This is what happens when I let a gizmo occupy a space with 15% terrain effect. This early in the game, even one point of extra defense is the difference between a two-hit and a three-hit kill, which is the difference between a character living or dying. What you see in those screenshots is my baiting the gizmo into occupying a 0% terrain square, making it much easier to kill. A large part of making this game easier on yourself is being able to occupy the 30% tiles while forcing the enemies onto 0% tiles.
Terrain effect comes in three varieties: 0%, 15%, and 30%. Terrain effect is a stat assigned to each tile and represents a bonus to defense. The more interesting point comes with the Terrain Effect window in the last screen. Chester being a piece of shit is going to be a recurring theme in this game. Seriously, Chester is the worst knight in the game yes, Shining Force veterans, he is worse than Higgins and Jaro and I have the data to back it up and one of the candidates for the worst character in the game. The first is that Chester fucking sucks and left the enemy at one hit point.
SHINING FORCE 2 CHEATS EXPERIENCE POINTS SERIES
Two things to note in this series of screens. I will be abusing this pattern to no end because the heroes simply cannot stand up pound-for-pound against the enemies. Generally a leash will only be broken if 1) Bowie is in range to be hit, 2) a healer is in range to be hit, or 3) a character who would be killed in that hit is in range. In fact, the AI is very easy to manipulate in this game move the edge of an enemy's movement range, and they will move in to attack that character and leash to him until one of the other is dead. While the enemy outnumbers us, we have the advantages of healing and being able to manipulate the AI. It's going to take us two to three hits to kill each enemy, while it's about the same the other way around. Luckily, it brought actual gizmo buddies. The king is sick, the kids barge in on Sir Astral treating the king, and then Astral pulls this completely out of his ass:Īctually, that's a dark smoke which would thoroughly ruin the shit of both me and my grandchildren if it attacked right now. I'm going to have to use them wisely if I want to make it to the endgame. This is one of three we are going to get in the entire game. This item actually mimics the effects of Egress perfectly. Being rascally kids, we lie our way into the castle and begin looting. Oh yeah, we recruit Sarah and Chester, our healer and knight respectively. Sega's pretty shameless about these things.Īnd by let's start he means I'm going to get summoned to castle and leave you kids doing nothing until you arbitrarily decide to start following me. Apparently Sir Astral spends his morning hanging out in the basement. We have to go to school and let our teacher know that we're here or something. The removal of Egress alone make the game kind of hard, but it doesn't stop there. It enables power leveling and avoiding the penalty for getting Bowie killed.
In the original game, Bowie starts with a spell called Egress which allows the party to flee the fight with no penalty. Hey, notice anything missing? That's right, he has no magic. Our story starts with the protagonist waking up on an ordinary morning. As a result, all playing on Ouch does is make the enemies prioritize targets better, but in this romhack, that's good enough.īy the way, that screenshot I posted in the OP was on Super difficulty.
I speculate that this attack boost was supposed to be active in Ouch rather than Super. Super is actually the hardest difficulty because all enemies have 125% normal attack power, which means they hit really fucking hard by the end. It's supposed to be the hardest, but most likely somebody at Camelot fucked up. That's what happens when you pick the Ouch! difficulty. I'm naming myself the standard Bowie, because I have no imagination. There's some framing device about being stuck in a forest and having to do what the witch says, but it's ill-defined and not as cute as the other Shining Force games. Nobody actually cares about the intro screen. Part 1: Why the fuck did they stick the hardest fight first? Part 1: Why the fuck did they stick the hardest fight first?Īctually, I'm 100% aware that I'm here to get my nuts smashed.