges that are in scenario one are completely unique to scenario one, and some in two are unique to scenario two. And you know 00:25:20.86 Daniel And the battles feel very organic. nothing is Very few of them are very forced at all. You get that diversity across the battles where, oh, this is a bridge fight. Oh, now we're out on the plane. Oh, now we're somewhere totally different. 00:25:32.41 Daniel And every fight just keeps evolving. It's very well done that way. 00:25:34.57 Jala um Yeah, and it's it's giving you different terrain to have to negotiate different types of enemies and you know their movement rates and their attack patterns and things are different in each of these different scenarios. you know You've got a lot of different elements that you are juggling, and I wouldn't even see this so much in some of the ah older Fire Emblem games that I have dabbled in. 00:25:59.25 Jala um I've seen that probably the most in fire emblem engage where they kind of do a lot of new things but like it's not every battle, whereas in shiny force three it feels like the hit ratio of unique battles is higher than the filler, there are filler. 00:26:16.50 Jala ah Battles that you go through where it's just a generic battle slowing you down and when you get to the next point you know but those are not nearly as numerous as the super memorable and cool battles that have a lot of narrative thrust and they have you know tricky gameplay elements that you are trying to negotiate and find the best strategy for. 00:26:37.64 Daniel Yeah, it's very well done. I quite enjoy the metal system and things like the friendship system and those things that they've really incorporated in here as well. It's ah it's a very diverse game with a lot of gameplay features that you don't find in any other places. 00:26:52.91 Jala Right. Right. So I did write down a ah spoiler free summary for each of the different scenarios, but I wanted to give like this broader overview before I talk about each of the individual scenarios, because otherwise it'll be a little bit disjointed. So scenario one follows the story of Synbios, a young lord of the Republic of Aspinia, which broke off from the Empire of Destonia some 20 years ago or so. 00:27:17.88 Jala It might be 25, I'm not sure. Either way, ah the game kicks off in the neutral city of Saraband, where the Republic and the Empire are meeting in order to treat for peace. The Bulsome Sect, a creep a cult of creepy masked monks, interferes with the peace dealings, triggering a full-scale war between Aspinia and Destonia. 00:27:37.39 Jala Synbios works together with the youngest prince of the Empire, Medion, to identify the one pulling the strings. 00:27:38.59 Daniel Mm hmm. 00:27:44.49 Jala Scenario 2 follows Prince Medion's story as he seeks to tread the line between loyalty to his father and searching for the power behind the bull's-ome sex doings, often dispatching rogue elements from the Republic in order to spare Synbios and his men the pain of fighting against their own. Synbios and Medion eventually find themselves forced to square off against each other when they are halted by a mercenary named Julian. 00:28:10.06 Jala Scenario 3 follows Julian, who is, for all intents and purposes, the true main character of the game. His and initial motivation as the story begins is his hunt for Galm, perhaps the strongest member of the Vandal race which originally existed over a thousand years ago, whom he believes killed his father. 00:28:28.33 Jala Seen throughout scenarios, one and two temporarily joining both Synbios and Medion for a time, but eventually discovering that the Bulzome Sect is trying to resurrect Bulzome, a powerful Vandal who was sealed away in another dimension, who is the true orchestrator of all the chaos. 00:28:45.58 Jala The sect is also trying to kill a young young child named Gracia, who is from the dwindling race called the Innovators, godlike beings whose power counteracts the Vandals. 00:28:59.21 Jala Julian undertakes the dual task of protecting Gracia and helping them come into their own power, as well as taking down Bullzone by heading up a three army force inclusive of his troops, Synbiosis team and Medions party you ah that that right there is something I already did not mention, but should be mentioned. This game culminates in a massive, massive multi map battle across different ah battle maps with different forces on each map. And each of the scenarios has this kind of thing where there's a split up of your force. um So it's in anybody's best interest if they're playing this game. yeah Don't just leave your reserves in the reserve and don't level them up like you need to level up everybody in your party because at the very end of every single of these scenarios, you will need every single person on your party. 00:29:49.38 Daniel Yes, it becomes very challenging if you just let Julian sit there and not do anything for the entire game. 00:29:55.15 Jala Yeah. 00:29:55.41 Daniel You have to actually put him on your team and force him to walk around and kill things too. So don't be shy with putting everybody from your reserves into your main team in every single scenario or you will leave them behind and then you will struggle very much to lead in the last battles. 00:30:10.12 Jala Absolutely. And um I am well served by the fact that i I was the person in Shining Force, the original, who would stop and grind when I got a laugh. And um what's what's his name? 00:30:23.79 Jala um Toru or something like the the I'm forgetting his name, the ah healer. 00:30:28.25 Daniel I cannot help you there. I don't recall the characters that well, but yes, there's a couple that... 00:30:30.23 Jala Anyway, there's there's a there's a fox lady who has lightning magic named Aleph. And then there's I think his name is Toru or something like that, um who is another healer that you get that has like massive, you know, heals that that are like the aura spell. 00:30:46.79 Jala And, um, I stop and I level them up. And then when I get Adam, this I work, I stop and level them up. And then when I get Blue, the dragon, I stop and level them up. So like I level everybody's the same and I always have done that. 00:30:58.17 Jala So, uh, that served me well when I was playing shining force three. 00:31:00.90 Daniel Mm-hmm because you know, you know what's coming 00:31:02.52 Jala So. Oh yeah, oh yeah, for sure. So yeah, I've done a lot of talking. what is what is What were your impressions of the story of this game, Daniel, when you were going through it? And especially since you didn't get to play scenarios two or three for a very long time, like did you look up the rest of the story on the internet or something? 00:31:25.16 Daniel As a kid, I knew that there were other copies like other editions. 00:31:25.42 Jala what 00:31:28.76 Daniel There was more scenarios. I had no idea what was in them. I really ah wanted to play them, but because they were in Japanese and I don't know Japanese and still haven't learned enough Japanese to sit down with them, my idea was these are either be translated by someone else and I'll be able to then enjoy them later on. 00:31:46.60 Daniel or I'll never get to play them and I'll just have to enjoy this one, which is part of the reason why I sunk so much time into scenario one, because I also was told by my mom, if you buy a game this expensive, because it was $80 Canadian at the time, you buy a game this expensive, you better enjoy it fully. So my goal was to play the game until I couldn't play the game anymore. And I continued to play it all the way up until I got an Xbox when I was 16. So I played the game fully for almost five years. 00:32:13.41 Daniel back to back to back to back just kept playing it and playing it and playing it over and over again and then I was put it down for some other games and then I picked it back up again for another five or six years and I just kept playing it and playing it and at some point I actually was foolish enough to unplug my Saturn and move away from that level of gaming and just in the last 10 years I've been back to the Saturn and been playing it again since then so um I really enjoyed playing scenario one and then with the advent of new technologies, eBay being an an excellent source of being able to pick these up. I went out and got them, as I said, and I have enjoyed scenario two and three since they found a way to translate those and bring over lots of tools into the game that allow you to patch into different things, allow you to build on how the games work. And there's a really excellent translation group that is working right now through their own Discord. 00:33:02.99 Daniel that does have lots of support and tools. So I am actually in the process of creating a mod for scenario one that I hope to translate across all three scenarios that will allow you to actually do some really neat, interesting features that change around how some of the weapons and things work. And there's one of those that another member in there just released too, that Nelson does how to change up the combat and change up the gameplay. So I foresee this being a game that we can play well into the future, no matter what happens with the but the world we're good we've got going on today. 00:33:33.29 Daniel So I'm really excited but about the whole series right now and there's never been a better time to be a Saturn fan I'm so super excited about the whole thing Yes, there's 00:33:38.89 Jala yeah That's yeah Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And you told me too, that you were also had helped the translation project folks with a little thing in one of the games or something like that. You'd said you'd played a part in something. 00:33:53.24 Daniel There's a couple of lines that one of the persons really wanted to edit for um a scenario that you can bring up later in scenario two, whereby one of the characters can come into your party. 00:34:04.36 Daniel And we now have a way for both of those characters that because it used to be a choice. You could have one or the other character and now we can have them both, but the dialogue didn't match up. So I came up with some lines and put them in there and I didn't have the blocking correct. So it was kind of off screen a little bit. So we had somebody come in and edit that a little bit, but I was the one that typed up all the script for that section. It's literally 15 or 20 lines. It's not super big. 00:34:27.11 Daniel But I was so proud to help out with that part of the project and I'm so excited for for what the future holds because now we can potentially put another version of that scene in so that we can have one, the other, or that section happens. So all three of those are now possible in the game pretty soon. I'm really excited about that too. 00:34:45.25 Jala That's really cool. and um yeah So like my experience with the translation team is very, very like over there. 00:34:53.82 Jala ah So i I was digging into these games, and I was playing them you know in deep from the time that i I first got scenario one, and then I immediately was looking for scenarios two and three. 00:35:05.64 Jala And I was playing through those, and I had the translation that was from Shining Force Central, and I was doing that. Hi Moogie. 00:35:14.03 Jala I was doing that for a long time. and I had read on Shining Force Central that the translation project was a thing, that it was in the works, but they didn't have anything working at that time when I was looking at it way back in 2001 or something like that. 00:35:30.06 Daniel I think 2004 they launched the first edit the first edition of the translation. 00:35:34.40 Daniel So yeah, they had been working on it for a long, long time. 00:35:35.40 Jala Yeah. Yeah. And so like 2001, I saw that they were doing the thing and I was like, man, that is so cool. But I have no idea when it's going to come out. So, oh, well, I'm just going to, you know, ah play with my little translation sheets that I've got. And so I was fine with that. And I didn't think about it again for a long, long, long time, ah you know, because I was just playing the way that I had always been playing with my little printouts, which again, I still have them. I can still play the old games that way. 00:36:05.44 Jala um And then ah when I was thinking about doing it for the show, I was like, OK, well, if I want somebody to come on with me, they have to have some way to access this game. So ah they are not going to want to play through having Shiny Force Central up on one screen and then like, you know, the Japanese version of the ROM or whatever on the other screen. So let me see what's going on with the translation project. 00:36:29.06 Jala And so I pulled it up and I'm like, oh, yay, they got it done. Cool. I mean, I can still play the same way I've been playing, but you know anybody that I know who wants to play this ah for the show is going to need these translations. 00:36:40.97 Jala So um then I ah had a whole debacle with um my my action replay. I played all of scenario one. And as I started scenario two, my action replay died and ate all of my save data. 00:36:51.08 Daniel Oh no! 00:36:56.34 Jala And so i i had to I was then forced to um go and play scenario two from the English translated ROM from the Shining Force Translation Project folks. 00:37:08.83 Jala And so I was forced to and do the thing and and to use ah that. 00:37:13.49 Jala But so like none of my my scenario one data got carried over. So I'm working with default scenario one and then just going from scenario two on. um that way. 00:37:23.51 Jala So unfortunately, that that was the kind of scenario that I had happen. But um yeah, these folks, huh? 00:37:29.14 Daniel but On the computer there are go ahead There are actually some tools now that if you want, i can after the show and other time, we can discuss how to fix all that stuff because I have a method that allows you to actually input data into a scenario too that changes what your scenario one outcomes were if you'd like. We can talk more about that after the show. 00:37:49.66 Jala Cool. I'm a little bit into scenario three as of the time we're recording here. 00:37:53.34 Jala So like I've already started it carrying over the data that I already had with ah the bunk scenario one defaults. But I don't know. we'll We'll have to talk about that and see what what we want to do with that. 00:38:04.56 Jala but um So, in either case my plan with this episode is to also release a blog, a little blog short blog episode explaining or not blog episode but like a blog entry that I will link in the episode notes, let me make my words make sense here. 00:38:20.13 Jala um And that way, if anybody's interested in playing these games and being able to see what we're talking about and everything, you can go to that blog post and then see, at least as of the time that we were recording, how it happened to work on mine when I'm working on a PC you know and how I got it to work on the thing, ah if anybody is interested in doing that, because um the translation team here fairly recently just released another patch. 00:38:37.57 Daniel Mmm. 00:38:46.08 Jala So they are still actively working on this game some 20 years after the fact or whatnot. So yeah. 00:38:52.63 Daniel absolutely yes and actually they just put out the new version 25 which does have a few bug fixes but also changes how you apply the patch and makes everything modular which is really why i'm actually interested in making mods for it now because now we just put in a few codes and we type in a few things and things actually change in the game when we create a new patch so it's really a simple process now and there's documentation on how to make those patches and everything is just kind of flowing very much in the direction of let's make this so easy that everybody and their dog can do it. 00:39:24.55 Jala Right. And that was a thing because when I was first trying to get it to work, I was like the the last time I tried to emulate a CD based game was in 2001. 00:39:37.00 Jala So I was like, oh, so I have to download and get a virtual drive set up and I have to take the ISO, blah, blah, blah, and do all this other crap right that I used to have to do. And so I'm thinking that's what I have to do. 00:39:48.33 Jala And then I'm like, like, why isn't it working when I was trying to get Shining Force 3 Scenario 2 to work? And so it was this whole ordeal where then a friend of mine who does other you know Saturn emulation and stuff is like, Jala, all you have to do is just put the the you know whatever. 00:40:06.08 Jala Like, here, you have to put this into this folder here. And you don't have to boot a virtual. What are you doing? look so ah Thank you, Juliet. 00:40:11.98 Daniel Yeah, but let's do step one and step two. 00:40:14.26 Jala You saved my life. Yeah, so thank you Juliet, you saved my life. But um yeah, let's let's ah transition over to talking about the gameplay. How does this game play now that we're talking about it? ah Kind of um in broad strokes about our our experiences. 00:40:30.37 Jala So ah this is a turn-based grid TRPG with an exploration mode similar to any other top-down JRPG. So characters can move and attack, cast spells, or use items and level up according to their experience points received from taking actions on the battle map. This includes using items on other characters, although the amount of XP you get from that is almost nil. 00:40:51.27 Jala uh in exploration mode it's always worth it to check cabinets barrels and boxes for goodies they do not all have treasures but when you do find them they are worth it and also some of that uh incidental dialogue when you open people's cabinets is hilarious which is your favorite yeah oh look a mouse 00:41:08.54 Daniel Oh look, a mouse. ah my ah My absolute favorite is when you open it and it shouts, oh my, a pair of panties. 00:41:15.97 Jala Yeah, because um so one of the things that they do visually in this game, and I know this is skipping to the visual section, but um a lot of times they manipulate the text. So there's not voice lines, voiceover for all of the massive amounts of text in this game. That was not something that could fit on the disc back then. But what they do is they have the text box themselves and the text as it appears on the screen do different stuff to convey the emotion of that moment. 00:41:44.37 Jala And um what other games at the time would do is they would animate the sprites to have the sprites have different expressions and movements and stuff. But this game is doing it differently. 00:41:54.38 Jala It decided that it wanted to use the text boxes. So sometimes if somebody is shouting something or it's like scandalous or whatever, it'll be a small text box that'll say, Oh my, but then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it's like massively you know taking over a third of the screen. 00:42:10.28 Jala um Or if they're whispering the text is in dark gray, if they are scared, the text will shiver. you know it It does different stuff depending upon what... 00:42:19.92 Daniel And they can also have like the rainbow colors for different texts. 00:42:22.55 Jala Yep. 00:42:23.04 Daniel There's rainbow function and also even some of the text boxes that can do emotions. So there's the frustration emotion and scared emotion and angry emotion. Those come up as text boxes as well, which is really cool. 00:42:34.38 Jala Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. So um this is the only game I can think of offhand that I have played that does the ah emotions for the script this way. I've like most of everything that I've seen does like, oh, we're going to animate the pixels differently. But this game took a different route. And instead of burning the space on, you know, like doing that with their little um characters when they also have this massive 3D battle sequence thing going on, ah they ended up just making the text do it. 00:43:08.97 Daniel It made a lot more sense. I think it was a lot easier for them to make the text manipulate versus changing the animations of the billboard and sprites when they're walking around, because I believe the characters have three billboards as a front, one side and a back. 00:43:22.08 Daniel And I don't think there's another side. I think there's literally if you turn your camera the right ways, your sword and your shield will alternate to be on the same billboard as the original billboard. 00:43:32.14 Daniel So, yeah, so it's really a very neat visual trick that they would do with that for walking around the map, too. Going back to the visuals again. 00:43:37.87 Jala Yeah, that right and that's that's kind of something that they did in Street Fighter as well. The reason why Guile has two American flag tattoos is because they would just reverse him when he was on the other side and it was just the same thing. 00:43:51.71 Daniel It just made the most sense at the time, for saving space in the games. 00:43:55.47 Jala Right, right. So so yeah, ah moving right along. when um you can You can also read things when you are in exploration mode. You can read things that are on the bookshelves and this is how um tips for how to play play the battles and stuff come out is through these bookshelves. 00:44:13.31 Jala So, I love this in place of having a formalized tutorial where like they're in a battle and then they say, now press X or whatever. like I can't stand those kinds of tutorials. But having this information available to you if you wish to interact with it in the exploration mode or you can just skip over it. like Fantastic, fantastic. i um I love this form of tutorial. How about you, Daniel? 00:44:37.37 Daniel Oh, it's fantastic. I love the fact that if I've already read it once, I don't have to go back for it again. 00:44:42.41 Daniel But if I want to, you can explore and you can go back and go, oh, I want to talk to every single NPC this time. And go, oh, this guard has as a sentence to say, and this person has a sentence to say, and oh, the lady who sells you flowers has a sentence to say. 00:44:56.89 Daniel Everybody has some dialogue. And even the shopkeepers, if you can get to them, some of the places that have shops, you can go in and actually talk to those NPCs. And they have their own dialogue too, usually. 00:45:07.74 Daniel So that is fantastic, it's very well thought out game design in my books too. 00:45:12.08 Jala So are you one of the people who like, OK, so since you played scenario one so many times, you don't talk to the NPCs every time, do you? You just you you be lying to the people you need to talk to and move on out of town, huh? 00:45:24.05 Daniel It depends on the playthrough. If I haven't played much in the last little while, sometimes it's nice to have a refresher. 00:45:29.05 Daniel And some of the bookcases have really interesting points that you don't think about until you go back and read them and it's like, oh, this is a neat piece about how to actually do something in battle that I forgot about or wasn't thinking of. 00:45:39.79 Daniel Oh yeah, that's a really cool tip. um I don't think that the showcases really teach you how to change things in the menus, but if you're playing the vanilla version of the game, if you press start in the menu, you can even actually change things like the color of the background boxes. 00:45:53.66 Jala Mmhmm. 00:45:53.84 Daniel So the default color is blue at a certain opacity. And you can actually set that to being more or less opaque and then changing that color to a different color. So sometimes you play with a purple text boxes everywhere or sometimes you want pink or blue or whatever. So you can set all that up. And the game tells you that stuff through things like the bookcases and the NPC dialogues. So yes, I go through and I talked to a lot of the NPCs very recently in my recent playthrough. I'm talking to every single person I can find, including the chefs in the kitchen. Again, you find out, oh, yes, Midian is very hot. 00:46:25.50 Jala Right. 00:46:25.51 Daniel You find out this stuff because you talk to NPCs in the castles and you go around and you talk to everybody. And ah there's some really unique dialogue that you can't get in other games. One particular instance where there's a an idea that they show you that you can push some of the NPCs and by pushing them, they give you different dialogue options too. 00:46:43.39 Daniel And if you push them to certain spots in the city, they give you very unique dialogue. and you would never have found that out by not doing it. So it gives you the incentive to go through and, hey, I've never actually seen this scene. 00:46:50.53 Jala Right. 00:46:54.67 Daniel Can I get that scene to occur? So for this playthrough, I've been very thorough with all my my current issues with trying to find everybody and find all the bookcases and find all the items. 00:47:04.33 Jala Mmhmm. 00:47:04.39 Daniel And then also you don't understand that there's so many barrels and boxes. 00:47:08.98 Daniel Once you understand that there's thousands of these items in the game and each one of them might have a treasure, then you start to want to go, oh, exploration is actually key. 00:47:17.32 Daniel This is the big main point of the game. Go through and enjoy every second of every town. 00:47:22.04 Jala Right. Right. And so a lot of times what's fun for me is trying to figure out like how to get to some areas because there's almost always an area that you have to kind of like figure out how to get to because it's it's you can get there, but like you have to go through a house and go back out through the back door and do this other thing to get to wherever or something like that, um especially 00:47:42.36 Daniel Yeah, there's an NPC up there on the on the balcony. How do I get to that balcony? 00:47:46.21 Jala Right, right. And so, ah like, if you can see it, you're able to go to talk to that NPC, you know, like, so you have to figure out how to do that. um Definitely getting the boxes and barrels and searching everywhere in the town ah is crucial to kitting out your party with the best stuff because like there are a lot of power-ups and stuff that will give like a one-time bonus like you know um the the different items that'll boost oh your strength by three or whatever your magic points or or whatnot. 00:48:17.36 Jala And um so all of those things and including mithril which you can eventually use to make craft, you know, unique items for your characters and things like that like you get all of those things, as well as usable, you know, consumable items. 00:48:32.32 Jala in all of these barrels and boxes. But ah something that I love is that when you're running around the town and talking to the NPCs and then stealing all their stuff and going through their stuff, some of the NPCs, like it it's fairly often, it's not just like one guy in one town. 00:48:46.02 Jala It's like every once in a while, you'll come across an NPC who's like, you soldiers just come in here and take all of our stuff all the time. 00:48:52.82 Daniel Yeah, thanks for taking all of our money, dirtbag. 00:48:53.59 Jala you know like and Yeah, because you're just rifling through everybody's house and taking their 300 gold coins that they saved up and you just took it and left, even though you're Prince Medion or whatever, but it's okay because you're hot. 00:49:05.22 Daniel Yeah, yeah we're we're totally poor, but okay, have our gold. 00:49:09.78 Jala Right, great. So ah it's pretty funny because like there are a lot of NPCs that will do that. But um talking to all the NPCs in town also gives you a lot of um like narrative world building stuff a lot of times so because ah you get back information about different areas and um how these people are living their lives and and you know how prosperous they are or you know how much in poverty they are in different um things that are going on with them, some of which carry over to other NPCs that you meet in later towns and things like that. So um it's not all just like throw away text or anything like that. um Sometimes it's it's just like a little comment about whatever they're doing at the time or something, but like most often it's either world building or it's giving you some kind of crucial information that might be useful to you in the future. So 00:50:03.44 Jala I find it beneficial to talk to everybody, so I habitually will talk to everybody. and like I don't feel like I've actually ah played the game all the way through if I haven't talked to all the NPCs in the town. 00:50:14.20 Jala so like i i can't I compulsively have to. I have to. and so It doesn't matter if I played it 100 times. I have to talk to every NPC and I have to go through every cabinet and I have to go through every box. 00:50:26.60 Daniel and search all the unique symbols on all the walls and check all the trees to make sure there's no brave apples hiding in the in the trees. 00:50:33.87 Jala Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So because like I i will tell you the one time that I'm like, oh no, I think I got everything in this area. I will have forgotten and then I'll leave and then I'll be unable to go back and then go, oh man, I love like left this thing. 00:50:47.98 Daniel My loincloth! Why did I leave the loincloth behind? 00:50:50.88 Jala Right? So um circling back to when we're in the battle sequences. So your turn order is determined by the character's agility as well as a random seed. So it's not necessarily the same order every time. 00:51:03.16 Jala It pretty pretty much is the same order every... 00:51:05.44 Daniel It sticks to the same. Actually, we recently discovered that it sticks to the same order up until agility 15. 00:51:07.47 Jala Oh, does it? Okay. 00:51:11.12 Daniel And then once you get above that amount, the randomness kicks in another level. 00:51:16.29 Daniel So it's a random number generated seed. And then so there's some other factor that we're still trying to figure out. But we're there's people in the discord, like I mentioned before, that are working on this stuff every day. 00:51:25.75 Jala cool awesome awesome yeah see because like to the best of my knowledge it was like i don't know because like most of the time it's the same but then so at certain points it seems like it is a little bit more randomized but i i couldn't tell you why but no 00:51:25.91 Daniel So we're finding out new new things about this constantly. It's pretty cool. 00:51:42.05 Daniel Yeah, just enough that it's like, oh, this turn on going on a 16, this turn on going on what feels more like an 18. 00:51:48.27 Jala Mm-hmm. Right. 00:51:49.82 Jala So ah battle goals will sometimes vary, but most often they involve routing all of the enemy forces, taking down the leader or reaching a certain point on the map and for different reasons and you know different points for for different reasons. 00:52:05.36 Jala Sometimes you are manipulating an object at that point or you're trying to get to a certain point for you know like time-based reasons, things like that. Other objectives will include potential the potential recruitable characters, or in one very memorable map ah from scenario one, ah rerouting trains. 00:52:26.37 Jala so yeah ah Some maps feature two separate screens. ah The primary battle screen with ah the main objective, but then also ruins or tombs, which are being raided by thieves. and I think there's so six so of them, one per chapter, isn't it? 00:52:42.08 Daniel Six in each of the scenarios. 00:52:42.32 Jala so Yeah, so there's one one of these battles per chapter. And in order to access the ruins or the tomb, you have to find the map. And the maps are pretty much like pretty apparent. 00:52:54.27 Jala Like if you are looking around in the towns and stuff, you will find the map. So. 00:52:58.58 Daniel Yeah, on every town there is a definite treasure chest that holds a map. I'm fairly certain they're all in chests. 00:53:04.50 Jala Mm hmm. 00:53:04.66 Daniel So if you've opened every chest, then you there's a good chance that you have every single map. 00:53:08.72 Jala Right and you have to have that map on one of the characters who's actively in the battle in order for them to be able to open the ruins. So um the goal is of course yeah in these is you need to put like your fastest characters in these bonus maps to take down the thieves to get the treasure before they do um because those thieves can go pretty far pretty quick and um Depending upon the layout of each of these tombs, sometimes you want some slower people behind as well. 00:53:37.82 Jala It just kind of depends on what kind of mobility they have. you know so Usually it's your centaurs that you want to throw in there like dantaras in the first scenario is almost always in a ruin every time there's a ruin for me. 00:53:49.53 Daniel And when you get multiple healers, it's always a good idea to take a healer because sometimes you run into trouble in there as well. And the other thing I'll mention about the tombs that I know is that actually you want the thieves to pick up the treasure and then you want to take it from them. 00:54:00.40 Jala yes yes 00:54:02.18 Daniel If they if they don't open the treasure chests, you don't get the treasure. 00:54:05.21 Jala Correct, correct, because the chests are locked. And unlike in Fire Emblem, where you can recruit, you can have characters that are thieves that can open chests. You cannot open the locked chests in Shining Force 3. So ah if you do not let the thief get the treasure out of the chest, then you are s SOL. Like if you just kill them, then that's bad. And that's another thing. um That's another thing to mention is because you don't want your characters to kill off the thief if that thief still has more chests to open. 00:54:35.67 Jala You need to ah go after them and not do enough damage to kill them. You just need to make them drop the treasure so they can go on and then open the other chests as needed. ah There will also... 00:54:45.58 Daniel And there is something there is something about the thieves that we're figuring out now about kill on or drop on hit is that um if you if they do have like three or four items and you kill them, they will drop up all of those items at once. 00:54:58.63 Jala Oh, okay. Cool. 00:55:00.07 Daniel So if you have someone with a bunch of special items, don't have them kill the thief because then you will have to give up certain specific things. 00:55:06.56 Jala Right, right. You have to have like basically an empty inventory if you want to go in and actually get all of the items from the thief if you are doing it that way. Another possible way to do that would be if you can get a couple of characters in range, have one of them attack but not kill to get one of the items and then have the other person finish off the thief and then get the rest of the stuff. 00:55:26.56 Jala There are also monsters or enemy units that are find them their way into these maps. They do not attack the thieves. They only attack you and they will be impediments to your progress and or will wipe out your folks depending upon how weak they are. 00:55:43.18 Jala So yeah, um that there's that. And then then um there are sometimes multiple screen maps, multi multim-map battles that you've got um in scenarios if they're special like boss battles where you have to split the party or something like that. And of course, the very last battle in each of these scenarios is a multi-map battle as well. ah So you do have other instances of having multiple levels ah that you will have fights in at the same time, running at the same time. 00:56:11.80 Jala ah So each character has a class which determines what skills and spells they have and what weapons that they can use. And you can train a character to use a different weapon from their starter equipment if their class has multiple types available. Like if you have a centaur knight, they like Dantares, again, will start with a lance, but you can train him with a halberd or with a spear if you prefer to have him use that particular weapon. And when you do that, 00:56:38.19 Jala Right at first, he's not going to have any special attacks or anything like that ah with this weapon. And he's weaker with that weapon initially until he gains some experience fighting with it. And then over time, he will learn special attacks with that and get stronger and things like that. And like your character specialized. So if you spend most of your time with a lance and then you try to equip a halberd, it's not going to be as strong for your lance guy as it will be your halberd guy if you have one. 00:57:09.07 Daniel And my actual main goal for scenario one at least is to make every single character that I can into a ranged character. This includes the people who use axes. I like to have a throwing axe instead of ah a one distance axe because then they become that much more versatile for myself, for my playstyle. 00:57:26.31 Jala Right. The last time, uh, when I was playing through scenario two, uh, I switched all of my ax people to ranged ax people, like to Tom Hawk people specifically for that reason. 00:57:36.68 Jala But in scenario one, I had my ax people playing with just like whatever strong acts they were using. Like one, I think one of them had a mace and the other one had an ax. Um, but either way, like I tried to change it up. 00:57:50.07 Jala One thing I have never done is made my main character have one of the little throwing knives and 00:57:55.25 Daniel Oh, I love that idea. 00:57:56.81 Jala Yeah, i've I've never done that. 00:57:57.59 Daniel I focus on that all the time. 00:57:59.17 Jala I know you mentioned it before to me and I was like, Hmm, yeah, I've never done that. I've never done that. 00:58:04.76 Daniel but At first he's really weak and he does leg behind experience because of that four a little bit. 00:58:10.21 Daniel But again, that versatility of being able to put him at range two means he takes less damage because he's not getting hit as often. 00:58:16.36 Daniel The enemies try to get to him, so he becomes more of a gauntlet. people come at him so he can be you can focus guys around him and then also at range two he actually can do on par damage with the regular sword at a higher level like if he's level three the daggers and level two swords he does on par damage for that and then also get some really interesting specials because some of the knives offer really really cool specials that do a lot of damage to the enemies and one actually has an instant kill so 00:58:45.92 Jala Cool. 00:58:47.14 Daniel That has been my favorite way to run him. I actually killed an enemy that was really high up really far in the game with one shot, which I shouldn't have been able to do. And it saved my run because I was going to end up losing him the next round. 00:58:59.33 Jala Woo, yeah, yeah, I've definitely had that too. 00:59:00.34 Daniel So I actually have that on YouTube. 00:59:02.53 Jala Yeah, and um that's the thing too. So you do get instant kills. So so ah as your characters level up with their weapon of choice, they will get, they will unlock these special attacks and these special attacks trigger in place of a critical hit and they will do you know certain effects. 00:59:20.61 Jala So there are different ones where um they will they will um make the character I don't know go to sleep or whatever like so some other status effect will happen in addition to whatever the main damage is in some of these and of course there's bonus damage involved and and so on multiple hits. 00:59:38.81 Daniel And you can do things like confuse and put enemies to sleep and freeze them in place. 00:59:40.70 Jala Yes. 00:59:43.14 Daniel ah Freezing their feet in place is actually guaranteed if they get that special off. It's a neat feature that we found recently too. 00:59:46.90 Jala Yeah. Awesome. See? So there's all of these different things that happen um as you specialize with your weapon. And ah at the higher levels, I'm like, ah I think it's every weapon, isn't it? 00:59:58.99 Jala It has like an instant kill eventually, if you unlock a high enough level with it. At least it, no, it's really? 01:00:04.05 Daniel No, actually a lot of them do major damage, but there's only a couple instant kills across the whole game. 01:00:10.86 Jala That's interesting because like I can remember having that happen with certain axe characters, um axe characters, and then the main character with sword. I forget what sword. 01:00:20.52 Daniel I think you're talking about the maces. The maces have one. 01:00:23.42 Jala Oh, it might be maces. 01:00:24.89 Daniel The um the Epee or Rapier has one. 01:00:28.76 Jala Uh-huh. 01:00:29.97 Daniel There's one on the Ninja Throwing Stars. 01:00:30.09 Jala Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 01:00:32.97 Daniel And I think that's it. I'm trying to think if one of the landscape ones does it, but I don't recall if it does or not. So I know there's several of them. I can't list all of them off the top of my head, but there are quite a few good variety ones to choose from. 01:00:42.55 Jala Yeah. 01:00:46.63 Jala That's probably why I have hi like, I'm like, you know, I always keep on putting my main character with the rapier. I wonder why I keep doing that. Oh, that would probably be why. 01:00:55.08 Daniel Also the They have Agility bonus on every Rapier, and there's some really cool those are some of the most cool effects in the game as well, as far as I'm concerned. 01:00:58.17 Jala Yeah. 01:01:04.57 Jala Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I found too. 01:01:05.29 Daniel Those specials are amazing. like 01:01:06.98 Jala Yeah, that's what I found too. So that's why like um i I used to run through and have them with whatever their default sword is, whatever that was. So Julian had his battle blade or whatever, and Synbios had his regular sword and and whatnot. 01:01:18.98 Jala But then like once I started using the rapier, I'm like, oh no, they all need to use the rapier. That's cool. so 01:01:25.30 Daniel And they can. 01:01:26.40 Jala Yeah, yeah, so, so yeah. um Once a character reaches level 10, they can be promoted from their base class to an advanced class. So ah you can promote a unit anytime between levels 10 and level 20. Level 20 is your level cap. 01:01:41.96 Jala ah So, it is often beneficial to wait several levels before promoting your guy in order to increase their stats. ah When you first promote a character, they are weaker for a little bit of a time as they start to learn their new role, and then their progression improves pretty rapidly. 01:01:57.21 Jala I want to say it's like level four or five that they really start to you know kick in with their their progression. 01:02:02.27 Daniel I think it's actually most characters level three promoted. 01:02:04.46 Jala Route three? Okay. 01:02:05.70 Daniel Yeah, but it also depends. 01:02:06.32 Jala Maybe I'm just not being charitable. 01:02:08.00 Daniel It depends on when you promote to because some of the later levels in them in the early promotion or pre promotion that we call it some of the levels in the pre promotion to get them that much closer to learning their spells first. 01:02:19.96 Daniel So if you go far enough in those and the recommended for a lot of people is to promote them at level 17. 01:02:25.47 Jala Mm-hmm. 01:02:26.10 Daniel um And I'll talk about reasons why later, but level 17 and then you promote and then they're that much closer to getting their level 1 or level 2 in certain spells. So that helps bring them that much closer to attaining their spells that much earlier, which gives them the ability to be that much more damaging on the battlefield too. 01:02:43.10 Jala That's awesome. See, so usually here's, here's my, my, you know, like I, I am aware that they need, they should be, if I'm playing like a a good shiny force player, I should be having them level up several, several times before I promote them. 01:02:56.07 Jala But it's usually like, Oh no, they're like level 12. That's fine. And then I'll just promote them and that's fine. I just move on from there and you know, deal with them being weak for a little bit before they get stronger. 01:03:06.87 Jala And then I play through the rest of the game and go, okay, that was cool. You know, um, 01:03:10.82 Daniel Mm-hmm. Yeah. 01:03:11.84 Jala and And I just kind of deal with it ah in terms of, oh, well, now I have to do the Heroes Challenge more if my characters aren't strong enough to to whatever. And then I'll like, right, right, right. 01:03:20.66 Daniel There's nothing wrong with the Heroes Challenge. It's a lot of fun too. 01:03:23.85 Jala So ah that's something I suppose we'll go ahead and mention in the gameplay section. So ah there is a a a section in each of the different scenarios called the Heroes Challenge, which is an area that has different levels of monsters in it and at the bottom or the top or whatever of the the area. 01:03:41.52 Jala um the The last level of this Heroes Challenge includes some kind of a big battle, and then you can get special item at the end of this. But if once you do that, then like I think it closes off, doesn't it? 01:03:53.95 Daniel After you've beaten the hero's test, you can go back to it any time that you want as far as I'm aware up until the time that you beat the final boss the final like for the final item that he drops. 01:04:03.38 Daniel I don't know about scenarios 2 and 3. I haven't been in the scenario 2 hero's test. I do know about scenario 3. Sorry, I just lied. Scenario 3, you are allowed to go back to it as many times as you want. 01:04:15.23 Daniel After you've beaten the bosses in that one, they drop different items. 01:04:18.34 Jala Oh, that's interesting. 01:04:18.89 Daniel So the main boss of Scenario 3 serial challenge, once you beat him, beat him, he'll drop that item once, and then he drops, I think it's Brave Apples or the level 3 special material that you need for those weapons. 01:04:30.66 Jala That's cool. Yeah, see, because um i I went through and I was playing scenario two for the the playthrough I'm doing for this this podcast series. I was playing through scenario two and I went to the last floor and I was fighting the boss and I didn't actually mean to kill him. 01:04:46.94 Jala I was trying to to to weaken him and do as much damage as as I could and then like deuce out and then come back. But then I accidentally killed him and then I had to reload. Do it all over again cuz I was like no no cuz like we you know, like you can't like that shuts it down at that point um So yeah, cuz once you once you kill him 01:04:55.65 Daniel Yeah. Oh no. 01:05:01.95 Daniel Yeah. And then you're like, Oh, that's, that's three hours of time going out the window. 01:05:04.95 Jala isn Right. Right. So ah but the hero's test is fun and it is a good way to level up any characters that you do not have at the level that you want them to be for the final battle that you've got coming up. 01:05:08.11 Daniel Yeah. 01:05:18.13 Jala It's it's end game like, you know, near the end of the game. Last chapter, I want to say for each of them real close to the end. 01:05:23.37 Daniel Yet, it's the last second to last fight, technically, for all of them. 01:05:27.24 Jala Yeah. Yeah. Second to last fight. 01:05:28.64 Daniel As far as I'm aware, yeah, second to last, third to last fight in the and Scenario 3. 01:05:29.42 Jala So it's. Mm hmm. 01:05:34.79 Jala Right. And so, um, one thing that I noticed about it, uh, when I was playing it in, and it I don't know this, I feel like it might be a thing that the translation team did to the ROM. Um, you, when you go into the hero's challenge, you can pick what floor you've gone to, like what floor to go to up to the last floor that you. 01:05:52.56 Jala ah Access so like if you go in and you do level one and then level two and level three and then you leave you can come back and start at level three if you want to and just skip over the first two levels and um 01:06:05.42 Daniel To my knowledge, that's additional from the from the translation team, I think so. 01:06:08.64 Jala Yeah, yeah, I was going to say because that that was not how it used to play. I was like, well, this is convenient. I don't remember this. 01:06:14.21 Daniel Quality of life, man. Quality of life. 01:06:17.21 Jala Yeah. I was like, I don't remember this from the original game. I don't remember. I had to go through all of this over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. So. ah 01:06:23.93 Daniel Which is also good for levels, because you then know all your low guys are leveled up. 01:06:27.00 Jala Yeah, exactly. so But yeah, so they do have an option for you to do some grinding or you know polishing up of your people if you want to train them in some other kind of weapon, or if you want to get their levels up, or if you get a certain unlockable low-level character, although I think Translation Team is helping with that too, with their their newest patch. 01:06:45.56 Daniel Oh yes, there's a couple of batches for the penguins. 01:06:49.19 Jala listen yeah Yeah, there are mascot characters in ah Shining Force 3 as there are in Shining Forces 1 and 2. So Shining Force 1 had its little mascot of Yogurt and Yogurt is very useless. um I have a fun story about Yogurt. I'll i'll tell it even though it's not scenario or Shining Force 3. So Yogurt, he's level one. 01:07:11.03 Jala And I was like, I wonder what happens when you level them up. And so I tried to level them up. And you know ah he gets like you know he he does one damage ever. So like it was so hard to level them up. 01:07:21.21 Daniel Mm hmm. 01:07:22.39 Jala And I tried to level them up, and nothing happens. and like i was like Because I was like, man, maybe I can promote him. Maybe he turns into something really cool later if I can just promote him. 01:07:29.07 Daniel Oh yeah. 01:07:31.90 Jala And so I was determined to do this because I i love hamsters. And so I was like, I have to do this. 01:07:37.81 Jala and all he does is drop yogurt rings and then turns other people into yogurt who have the same stats as him. And then that's it. Like that's all that happens. And I was so sad because I was like, I really wanted him to be like the Magikarp of Shining Force, you know? 01:07:51.95 Daniel Yeah. And he's not. 01:07:54.30 Jala He's not, he's not, he's just, he's so cute. 01:07:54.46 Daniel He's totally not. He's so cute. He's such a good mascot that he's just a mascot. 01:07:58.16 Jala Yes. He is just a mascot. But yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got the turtle guy who is not useless in two. 01:08:05.15 Daniel Oh yeah. 01:08:05.75 Jala And then in here, you have the penguins. You have Pen, Penko, and Pendolf. 01:08:10.68 Daniel Pendolf. Yeah. 01:08:12.23 Jala So each of the scenarios has a little penguin that you can get, but you have to do a special series of things to get that character in your party. And in the base original game, they started at level one, Unpromoted. 01:08:25.03 Jala And all of your people at this point are promoted or about to be promoted. 01:08:28.80 Daniel and level And level three or four or five, somewhere in that range, usually. 01:08:31.71 Jala Yeah, something like that usually. And so um that that takes a lot of work to get that penguin leveled up. But if you don't, then he will just die or she or whatever will die in the last battle if you don't ah level them. 01:08:44.92 Daniel Mm-hmm. 01:08:45.78 Jala So ah but translation team has a patch for that to help with that to speed up that process. So it's not as grueling as it would otherwise be. 01:08:55.20 Daniel And there's also a couple of techniques that you can use with Pen. In Stereo 1, he can use accessory items that cast spells. So there are two of those available to him, and he can use either of those to help you do additional damage at range. So you can box in an enemy and then force him, force everybody to stand there, put a healer next to the person that that enemy chooses to tank. 01:09:17.78 Daniel And then you just tank that enemy down and use him as the DPS, referring to MMO style tactics. 01:09:21.63 Jala Mmhmm. 01:09:23.61 Daniel But yes, you use him to DPS down the guy until he dies. 01:09:23.74 Jala Yeah. 01:09:26.54 Daniel And then hopefully he gets enough experience after three or four of those guys to promote or to level up every single time. And that can be quite a grind, but you can do that as soon as you get him. And then eventually he's not useless in the next battle if you sit down and spend two hours of your life doing that. 01:09:42.85 Jala Right, right. And I did every time because again, I am the dedicated Shining Force player that even though I will not, um you know, go go level them up a whole ton before I promote them, I will level them up from one to promoted status. 01:09:57.37 Daniel promotion yeah i remember getting him to 10 and going yes it's time to leave and then him dying in the next round of combat and going oh he's gonna come back and he's gonna be sad 01:10:04.07 Jala Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But um the the so the thing about Penn that makes me laugh is that he really deeply to me resembles like a garlic bulb. 01:10:17.47 Jala He just looks like a garlic bulb. 01:10:18.95 Jala And so it's very funny to me because one of his special attacks is that he will shoot fire out of the crown of his head, which looks like the sprouting top of a garlic bulb. it its It's sure something to see. 01:10:30.18 Jala I was like, oh, go ahead, Penn. Every once in a while when Penn would do like ah a special attack, I'm like, OK, yes. 01:10:34.47 Daniel here. 01:10:36.85 Jala Finally, Penn has some use. 01:10:39.82 Daniel This is the fire we needed. 01:10:39.93 Jala So yes. 01:10:41.47 Daniel Not the fire we deserve, but it's the fire we needed. 01:10:44.19 Jala Right, right. So um yeah, they these are ah the the last thing I wanted to talk about with the the way that the game plays is ah the friendship. Friendship's whole mechanic that we have in this game. 01:10:57.11 Jala So how about you talk about that, Daniel? I've been talking. 01:10:59.93 Daniel Oh, it's my absolute favorite part of this game is you can partner people up 01:11:01.67 Jala Yes. 01:11:03.99 Daniel And so when you engage in combat actions, one of your characters and goes and attacks a guy. Somebody else goes and attacks the same guy. And every so often, you'll get a friendship meter increase. The meter is in the background. You don't see the points, but the points are based on a scale and you gain points for every action set together. And this is why certain things like casting the support spell on multiple people will increase your friendship faster because those people all get points when you use that together. 01:11:31.85 Daniel So you can go out and you can have, say, Masker in, cast a spell on one of the bad guys, and then Denturists can go and smash the Everliving Snod out of them afterwards, and they get a friendship bonus from that. Once that levels up, every rank in that, because you all start as allies, once you get level up in that, 01:11:48.24 Daniel you start to get different bonuses which start from like I think it's plus five benefit up to plus 15 or plus 30 in some instances and things like Obrite for example one of the dwarfs that you get he's an axe user he gives a defensive bonus so you partner up every single person you can with him he goes at first and then everybody hits after him and if you can do that because he's really slow 01:12:03.90 Jala Mmhmm. Mmhmm. 01:12:11.55 Daniel But if you can do that, then everybody who gets a defensive buff that stands next to him, when they get attacked in combat, they all get that bonus of plus 10 plus 15 defense. And that number in this game is actually a fairly significant amount when you're in combat, even later on in the game. So the more friendship you get with these different people, the better off that gets and friendship grows up to a certain point. And then the number generator kind of gets weird in the base game, because once you hit something called trusted, 01:12:41.24 Daniel that level there can, well I thought originally that that was the end all be all. My first playthrough I got to trust it with a few people and that was as far as I thought the friendship got. But once you go one step further than that you can achieve something called soulmated. 01:12:56.30 Daniel And you can have multiple soulmates with multiple people. 01:12:59.10 Daniel It doesn't just matter for that character. But some of the really awesome things about soulmates are soulmates don't go away when you die. 01:13:05.90 Jala Oh, that's awesome. 01:13:07.53 Daniel when you When you die, if somebody of that partnership dies, they stay soul-mated when they come back to life. So if you lose a guy and it's not your main guy, then that ah transitions back into still being soul-mated. 01:13:19.78 Daniel And that doesn't lose any value. When you die and you have less than soul-mated status, you lose points in your friendship status. 01:13:25.62 Jala Mm hmm. Yeah. 01:13:26.47 Daniel And you have to rebuild that trust back up again. 01:13:28.71 Daniel It's like a trust system that is really rewarding, but also very punishing up to that point. The other great thing about Soulmated is that you can get that bonus from two squares away. 01:13:38.45 Jala Awesome, awesome. 01:13:39.45 Daniel So you no longer have to stand next to Obrite, you can stand over there and if you're ranged and he's ranged, you can both attack targets at different points and be very, very useful and it just develops the combat that much further. 01:13:46.18 Jala Mm hmm. 01:13:51.61 Jala That's awesome. So um I thought Trusted was as high as it went too. I didn't know there was a soul mate. Well, now I got to find out about this soul mate thing. Because boy, now I need some soul mates for some of my absolute favorite characters. 01:14:04.70 Jala And I got to go do my one troop here. 01:14:05.30 Daniel Absolutely. And certain certain pairings have a better chance of becoming soulmates. And with the vanilla game, there's a percent chance every time you're in combat after a certain amount. In some of the modifications that we've done, it's a lot more common. 01:14:20.37 Jala Mm hmm. That's cool. So, yeah, um if you all haven't already sorted this out, listeners, ah the translated versions of this game, the the ROMs that are out there that exist for everyone to access, thankfully, so that everybody can experience this game are they include a lot of cool ah upgrades to the game and improvements to the game. which is already an awesome game to begin with. But the addition of some of these little tweaks for quality of life and you know just solid improvements for just how games have evolved over time you know ah is is fantastic. 01:14:59.45 Daniel Oh yes, I'm quite enjoying all the things that are coming down the pipeline right now. 01:15:03.61 Daniel It's it's an amazing time, like I said, to be ah like a Sega Saturn fan, but also a Shining Force fan right now. 01:15:09.04 Jala Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's move on to the graphics. We already kind of talked a little bit about some of the visuals, so that's good. That'll make this a little bit faster. But some yeah, this was the first 3D Shining Force game. So it featured real-time 3D rendered graphics, but this was still the early days of 3D modeling. So you got They're not quite Dorito men level but they are pretty close to Dorito men level. 01:15:32.56 Jala I mean like ah the centaurs have a very yeah unique kind of ah look to them and things. 01:15:37.66 Daniel Mm-hmm. 01:15:39.42 Jala And in certain characters like Rock in Scenario 2, I'm looking at you buddy, ah boy do they does does he look like a real weirdo on the screen when you've got got his 01:15:48.27 Daniel Yeah, he's he's successfully strange, yes. 01:15:50.95 Jala Yes, he is he is a like he already looks kind of weird anyway in his character portrait, but he looks even weirder somehow because he cut the way that they cut his model is that like he's got a flat angular face that kind of comes to a point like a narwhal or something. 01:16:05.51 Daniel Yeah. 01:16:05.62 Jala It's just real. It's real weird. I don't know. um So 01:16:10.39 Daniel And the graphics get better by the time they reach Scenario 3 and Premium Disk, and you can tell the quality difference when you go back and look at Scenario 1 and you're like, oh yeah, this is this is going back a ways. 01:16:21.07 Jala Yeah. Yeah. So there's. 01:16:22.80 Daniel But there's still really cool graphics for the time. 01:16:24.63 Jala Yeah. Yeah. 01:16:25.48 Daniel It's better than Virtual Fighter 2 level in my books. 01:16:27.60 Jala Yeah. Yeah. 01:16:29.24 Daniel It's not quite that blocky. 01:16:29.75 Jala For sure. Yeah, for sure. It's not quite as as rough as that, ah but it is early 3D. And one comment from Alex talking to you, Pickle Facts, Pickle Factory Alex, in my server. when I was sharing some little videos of you know just different parts of scenario one in my my Discord server when I was playing through it. And some of these people were experiencing this game for the first time through these little videos I was sharing. 01:16:57.00 Jala And one of the videos or several of the videos I had were just different parts of scenario one when you go to a town and then it's it's doing the thing where it's it this game loves to spin on an axis. 01:17:07.72 Jala And it was Alex who was talking about this the most. He's like, they really want to show off that they are doing 3D modeling, by making it go 360 rotation around everything all the time. 01:17:14.81 Daniel Oh, yeah. 01:17:18.34 Daniel Oh, yeah, the camera has a heyday. 01:17:18.43 Jala And it's like, I really do. Yeah, they they they had so much. And then like when you open up doors, most of the time that the screen turns or or all of the time, the screen will turn and rotate a little bit if if you're not like square on it so that. 01:17:31.96 Daniel That is actually a cutscene that renders the screen so you can see the door opening. 01:17:36.64 Jala Yes, and so it'll it'll do that every time if you do not have like the door like front and center where you can see it so you can see the door opening. 01:17:37.89 Daniel Yeah. 01:17:44.75 Jala It's it's pretty wild. But yeah, they were 01:17:46.58 Daniel They do do a really good job with the camera controls though because you can use the left and right triggers to aim where you're going. So if you generally just position yourself so you're looking at the characters but the whole time, then you're having a good idea of where the doors are going to be and it doesn't do that as much. 01:18:00.10 Jala Yeah, yeah. But it's it's still fun. It's like a quirk of this game that it does that little little um kind of spinning all the time kind of thing. But once Alex pointed it out, like it's funny because I've been been playing this game for so long that I didn't even think about it. 01:18:12.29 Jala So it didn't even occur to me. Oh, yeah, they're spinning everything all the time until he said it. 01:18:17.57 Daniel Yeah. 01:18:17.97 Jala And once he did, I just started laughing every time I was opening a door from an angle or something. And I'm just like, here we go. 01:18:23.45 Daniel Yeah. 01:18:24.46 Jala Yeah, it's spinning. And I think of Alex every time. So so yeah. But um yeah, when I played ah back in 1998, even though when I saw the game and I saw the 3D rendering and stuff, I was like, oh, man, why did they do that? Why did they make it 3D? They should have just made it the 2D with the sprites. Those look great because they have them the character portraits that are drawn in the same kind of like, here, let's do the character um concept art and then pixelize it and put it in the game. They have that same thing here for the character portraiture. 01:18:58.28 Jala and everything. It's just that like when you get to the battle maps, it's all 3D little guys. like I don't mind the ah exploration mode guys. What I don't like is the really blocky like combat guys that you've got. 01:19:10.06 Jala they They look real weird to me, and they always have, so I was sad. ah What was your first reaction when you first saw it, Daniel? 01:19:16.89 Daniel My very first time plugging in the game and sitting down to combat, I was blown away by how amazing the technology was. 01:19:21.76 Jala Hmm. 01:19:24.77 Daniel I had been playing Sega Saturn since practically launch. And I had played Virtua Cop, and I had played, because I had Virtua Cop 1 and 2, I had Daytona, I had played all these games, and I was like, okay, this is going to be box rendering, 3D polygons, there's going to be some cool stuff, and it's going to be okay, I'm not expecting a lot from the combat. 01:19:41.41 Daniel And then you go in and you attack the very first time, which is with the Sinbios, and he gets murdered, because you're silly, and you move him all the way up, and he he gets murdered, and then you you get to see the enemies attacking you, and you're like, oh, 01:19:50.31 Jala Yeah. 01:19:54.24 Daniel This is actually really well done and pretty cool. I have a totally different opinion of you of yours on that is for me, I was blown away. 01:20:00.46 Jala yeah 01:20:01.44 Daniel It was so amazing that you could have these sprites rendered in 3D fully animated doing these attack actions. And now in today's world, we are working on finding a way to port all the games onto the premium disc style. 01:20:16.00 Daniel of gameplay so that everything's in the updated graphics, but also so that we can then eventually set our own animations and make our own attacks. 01:20:22.73 Jala Ooh! 01:20:23.98 Daniel That's kind of where we're at right now with some of the processing is that that's the new future is that we're looking forward to in in a fairly near future, next five years, hopefully. 01:20:27.11 Jala Mmhmm. 01:20:34.13 Daniel But, you know, these things take whatever time they're going to take. We're going to be able to, OK, well, we want to give the symbiote a spear and have him attack with a spear and be able to throw that or jump up in the air and throw it down or some other cool animation. 01:20:48.65 Daniel And all of that is in the process. But watching that come out of what it was and have him do his sword animation and watch the enemies do their spitting scimitar attack. That blew me away in in 1998, 99. 01:21:00.58 Daniel That was just fantastic and and phenomenal for me to see back then. 01:21:00.69 Jala Awesome. 01:21:03.70 Daniel And it still excites me now watching it now. 01:21:06.04 Jala That's awesome. Now, I will say I love the little combat barks. I love them. I i also, well, I say say I love them. I love the Japanese ones. 01:21:15.81 Daniel Yes, absolutely. 01:21:17.13 Jala The English ones are so, some of them are so bad. 01:21:17.29 Daniel absolutely 01:21:21.05 Jala I mean, ever since ah there was one one time that I was going through and then um ah by a fluke, Synbios died and he said, is this the end? 01:21:31.29 Jala yeah and then 01:21:31.79 Daniel Oh, yeah. 01:21:32.52 Jala when that When that happened, my husband Dave lost his shit. He lost his shit. 01:21:37.83 Jala He has been saying it ever since. He's just like, yes. 01:21:40.40 Daniel It is absolutely hilarious. And I believe the voice acting for the English was people on staff that they could not could get away with not paying. 01:21:48.63 Jala Yes, yes. 01:21:49.20 Daniel That's the story that I've heard about it is that those people were part of the cast and crew and the families of the cast and crew who were not being paid for the lines. 01:21:56.71 Jala Yeah. 01:21:57.67 Daniel They just had to throw something in there to help offset the fact that the Japanese had voice lines for these things. 01:22:02.95 Jala Yeah. 01:22:03.19 Daniel And it shows when you listen to noon going, now bear my Arctic blast. 01:22:06.99 Jala Yeah, nude. 01:22:07.45 Daniel So in the beginning it's cool, the first time you 01:22:08.03 Jala Oh my God. 01:22:09.40 Daniel third time you hear it, you're like, really? Are you seriously saying this again? I cast this spell 100,000 times every single time we play this game because freeze is the best cost per damage that you get. 01:22:21.66 Daniel And why am I hearing this voice line over and over again? 01:22:23.08 Jala Awesome. 01:22:24.34 Daniel But I have actually the translation patches do also now include the Japanese voice lines. 01:22:29.16 Jala awesome 01:22:29.76 Daniel And I have been listening to those and it is a blast again to hear those for the first time actually in a playthrough on hardware. It is quite incredible. 01:22:38.01 Jala Well, I will say too, that some of the problems with the English voices is that the voices are really quiet and you can't even hear what they're saying over the battle music and and the sound effects in a lot of the instances. 01:22:45.20 Daniel Mm-hmm. Yeah. 01:22:50.29 Jala So like the original version of this game had some, some junky sounds like that. 01:22:55.34 Daniel And some of Synbios' lines, one of his lines when he's using the rapiers, ta. 01:23:00.82 Jala Yeah, that's it. 01:23:01.04 Daniel That's his whole line, ta. And it's like, no, man. Seriously, say something cool. Say something exciting. Say something that impresses me. 01:23:08.39 Jala Yeah. 01:23:08.76 Daniel I'm not going to enjoy you saying ta 600 times. 01:23:11.67 Jala And you know the thing is is that um I disliked the English voices so much that I ended up buying an import copy of Scenario 1 so that I can play the game and hear the Japanese on my hardware because I wasn't down with these wacky voices that I heard during the US version. 01:23:32.49 Jala So ah for folks who are are listening to this who want to go play the game, if you have the option to change it to Japanese voices, do that, please. 01:23:40.63 Daniel And again, this is very specifically something that's available with version 25 with the new patching method with the absolute newest version of this patch. If you get an older, cause we launched it with a bad one. 01:23:52.38 Daniel So we found out right away that the bad English or Japanese voice patch doesn't work. So make sure you get the absolute newest one of those. Ask us in the discord if you need help. We will get you the right one. 01:24:03.53 Daniel If you use the wrong one, it crashes your game. 01:24:05.64 Jala Oh no! 01:24:06.03 Daniel And I found that out the hard way because it was always crashing my game. 01:24:09.04 Jala Aww, yep. Yeah. 01:24:09.85 Daniel And I had to fix that, but it's a very easy process to to get done. 01:24:11.01 Jala yeah 01:24:13.93 Daniel And it is it worth the experience if you've already played it through once in English. 01:24:18.10 Jala Yes, it absolutely is because i as soon as I got my hands on a copy of scenario one in Japanese, I turned around and played it immediately because I was like, nope, I'm not, I can't, I'm not, we're not doing this. 01:24:32.57 Daniel Yeah. 01:24:32.75 Jala So some of those voices, I'm like, oh man, this character looks so cool. And then I get them into the battle and I'm like, oh no, oh no. 01:24:40.12 Daniel yeah get Masqurin in casting a spell and she muddles and is the of power 01:24:44.16 Jala Yeah. 01:24:45.25 Daniel okay i i wish i knew what those words were i'm going to imagine all kinds of things about what those words could have been something about power 01:24:53.63 Jala I know. 01:24:53.84 Daniel i wish i knew more 01:24:55.54 Jala Well, and then too, like a lot of her voice lines, she sounds like she's just like, I don't know, asleep. She's just not really excited about it. And it's like, I don't know. I mean, if I were casting a fire magic spell and watching all these people burn alive, I might be a little bit more animated, but I mean, you know, maybe she's just shell shocked and has PTSD and doesn't have any left in her. 01:25:13.69 Daniel I think... 01:25:14.84 Jala I don't know. 01:25:15.05 Daniel I think she's been shell-shocked. 01:25:16.25 Jala So. 01:25:17.26 Daniel She's this 14-year-old girl in in some of the theories and it's like, yeah, okay, so you're 14 and you're able to cast this amazingly powerful spell and you don't like the fact that you're killing people. Okay, I get it. 01:25:28.20 Jala Yeah. 01:25:28.60 Daniel But could you have some some life to your words? 01:25:30.85 Jala Right, right. 01:25:31.27 Daniel Just so um just so just two volume, not just higher, please? 01:25:33.97 Jala Right. That's okay. That's why the Japanese version exists. So um yeah, do we have anything else to say about the visuals though? 01:25:38.73 Daniel Absolutely. No. 01:25:41.92 Jala So we talked about the how the text text animates and the text does a lot of the lifting when it comes to emoting for these characters and things like that. And we talked about the 3D battle animation, which depending upon who you are, you may love it. 01:25:55.44 Jala You may be like, eh. 01:25:57.77 Daniel Absolutely. 01:25:58.93 Daniel One of the things they will mention is that some of the spells do have some intense graphical moments which could lead people who have epilepsy or epilepsy adjacent could lead you into a severe moment of panic or cause you to go into shock. 01:26:14.04 Daniel So be very careful if you have those issues again with all video games be aware that you know if you have needs be be attentive to that but the game does have some moments where there's extreme flashing on the screen and some of the spells are quite visually Shocking because they did an intense job on some of those spells and they could put you into some kind of state where you're not happy anymore So be very aware when you go into this game that yes There are spells that you probably personally shouldn't cast even though they do immense damage They are quite effective for the graphics that they are in and they they could be quite alarming to someone who's not prepared to witness them and 01:26:51.35 Jala Well, what you could do is cast the spell and then turn away and just not look at the screen and then. 01:26:55.65 Daniel Or yeah, not watch the screen. You'll know when it's over because the sound stopped. 01:26:57.94 Jala Yeah. 01:26:59.25 Daniel But yes, for for those people who have issues, just be aware that there are some that could cause you to have problems if you're not aware. 01:26:59.47 Jala Right, right. 01:27:05.95 Jala Right, right. Very good point. So ah moving on to the sound design, since we already started talking about sounds by talking about the voices and stuff, that just kind of segues right in. 01:27:12.60 Daniel but Yes, absolutely. 01:27:15.52 Jala So yeah, the music is composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who is known for the Tales series, Golden Sun, Star Ocean, Mario Golf, and Mario Tennis, and weirdly enough, Dark Souls. 01:27:29.02 Jala So ah a person of many, many talents who can make music for all kinds of situations. So among many, many, many other works, um this this particular Sakura of a son has been in the industry for a very long time. ah Yeah. And as poor for the combat barks, we already talked about that. What do you think about the music, Daniel, in this game? 01:27:50.57 Daniel um Well, I've looked at to at the actual instruments involved and broken down some of the, um or we've had some people analyze the actual sound system and how it works in the game. 01:28:02.01 Daniel And it goes through and creates all those sounds with different instruments. So it's one of the first games I've encountered that has a full orchestra style sound setup. 01:28:10.32 Jala Mm hmm. 01:28:10.66 Daniel And ah by that, I mean there are cymbals and there are horns and there are flutes and there are, I don't remember all the different things, but there are several different sets of certain instruments and all the instruments play a role in creating these sounds. And when I played it, I had heard sounds from all kinds of places that deal with music and video games. I've been a gamer my whole life. So I thought, OK, well, these sounds are going to be cool. They're going to be interesting and it's going to be neat because it's Shining Force and it's on the Saturn. But I was blown away. 01:28:39.01 Daniel the The phenomenal ah orchestra that they put together and the way that they implement all the sound effects and all the all the design choices, they all flow really well together. The cut scenes when they occur in battle and in the towns, they all have different unique sound effects. 01:28:54.25 Daniel A lot of the combat dialogue and non-combat dialogue has amazing music behind it as well. The score of the music really sets the tone and the pace for the game, and it does a phenomenal job of highlighting the yeah the ups and the downs that your characters go through, as well as leading you on a really emotional journey through this story. And it impacts you in a way that I didn't think that music really had that effect in a lot of games on the Saturn, because a lot of the games on the Saturn are here's an action game or here's a shooter game and you're just listening to the same soundtracks or a couple of tracks over and over again, whereas this was every scene has a planned out route for the music as well as the story. So if you're pacing yourself and you're listening along to the sound effects, you can tell when the emotions change in the dialogue, not just from the dialogue itself changing, but also from the sounds that go on and the and the change of the music, the change of the mood. It really does a great job of showcasing the the power that the Saturn sound processes are has and the access it has to creating this environment in your head of all this different emotion. 01:29:54.80 Daniel So I think that they did a really good job of of designing this. And you mentioned the artists. I don't really track all that stuff myself. I'm glad that you have that information handy because I have no idea who he is. He's done a lot of amazing things before and since. But this was really one of his show pieces, I think, one of the one of the top pieces of their catalog. And if I had to recommend a soundtrack to someone, this would be one of the soundtracks I would recommend someone goes out and buys and owns just to listen to to remind yourself of the game. If you were wanting to experience it outside of the realm of the game itself. 01:30:26.04 Jala Right, and there are there are some particular tracks like um the kind of devastated track that happens when you go into a ruined town, for example, and things like that were like those tracks. 01:30:41.00 Jala Once you hear them the first time, you might be like, oh, well then I know that track. Like whenever that shows up, like you you have that kind of emotional cue and all of this is set up in scenario one. So like in scenario one, you get a lot of this this music and you get these emotional cues tied to each of these different pieces. So um once that happens, then you As the scene, whatever the scene is, loads and that music starts, you already have that emotional state. 01:31:07.82 Jala you know like You're trained to that emotional state to to already trigger and understand the emotional state of the situation going on because it was already set up like so many different things in scenario one. 01:31:18.93 Daniel Oh, yes. 01:31:20.06 Jala So I've said this before on other ah places when I've talked about this game, scenario one is really it starts real slow. 01:31:29.60 Jala It's like the first hour is is mostly like sitting in town and like learning the setup of what's going on in the world because there is so much narrative. There are so many different moving parts that are already moving that are there already you know underway. 01:31:44.21 Jala Different things, different gears are turning currently. as the story begins, as you are brought into this world. And so um it starts very slow. So understand that when you start the game up, it'll be like an hour before you get to your first battle. But ah all of that is very needed for the setup. Because once the story starts going, it starts going. And then like there's so many different interwoven parts and things that are moving as the story progresses throughout each of the different scenarios after that. 01:32:15.47 Jala And scenario two doesn't take as long to get started. Scenario three absolutely doesn't doesn't need any preamble to start up. So it's just because it's it's laying the groundwork in this opening section of like this this peace treaty pre-talk that you've got going on. 01:32:32.95 Jala in the beginning of scenario one and how that ends up playing out. and um you know It's there in part to set the tone of all the hopes and the fears that all of the people of the Republic have as you kick off this game and all of the conflicts that are about to happen. 01:32:50.23 Daniel I'd also love to mention at the beginning of Scenario 1, when you put the disc in at the beginning beginning of the whole thing before the game even starts, the opening cutscene, if you sit through it and you sit down and you take your time with this game, that opening cutscene, the amount of orchestral music that goes through that, when I watch that scene now even, 01:33:09.51 Daniel I am thrilled to be experiencing that that level of music, and every moment of that cutscene just strikes different chords. 01:33:18.20 Jala Mmhmm. 01:33:18.78 Daniel It's not a whole lot of scenes. There's not a lot of animation. You see a couple of different scenes, but as you mentioned even just a few minutes ago about the gears, there is a scene where there's the gears turning, 01:33:22.86 Jala Mmhmm. 01:33:28.44 Daniel And that scene really starts to make you feel like you're part of a larger picture as it zooms out to see a giant mechanization of a machine. And all of that leads into the fact that this story is built around all of this design and all the sound that goes together. The very first town of Saraband, you go in there and you have a nice little score that's going on while you see the opening cutscene. And then right away you get a thunderbolt of noise. 01:33:54.07 Jala Mmhmm. 01:33:54.40 Daniel to jolt you into the story. And I feel like all of that design was really well thought out and really well executed together to to bring the world together for you so that you have a feeling of of of Shining Force 3 when you go into the game at any point. 01:34:08.28 Jala Right, right. Absolutely. And all of those little opening cutscenes are so worth watching. even and Like they have better animation style. I will also say that it it looks better than the um the battle animation. 01:34:19.63 Jala So ah i I was OK with those when i was I was watching. So I will watch those opening animations because they they really kind of give you ah some little tidbits of here's some of the main players that are in your team. 01:34:23.18 Daniel Oh, yeah. 01:34:31.92 Jala And then here's some of the main conflicts that you come up against in this inst installment of the game. And it has this really, um you know, heroic music going on in the background, this epic adventure music that's just like setting the tone for, you know, the whole kind of thrust of what this this multi part game is going to give you. And yeah, it's very effective, very cool. And, you know, definitely worth your time to look at. 01:34:58.87 Jala So a couple more things I have here on my list for this episode. So ah let's talk about some of the stuff in the premium disc real quick, and then we'll get into a few little discussion questions, which I think we pretty much answered most of them, but we'll we'll go through and look and see if there's any more. 01:35:14.30 Daniel Hmm. 01:35:14.78 Jala so ah Yeah, we already talked about how you had to get the UPCs off of the backs of all of the different disks of Shining Force 3 and then mail those into Camelot in Japan during a certain window in order to get the the premium disk for free. so ah This is equivalent to these days getting a DLC, but like it was released for free. It was given to people for free. You just had to mail them the UPCs, which is very cool. 01:35:40.18 Jala So when you boot up the premium disc, it starts with a very short commercial for Shining Force 3 that has a few CG cutscenes from the game. And if the if you let the disc run, then it begins to play a promotional video for the game. And um it features interviews and the history of the entire Shining series of games. 01:36:01.70 Jala um I, you'll have to fill me in on this Daniel. I have never seen, I'm not at this time of recording booted up premium disc to, you know, like the English patched version of it is all of that subtitled or anything or not yet. 01:36:15.60 Daniel Oh, actually, I don't believe the premium disc has been translated. 01:36:19.57 Daniel I believe, and it's been a while since I used the premium disc, but I believe 99% of the premium disc has been completely untouched. And the only part of the premium disc that is in English is the part that is the battles and the character um creation slash set up slash organization part of the premium disc. 01:36:38.44 Daniel I believe all the interviews and everything else. is still in Japanese, although there are translations available um on the internet, I believe, somewhere on YouTube or something attached to the translation project. 01:36:42.33 Jala Mmhmm. 01:36:49.55 Daniel I know I've seen the interviews in English subtitled, but I don't believe they've actually put that back on the disc at this time. Again, you'll have to forgive me. I haven't actually utilized my premium disc for um six years since I got the thing originally and played through the entire series all at once at that time. 01:37:08.79 Daniel Um, that was when I meet scenario two and scenario three for the first times, and then also went on to do the entire premium disc. And my recollection of that was during COVID and, um, I'm a little fuzzy on some of that, that time. 01:37:19.43 Jala and Right. 01:37:20.83 Daniel So I don't recall a hundred percent if that's just in English or not. So you can't quote me on that because I have not, uh, not an experienced hand at the premium disc, but I do love the content on there. 01:37:25.45 Jala Right. 01:37:31.58 Daniel And some of those interviews are incredibly cool to, uh, to go back and watch them and listen through. 01:37:36.72 Jala Right. And so, you know, if they're available out on YouTube and you can get ahold of them that way with some subtitles or something, whatever, it's cool. ah I will, I will do some kind of googling around to see if I can find at least some links to something like that. 01:37:51.26 Jala And if I find anything, I will put it in the show notes so ah you don't have to. So you're welcome. 01:37:57.26 Daniel Appreciate that. Sorry again. I wish I had more experience with it I wish it could be more of a guru there, but I just don't have the I don't have the wherewithal to oh No, yeah 01:38:00.42 Jala Right. Well, hey, i I didn't tell you to play the premium disc and I didn't even open the premium disc before we started doing this episode. 01:38:11.24 Jala So, um you know, that was on me. So anyway, ah yes. 01:38:14.23 Daniel And I do plan on playing through it again. Now there's some quality of life updates to that with version 25 as well. ah Stuff that affects one of the characters that you get later in the series that allow you to do different things with her and set her up differently. So I look forward to changing her up and or them up and altering some of the stuff in there and playing around with some of that stuff for the new patch. So it is worth getting into as well and going through those battles at least one more time for me. Hopefully you get to experience it as well soon because you're now on scenario three. 01:38:42.07 Jala Mmhmm. 01:38:42.53 Daniel So that'll be exciting and a good challenge for you as well. 01:38:45.59 Jala Right, right. So I will go through it probably when I finish scenario three, um just to kind of cap everything off. So maybe we can circle back to that when we we we we're talking about scenario three. 01:38:57.09 Jala But ah I will still tell folks what's on the disk. 01:38:57.39 Daniel Absolutely. 01:39:00.57 Jala So ah once you push Start, the you have six different options. You've got a 3D model viewer for all the characters in the monsters. You have an artwork viewer that has some additional um illustrations and stuff. 01:39:13.34 Jala I have a copy of the Shining Force III art book, so like I have a physical. I have a physical, so um I don't really need that, but a lot of people loved it for the artwork um in particular, I know, and of course the battles, but we'll get there. 01:39:26.85 Daniel You mean the the scenario 3 world book? 01:39:29.03 Jala Mm-hmm. 01:39:30.54 Daniel That's what it's called, I believe. It's the world book. They are working on a full translation of that too. 01:39:32.25 Jala Mm-hmm. Awesome, very cool, very cool. 01:39:37.07 Jala ah there There are bonus battles. So there are eight of those total. It begins with the Kraken from Shining Force 2 and then progresses through. You can eventually fight people like Xeon and Dark Dragon, which I already mentioned before. 01:39:49.47 Jala ah There's also a, ah well you can also load in your save data and then use any of that save data to use any of the characters on that save data in these battles. So that's cool. ah There's also a backup file creation thing where you can answer questions about different decisions along the way to generate ah another clone data more or less of of like, this is how this game played out for me. ah You can also rename every player character in that mode. Then there is a movie viewer with all the CG cut scenes, TV commercials, and promo videos and stuff are all in there. So you get to see all these Japanese commercials for Shining Force 3. 01:40:26.08 Jala And then finally, you have a sound test with all of the music sound effects and voices. And ah to be clear, it's the Japanese voices. This was the Japanese release. So you don't have the God awful American voices in there. 01:40:38.98 Jala So you are spared from that. But yeah. 01:40:41.87 Daniel Yay! 01:40:43.65 Jala Hey, so um what for you was the most unique thing about this game, Daniel? 01:40:50.37 Daniel Do you mean in the series as a whole? All four game discs? Or premium discs specifically? 01:40:54.73 Jala Oh no, the the the all of Shining Force 3. Shining Force 3 has its own work because, I mean, it is a game, it is games. I mean, it is one, it is many. 01:41:02.97 Daniel Yeah. 01:41:05.45 Jala Shining Force 3 as the topic. 01:41:07.32 Daniel ah some of Some of my absolute favorite facts that you can do in the game are things that allow you to, in in the middle of combat, a lot of games, when you change out equipment, you are then done for your turn. While in Shining Force 3 you can change your accessories and your weapons mid-combat, 01:41:23.77 Jala ah yeah 01:41:24.59 Daniel So you can use a movement ring to get your characters further or something like that and then also then put on something that buffs your attack and defense So when you go into combat that round you are farther away than you should be and they can also use a different weapon or what have you so that you have higher defense if you're just sitting there waiting or If you wanted to say move further away and get away from a bad guy you can do those things and then also still have the defensive option or something creep pops up or creeps up on you and So the amount of combat diversity is really the the single biggest feature for me that really drives home for me the impact of the game. I love a good story, but I'm not story driven. I am a gamer who will go out and play games because I love the gameplay. And that's what really ultimately brings me back to a game is how well the combat and the gameplay flow together and how 01:42:12.57 Daniel um You can embrace and discard different aspects of a combat situation that make it easier or harder for you to enjoy and then also the the challenge that you can have. So Shining Force 3 also does a really good job of well does an okay job of balancing the different tiers of difficulty because there are options to select different tiers of difficulty after you've beaten the main game the first time and I like the fact that you can set it to a difficulty called it Insane And then everything is that much harder. So then you have to plan your strategies more. And that's again why I utilize the ranged options for every character that I possibly can, because then you can set up a different combat scenario where the enemies come to you and you blow them up. So for me, that's been my most effective way of playing the game. And what I enjoy the most is watching those enemies try to come at me and me saying, no, bro. 01:43:02.59 Daniel I've got this, you just sit there and you come at me and and you can take all this damage and then if you still survive that, come on over and we'll duke it out a little bit more. But I really love that the gameplay is still enthralling this 20 some odd years later and I can still find a way to dig in more and embrace that more and have more fun with that even though I've been playing this game for decades and decades. 01:43:25.63 Jala Yeah, that's awesome. So I'm kind of like the you're a good compliment to me because I am primarily narrative driven. I do like I enjoy the way that this game plays, but I don't get into super crunchy details most of the time. 01:43:34.76 Daniel Hmm. 01:43:42.40 Jala Like I will sometimes, but it's kind of hit or miss how deep into that I'm going to get. 01:43:47.70 Jala I'm most of the time focused on the characters, focused on the narrative and 01:43:53.13 Jala the thing that for me feels so unique about this game is the absolute opposite end from you which is ah more along the lines of I love the fact that this game is telling this tale this tale and it's like weaving a narrative that you know has different moving parts and is envisioning the different ah issues, the trials and tras travails that each of these different characters are going to encounter while weaving all of that into this larger overall story. And while that overall story is very basic in premise when you just boil it down to a sentence, right? 01:44:28.81 Jala ah At the same time, it talks ah goes depth about philosophies of life and your ethics and the ways that people ah come to blows over different situations just because of differences in how they interpret things or information that is provided or not provided as the case may be and how these things come into conflict and how 01:44:45.54 Daniel Hmm. 01:44:52.17 Jala Um, you know, this, this causes this human strife. So it's like this struggle that is very, very primal to just like being at the, you know, the experience of being a person. And I dig it. 01:45:01.92 Daniel Yes. 01:45:02.61 Jala I love all of that. And, you know, ultimately, even if it was a story like that. And it's fantastic. If it didn't have the gameplay to back it up and wasn't fun to engage with, I wouldn't be playing it over and over again. So, you know, ah ultimately it requires all of that gameplay stuff. And granted, um you can have a game that plays really well and doesn't have a really intense narrative. But what's special about this is game is that it is so complex, narratively speaking. 01:45:31.42 Jala has so many layers to just what you can discuss about what's going on in the story as it goes. But then it also has a very dynamic type of gameplay that is is for me a good balance between the kind of crunchiness you get in something like a Final Fantasy Tactics where it's just very granular and they don't tell you how to do anything. 01:45:48.29 Daniel Yeah. 01:45:50.80 Jala And like if I wasn't for the people in the Duckfeed TV Slack telling me all about how to play those games, that game and like, you know, oh, you don't want to play that class because it sucks or whatever. 01:46:02.06 Jala Like there's no way I would ever have been able to play that game even, you know, like not on the first playthrough. Anyway, it's very opaque. I'd have to read so many facts to get to the information. 01:46:11.38 Daniel Oh, my experience my experience with tactics is very much similar to that where I tried to play it and found it very disgusting to play because you pick something and then it's the wrong choice automatically. 01:46:13.76 Jala Oh. 01:46:21.08 Jala Mm hmm. yeah 01:46:22.27 Daniel And every time I played that game, I played it, I started it three times. And every time I started it, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't read game FAQs or any other source of information to get some idea. And I went through and I just tried to blindly play this game and Final Fantasy Tactics, it fell on its face. 01:46:37.34 Daniel Whereas Shining Force, and I mean to go back to the story on this, As a kid, the story meant almost nothing to me. I was very, very unaware of the political implications of the game and I could grasp at the very base level that there was a political intrigue and a social intrigue and all this stuff was very surface level detail to me. 01:46:42.97 Jala yeah 01:46:56.75 Jala Okay. 01:46:57.15 Daniel And going back as an adult now with some mature experience, I can go back and go, oh yeah, this plot is actually also quite rich. 01:47:00.39 Jala Okay. 01:47:03.38 Daniel And that's why I love being able to help edit some of the story myself, because I can then add to the lore a little bit and showcase our words as a group. Again, I didn't come up with the words or the script. 01:47:15.52 Daniel I just went through and put in some code and helped code that in. So I didn't even actually put in the script. It was one of our members who came up with that script, but I was able to implement it in a way that we were like, OK, this is easy to adjust and fix and and reprogram. And now we have this additional piece, which I have forever contributed to Shining Force. So I am super excited by the story now as an adult as well. And as you said, this ah this plot is very deep. It's not something that's surface level. A lot of video games have a surface level. Oh, we're the good guys. And those are the bad guys. 01:47:47.72 Daniel and there's no ah deeper meaning than black and white. Whereas this has gray levels everywhere. 01:47:51.31 Jala Right. 01:47:53.35 Daniel There's a gray tone over here and a gray tone over there, and when you get into this character and what their motivations were, and this character over here and what their motivations were, then you start to develop this feeling for all these characters. 01:47:54.21 Jala Mm-hmm. 01:48:03.76 Daniel ah One of my favorite characters in English is called Spiriel. In Japanese she's called Spirited, and she is a really intense woman. She is a very powerful feeling character the whole time you see her and you don't get to see her deeply wounded feminine side very much but that still comes through in the plot when they've translated it to English and the parts that you get to see and you understand that no she's not just a brave warrior who's really strong and talented but she's also a human being and these are also people who are trying to struggle through their lives and grow and develop and become strong enough to be part of an army that deserves 01:48:41.57 Daniel all the victories that they can ah acquire and deserves to be part of a force that stands proud against the darkness of the world. 01:48:49.00 Jala Right, right. And so like, it's funny, you mentioned spiritual or spirited because so that's like a character that I, you know, really dug when I first saw the game. And, you know, for me, when I was growing up, it was always so hard to find a strong female character in any kind of media that wasn't just like a bad guy. 01:49:07.18 Jala You know, a bad guy or who was then rendered trivial and having to be saved by some man in in every media at that time. 01:49:07.95 Daniel Yeah. 01:49:14.89 Daniel Yeah. 01:49:16.29 Jala You know, so like, superior or spirited as a character is just like a really interesting character, especially as her story develops, as the the different scenarios go on. 01:49:27.33 Jala But your first experience of Spiriel or Spirited is in and well, I mean, not your first one, your first kind of like allied version is is ah in in scenario two, where the first scene that you see her ah is where other people in the room are basically fighting over how like they're like, Oh, I have a crush on her. 01:49:40.02 Daniel Yeah. 01:49:51.84 Jala What? I can't believe you said that I have a crush on her. And they're like, And you're like, what? And then, you know, ah but she's all business, you know, and she' she didn't have time for that. But you know, it's this 01:50:03.05 Daniel Yeah, she's she's the the epitome of, I don't need no man. 01:50:06.26 Jala Right, right. Although she is like a fiancee to anyway, like that's all that's all stuff we'll talk about later. 01:50:07.67 Daniel Yeah. 01:50:12.15 Jala But yeah, so I'm like the characters in this game, even some of the characters who seem like Oh, they have a pretty basic kind of of disposition, like we'll take my favorite Dantares. 01:50:23.31 Jala I don't know why Dantares is one of my favorite characters. I can't even tell you But I like Dantaras. I think it's because I love the Centaur Knights. I always love the Centaur Knights in every Shining Force game. There's always at least one that I just love. 01:50:34.69 Jala And like my for whatever reason, my favorite Centaur Knight in all of Shining Force III is Dantaras. I don't know. so ah But he is this big and strong knight who stands for Justicin, and this, that, and the other, and has to basically play big brother to Mascarin who is a nuisance. 01:50:41.41 Daniel Mm hmm, yeah. 01:50:52.67 Jala She is a nuisance all the time. And um so he's trying to to be like you know the big brother for everybody. But then like you find out later about some of the things that scare him that are actually kind of cute and funny um and things like that. 01:51:07.48 Daniel Oh, yeah. 01:51:09.32 Jala And um you know like you get to see more of his his character as time goes on and as you come up against these kind of like moral and ethical questions where there isn't really like a straight answer to be had. 01:51:21.50 Jala you know, and where he starts questioning himself as well and growing as a character as as well. 01:51:22.21 Daniel Yeah. 01:51:26.96 Jala And I dig all of that. So ah as as Shining Force three compares to something like a Final Fantasy tactics, Final Fantasy tactics, only the like though the main characters make any real difference in tactics when it comes to the narrative, because all your other people are just guys. 01:51:43.90 Jala um And so like that that that has a good narrative. That game came out a few months after Shining Force 3 scenario 1 dropped. So ah that was concurrent. That came out around the same time as Shining Force 3. So just like for context and and you know where in history this sits. 01:52:02.65 Jala um As for something like a fire emblem, ah fire emblem notoriously for me anyway, except for Three Houses, which was written by a different team, ah is not really good on the narrative. 01:52:13.81 Jala well You're not really in it for the narrative of any fire emblem. 01:52:14.86 Daniel Ah, yeah. 01:52:17.61 Jala You're there for the ah support conversations, like your friendships the and and romances that you have and your you know between your characters and stuff. And those have some very, very strong character writing. 01:52:28.60 Jala um Fire Emblem allows you to change classes and stuff, but it doesn't allow you to manipulate all the stats as much as like a ah Final Fantasy Tactics does. So um in terms of crunchiness, Final Fantasy Tactics is the most crunchy. 01:52:44.04 Jala Then you have like your Fire Emblems, whatever those might look like. 01:52:44.36 Daniel oh yes 01:52:48.22 Jala ah And I kind of say that because you can choose a path for your your characters to take. 01:52:51.71 Daniel Oh yes. 01:52:53.30 Jala like You can change up their class to something totally unrelated to what they have been doing. and things like that. Whereas in Shining Force, they are on a track, they have a class, and then they have the advanced version of that class. 01:53:04.84 Jala And um you're your manipulation is more in like what weapon you want to give them and how you want to work their friendship levels with all the different characters and things like that. 01:53:14.54 Daniel And some of the things that we found and some of the patches that we are are working on, and we found actually some really neat things with the friendship bonuses, there are friendship bonuses that are not in the game. 01:53:24.94 Daniel There's an experience point bonus friendship bonus. 01:53:28.06 Jala Mm hmm. 01:53:28.50 Daniel And that's not found in the game in any of the scenarios. That's not something that you can have without putting in some extra codes right now. 01:53:34.12 Jala Mm hmm. 01:53:34.91 Daniel But that allows you to have bonus XP when you hit somebody in combat or do combat actions. 01:53:40.03 Jala So that was like so that was like in like in the code of the game, but just not actually. 01:53:44.71 Daniel It's in the game, but they never actually utilized it with any character. 01:53:49.28 Daniel There's also a bonus, I think, for gold, which doesn't work properly or does work properly, I think, but there's one other bonus. And I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but there's an extra bonus that does some weird stuff and it doesn't work properly. 01:54:02.03 Daniel So they obviously went through and took some of these out of the code to make them more streamlined and to make it make more sense. 01:54:02.33 Jala Mm hmm. 01:54:09.03 Daniel And I think some of them were for debug purposes. So they were trying to experiment with some of the stuff and make things easier when they were programming some of the combat. So there are some neat bonus features that are available if you play around with them enough. 01:54:21.18 Daniel They've done so many good things with the ah the combat, the friendship experience. There's so many interesting parts of the game that are currently just, we're just getting into the numbers and the nitty gritty. One of the things that we noticed with combat is that, and this is going to the countryside of things here for Shining Force 3, is that the combat, if you hit a damage marker around 13 or more, there's damage variance that starts to kick in from that point and goes up significantly as you get higher in damage numbers. 01:54:51.18 Daniel So that's why sometimes when you cast a higher level ah fire spell or higher level ice spell, or you do more ah special damage, you'll notice that sometimes when you hit a guy that's weak against that element, you'll do 60 damage. 01:55:02.96 Jala Mmhmm. 01:55:03.31 Daniel And sometimes you get bonus critical and bonus damage on top of that. and You can do upwards of 100 damage on the same attack against the same guy in a separate, like if you were to run two instances, just moving your character from one spot on them to another spot on them without changing anything else can affect that that random number generation. 01:55:20.71 Daniel So having more range can also min-max your stats a little bit more, and you can do some more variant combat with some of that stuff too. So I think that they've done such a great job of going through and looking at these and going, let's ah let's play with these numbers now. Now that we've gone through and looked at the at the aspect of the game itself and gone, oh, we can build on what's going on here, and we can ah create a system that really works well for randomization, which is neat to see in the code, but also neat to see from a a story perspective, because you go through it and you go, oh, so these characters actually are strong against these other characters, or weak against these characters based on their elements that they have. 01:55:58.80 Daniel And a lot of games try to do that, but don't do it nearly as well as the Shining Force series. 01:56:03.52 Jala Mm hmm. Mm hmm. That's really awesome. 01:56:05.63 Daniel So I see a lot of development there. 01:56:06.80 Jala Yeah, that's really awesome. 01:56:07.39 Daniel Yeah. 01:56:07.84 Jala And it sounds like the the translation project folks are they're going to just have stuff forever. It's kind of interesting to kind of get this information um through like the back door, you know, like Y'all are going in there and digging into the code and seeing what's in the code. and um you know like What exists for documentation of the um production of this is just kind of the stuff that was on the premium disk more or less and whatever the interviews are that are in some of the stuff like the art book. That's about all that we have ah you know to tell us about the whole 01:56:42.44 Jala you know, process because back then it was still fairly early internet days and people weren't, you know, just rabid for information the same way that they are now about that whole process. So, um you know, through digging through the code, you are unlocking and and learning about like some of the stuff they were doing in their process to make this game. And that's really cool. 01:57:03.90 Daniel Yeah, I really like the development side of it. I think that there's a lot more that can be worked on still too. So when we find these things, we can throw them into new mods. 01:57:11.52 Jala Mm hmm. 01:57:12.56 Daniel And ah ah like I mentioned before, I'm working on a mod that allows me to open the ruins that we mentioned before without needing those maps. 01:57:22.33 Daniel And then I can take those maps and turn them into something else. 01:57:26.02 Daniel That's a mod that I'm personally going to be working on at some point and I'm really thrilled about it because when I think about it, I go, how do we make these balanced, but also make them incredibly unique items in the game that do separate things at different times. 01:57:37.47 Jala Mmhmm. 01:57:39.94 Daniel So the end map will be incredibly powerful and the beginning map has to still be sort of relevant to that point in the game. 01:57:46.61 Jala That's cool. Very cool. So who would you recommend this game to? 01:57:54.89 Daniel um Anyone that can read. 01:57:58.31 Jala There you go. There you have it, folks. 01:57:59.92 Daniel And I mean, anyone who's interested in a good story, so people who are, say, seven or eight and just getting into video games, it's great for them because it helps to build their vocabulary. The game has a very diverse vocabulary. The series has a very diverse vocabulary, but it also teaches you math and it teaches you concepts of growth and experience and development across ah an entire series. 01:58:25.18 Daniel So anyone who's the age of 7, 8, 9, somewhere in there where you're starting to get into video games and you want to learn how to do these things and and what might help you ah read and develop a good focus on skills, it's a great way to to build those. And then if you're getting into video games to get into video games, then it's also a really fun game to play. 01:58:45.05 Daniel On top of that, anyone who's older, 30, 40, 50, and looking to get into the retro scene, this is an excellent game to get into. It's relatively affordable, especially if you get into the English version of Scenario 1. And if you want to get into the other scenarios, I think they're not super expensive yet either. So anyone who's interested in getting into retro gaming, this is an excellent place to start, especially with the optical drive emulators that are now available. There are more options than ever to play Sega Saturn. 01:59:12.11 Daniel And it's very diverse for that and anyone who's older and has free time 60 70 80 years old people who are looking for a way to spend time that are not super Outdoorsy people that don't want to be out gardening every day and want to have something to do to relax This is an excellent way to spend a couple hours every day relaxing and sharing this experience with people that you care about so really You know 01:59:33.90 Jala Right. And something that, yeah, it's it's basically everybody. Yeah. So I like that. And one thing I want to add on to like, if you are a young person and you are trying to to get into games and stuff, this one is a better game to get into than something like a Fire Emblem because Fire Emblem has a lot of ah sexy stuff in it that um is is already, it makes me feel weird when I'm in there playing it and I'm an adult. 01:59:50.98 Daniel Oh yes. 01:59:55.20 Daniel Yeah. 01:59:57.87 Daniel They, they aim Fire Emblem at 20 somethings. 01:59:59.34 Jala So yeah. 02:00:01.93 Daniel Fire Emblem, I feel like a Fire Emblem is aimed at people who are 18 to 25 with a little bit of disposable income and very, very interested in observing people who are hot and interested in talking to you while they're hot. 02:00:14.49 Jala Right. It's specifically for a certain level of hormones that we have passed. 02:00:19.65 Daniel Yeah, there's a demographic exposition here where they want you to, oh yes, some boobs that are nicely wrapped. 02:00:26.12 Jala Yeah. 02:00:27.94 Daniel And then some sexy bodies and probably some excellent looking abs. 02:00:32.77 Daniel All of the stuff that really sells within the music industry and the younger persons industries, those are all with places to to experience that and Fire Emblem is no exception. 02:00:41.20 Jala Mm-hmm. 02:00:41.64 Daniel And I have played Awakening a lot. At one point, I had two consoles and two copies of the game and was playing it with both hands. 02:00:47.62 Jala Whew! Wow. 02:00:49.99 Daniel Yeah, so I was and I was because I was playing maps together and doing different things to try and build my characters up and then share them. And I think there was ways to link those and do the towns together. 02:00:57.64 Jala Mm-hmm. 02:01:00.99 Daniel So I was trying to do town building and doing all those things together before it all went offline and all that stuff with Gonzo. 02:01:04.48 Jala Mm-hmm. 02:01:07.81 Daniel But I really enjoyed that game for what it was at the time, but yeah, I wasn't looking for a deep plot. Once you get through the main game, there's all the extra DLC, and I had purchased two sets of the DLC even. 02:01:12.94 Jala Mmhmm. 02:01:18.54 Daniel I was really into that game, and when some of that crashed and burned, that was sad, but it was an interesting version of a game that you could play for many hours and also get into the the combat, but you weren't getting into it for the story or the plot. 02:01:31.90 Jala Oh, absolutely not. And I will say I do plan to one day do an episode on episode or episodes on awakening. So we you already have a shoe in for somebody you to come in for that. 02:01:43.72 Daniel Oh, it's i don't I don't have it currently, so I would have to emulate it to play through it again, but I would gladly come on to talk about that as well. 02:01:46.17 Jala OK. Yeah. Right, right. So as for me, I would kind of say like um I have I've told so many people about this game trying to get them to play this game and um so. 02:02:01.58 Jala On any given scenario, if I'm not trying to grind super deep into it to get every last little thing, ah things like that, I want to say my play clock for scenario one when I just finished it here recently was something like, I don't know, 30, 3085. 02:02:18.32 Jala hours or something. I think like my my so most svelte was like 28 hours or so. All of the games are about the same length so um you can times that times three and get your your total. 02:02:31.89 Jala It's somewhere been in the realm of like a hundred hour game collectively if you are just kind of going through and not trying to pick it up to pieces. If you are wanting to do a bunch of different um stuff and and kind of engage with some of the extra stuff and go through the Heroes Challenge a bunch and things like that you will be able to spend 1000s of hours on this game and still be in there. 02:02:53.34 Jala um So, you know, 02:02:55.16 Daniel ah think you can push I think you can push the game to 120 hours if you do all the content, level up all the characters up to a decent level and get everybody every item that they need for all of their classes and all the things that you want for secret items and special items. 02:03:10.39 Daniel So if you put more than 130 hours to doing it that way, let me know, because I would like to talk to you about what you're doing wrong. 02:03:18.27 Daniel Because i don't think I don't think you need that long, but honestly, if you play through each scenario on their own, they're about 30-40 hours for Storyline and all the items in development. um That's all you really need for each scenario, but you can do a lot longer. 02:03:31.04 Daniel My longest single playthrough of Scenario 3, I grinded every character to level 40. I think that took me 642 hours or something like that on my play clock. 02:03:37.01 Jala Whoo! Yeah. 02:03:40.62 Daniel But I also admittedly fell asleep once or twice playing that game at night and left it running overnight and then continue to play it the entire next day. 02:03:48.66 Daniel So um the the awesomeness of being 12 or 13 and being able to play all day. 02:03:56.09 Daniel or all night from a Friday and then all the way through a Saturday and all the way to a Sunday. So I have had runs where the guys just sit there in the hero's test and doing nothing for six to seven hours while I'm sleeping in my chair, looking at my looking at my screen, waking up and going, oh yeah, my next move, and then falling back asleep again. 02:04:13.12 Jala That's pretty wild. Yeah, yeah, so. 02:04:15.11 Daniel that was ah That was a fun time, and i I really love this game. I think anyone who wants to play this series or wants to get into the series, it's an excellent game at a very good entry point price-wise and age-wise. 02:04:27.31 Daniel There's almost no um no person alive who can't enjoy this game. If you don't like story, don't play the game. 02:04:35.44 Daniel But anyone else who enjoys a good story, ah enjoys gameplay, enjoys 3D graphics or 2D graphics at any level, this is a game for you. 02:04:43.82 Jala Right, right. Because um i was because because for me, Shining Force doesn't exist after Shining Force III, because although the series continued under other people, we we don't talk about those. 02:04:55.01 Jala Those so those but those aren't real. ah Those are all figments of your imagination. 02:04:58.83 Jala I don't know what you're what you're referring to. um 02:05:01.45 Daniel Shining Force 4 will be coming out when we finally figure out how to program our own game. 02:05:05.81 Jala Yeah, I was going to say like that the translation team needs to also be making another Shining Force game at this point. 02:05:11.28 Daniel And this is why we're porting it to the premium disk mode. 02:05:15.03 Daniel We're trying to get every aspect of every part of the games from scenario one all the way through scenario three up to the premium disk standard of coding. 02:05:22.61 Jala Mm hmm. 02:05:23.41 Daniel And once we've done that, then we can start creating our own battles, maps, NPCs, conversations, and storyline. 02:05:29.88 Daniel We already know how to edit our own items, not just the pictures of the items or the descriptions, but we can do both. So I can take any item in any of the scenarios at any time and create a unique item with it. And i know we know between the group that there's a way to take any single thing in the game and alter it to whoever we want. And we can add characters via different levels of coding. So we can take, say, I don't know, General Varlent, who you meet early on. 02:05:57.28 Daniel and make him a part of the game and an actual playable character at some point. So that'll be stuff that we work on that are mods going forward and then also its own game going forward. There is a person um who's in the discord that isn't directly connected to the team who's making their own port of the game in Unity. 02:06:15.27 Daniel And they're doing a Shining the Holy Ark version right now, as well as somebody's working on a character and items editor that is very diverse and very verbose and has a lot of unique intricacies to the series as well. 02:06:29.11 Daniel So the tools are just continuing to grow and the gameplay itself will follow suit. So we're looking forward to the future with this game. I can't be more excited. I could be more excited, but you'd have to give me something that was already Shining Force 4 and we're not quite there yet. 02:06:43.69 Jala Right, right. 02:06:44.41 Daniel So yeah, I I just can't wait to play some more actually looking forward to doing that later today if I have time Oh Can can we can we not talk about it 02:06:49.83 Jala Right. Right. Because, um, so, so of the different releases, the most, the most promising thing that was coming, maybe down the pipes that then got canceled was they were going to make a shining force gotcha game. 02:07:02.51 Jala And then that got canceled. And I'm like, you know, I, yeah, I know. 02:07:07.13 Daniel I want to talk about it, but I also don't want to talk about light and I'm so so excited and so sad at the same time for that. 02:07:09.22 Jala I know. 02:07:13.62 Daniel It was going to be so good. was It looks so promising. 02:07:16.99 Jala So promising and also so terrible at the same time because I got on that Fire Emblem Heroes bent for a while, and I'm glad it doesn't work on my phone anymore. 02:07:17.22 Daniel I was so happy. Yeah. 02:07:24.19 Jala I'd still be playing otherwise. 02:07:25.87 Jala ah So yeah, yeah. But in so far as Shining Force games are concerned, though, as much as Shining Force 1 was my entry point, although I feel the Game Boy Advance version um ah Resurrection of the Dark Dragon. 02:07:39.88 Jala That one is kind of, to me, the better version of it. ah It has a better translation, in my opinion, and it has some added mechanics that are really cool. um That's cool. And Shining Force 2 is a cool experience. 02:07:53.25 Jala Of course, I never did get to play Shining Force 3, but my understanding is that regardless of what's going on in the story, the way that the gameplay is is a little bit constricted because of its the fact that it was on the Game Gear originally. 02:07:54.71 Daniel Yeah. 02:08:06.28 Jala So um that one wouldn't be considered 02:08:07.71 Daniel yeah The hardware limitations, yeah. 02:08:08.82 Jala Yeah, the hardware limitations. So um for me, my kind of like this is my example of what a shining game should be is this game is shining force three. 02:08:19.96 Jala So um definitely if folks want to get in on the shining train, start on this game. You've got so many things out there and we will definitely put a link in the show notes for the translation project discord as well. 02:08:26.60 Daniel yeah 02:08:33.12 Jala So folks can go hop in there as needed. So. This will wrap us up for this episode, this overview episode of this show, starting off our our series on Shining Force 3. 02:08:45.40 Daniel Yeah. Yeah. 02:08:47.44 Jala So in the meantime, is there anywhere on the internet that you may be found, Daniel, for folks to ah say hi, talk to you about this game or whatever? 02:08:58.53 Daniel ah Yes, you are welcome to join our Discord chat, and I am on there as Magic Knight Frederickson. That is my current handle, and you are welcome to come in there, ask me any questions, ask anyone else any questions that you have about the series, as well as I am on the Sega Saturn Shiro Discord, the Sega Extreme Discord, and a few other places on Discord right now. I do also have a Twitch channel I don't remember my handle for it right now. I haven't been streaming for the last couple years. I will plan on getting back into that. And when I start doing that, I will ask some help to to be plugged that here and some other places. But for now, that's the best place to reach me at. And if you have any further questions about any games in the series, um there are also places like the Shining Force Discord itself, which has all three games or all all of the games in the series plus the Sega CD and Shining the Holy Ark and all those. so 02:09:55.42 Daniel There are many places to find me and others like me, and the interest is there. So if you if you find yourself having questions, please reach out to us and we will gladly answer any questions you have, including ones that we don't know the answer to ourselves, because then we can go into the game, play around with the code, and find out more information as well. 02:10:14.07 Jala Yeah, that's awesome. And that's exactly how I found you. I went into the shiny first translation project, and I was like, I does somebody want to talk about this game with me. 02:10:26.70 Jala So yes, and I'm so glad that I did that and that you were game to game. ah ah So 02:10:31.89 Daniel Absolutely. 100%. Anytime you want, I'm here to talk about this. 02:10:35.90 Jala Awesome. Awesome. 02:10:36.86 Jala So as for me, you can find me anywhere that I may be found at jalachan, including jalachan.place where you found this episode and all of the others. So until next time, take care of yourself and remember to smile. [Show Outro] Jala Jala-chan's Place is brought to you by Fireheart Media. If you enjoyed the show, please share this and all of our episodes with friends and remember to rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice. Word of mouth is the only way we grow. If you like, you can also kick us a few bucks to help us keep the lights on at ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia. Check out our other show Monster Dear Monster: A Monster Exploration Podcast at monsterdear.monster. Music composed and produced by Jake Lionhart with additional guitars and mixed by Spencer Smith. Follow along with my adventures via jalachan.place or find me at jalachan in places on the net! [Outro Music]