I feel like there's a ton of Diablo-adjacent jrpgs out there that deserve to get dug up and reexamined. I had no idea this game existed and I loooooove these kind of games!
Definitely. Even fairly major ones back in the day like Dungeon Siege are barely even discussed anymore. Let alone the stuff that wasn't immediately visible on release. A good number of them are still pretty good, but you'll rarely hear about them so they can be hard to dig up.
I am late to the party but I feel so happy any time I see somebody giving this game an actual shot. Its my favorite game in this particular subgenre of ARPG and I love seeing people set aside the fact that its not an SRPG to find the solid game underneath it all.
This game's chara design is amazing The translation looks surprisingly faithful for the time it was made too, at least judging from the few cutscenes you put in the video
Yeah, I had to look up the artist for this game, and it turned out to be Pako. If you're not familiar, he's worth looking into. Lots of very good F/GO art and designs. Also designed Sana from Hololive recently. And the translation is surprisingly very good, I'd agree. There were a few text boxes here and there that weren't completely on point, but that's across a 40 hour game with a lot of voice acting in it for comparison. They'd also changed a few lore names, probably to keep them sounding as exotic and strange as they did in Japanese to western audiences. But overall, very solid translation work for the time.
Fascinated by console Diablo-likes. I played Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II and it was interesting seeing a normally mouse-based control scheme fit nicely on controller.
I remember the old marketing for Diablo 3 trying to really zone in on the idea that this sort of gameplay on a console wasn't a sure thing if it could work. Never done right before, will it actually function? And I always thought that was strange since the couch co-op journeys through Dark Alliance 1 and 2 were some of the most fun I've had with the genre up to that point.
I pretty much completely missed out on the PS2 in it’s time. I grew up with a GameCube mostly playing Nintendo’s own games on there. I love finding out about stuff like this that looks like something I would have loved as a kid. Awesome video 👏👏
I picked up this and Neo earlier this year. Haven't spent any time with them yet, but loved your review! Game looks nuts and this has bumped it up on my backlog list. Thank you!
Excellent insight as always. Thanks for bringing attention to Shining, yet another long running series that ticks a hell of a lot of different boxes that I somehow haven't heard of before now.
Great video I remember playing shining force neo a few years back but never finished since I had a bad character build, definitely regret not playing EXA instead.
I completely missed this game back in the day. 100 hours of Neo left a sour taste in my mouth so I never really gave it a chance. May have to pick it up if I see it in the wild!
@@Aboveup Only in the first one, but yeah. One of their villains also shows up and they discuss things that are probably spoilers for the original game? I'm guessing it's the stuff you intentionally avoided discussing in your video, but I haven't played EXA so I wouldn't know. I went in mostly blind to both Project X Zones and have no idea how many games they've spoiled for me. It's an odd feeling.
I loved this game. Picked it up because of the cool anime cover and rest is history. I love that you can access areas outside of your level with a warning posts for game breaking rewards. I think this is what set my love for game breaking mechanica like Disgaea's
After watching some walkthroughs of this game plus your review, i will finally buy it, it looks like a really good game. And i love diablo-like style games. Shining Force EXA has an original style of combat system (diablo-like) for an RPG, you can also defend your base by switching characters, the dubs are very good, the portraits are gorgeous, the music is very good, the graphics are good for their time, the story looks good too ! Damn, that's an hidden gem for me ! I will definitely play it on my PS2 !
I remember really liking this game but getting softlocked early on because one of the first invasions was impossibly difficult. I guess I somehow messed with the game's balance since I managed to cheese the trial at 11:41 and got a lot of exp and equipment I probably wasn't supposed to get, so the game thought I was strong enough for a more difficult invasion. I eventually gave up on that save, but will give it another go someday.
There's something clicked to my head that i remembered this game and by watching this video Cyrille was my forgotten wifu 🤣 played this game when i was a kid btw...
I never finished this game because I made the mistake of not grinding Cyrille's stats and when I went late game and a late game raid happened while I was using Toma Let's just say I was stuck in a perpetual limbo never able to continue because I only use one save file :)
I had the same problem my first attempt. My mistake was using all my mythril to level Toma. I ended up restarting it and separating their equipment before breaking it down. Anything meant to be used by Cyrille, I broke down and used it to level her up and broke down Toma's equipment to level him up. It kept the characters more evenly balanced.
@@cmudd9788 that's why EXA has a special place in my heart because unlike other jrpgs, you can't one trick pony your way through the game because it forces you to adapt and manage your characters
Yoooooooo! I actually played this game earlier on in the year, really good for a PS2 JRPG actually. Cyrille quickly became one of my favourite females in gaming
It was during one of those spikes in difficulty that I had to double check the HLTB average because something about that felt off, and found out the average was between two entries. One at 60 hours, the other at 20 hours from a privated account. Either that lower end timer was lying, or misrepresenting a highly optimized, cutscene skipping replay as a normal playthrough. I didn't mind too much on the game's end, they give you enough ways to power up, but always frustrating when HLTB timers end up being weirdly unrealistic for a first-time playthrough.
Fun thing about Shinging Force Exa is that it's actually a weird twice removed cousin of a sequel to Record of Lodoss War for Dreamcast. Same devs, basically the same gameplay except centered around melee completely. It's a very fun game and probably one of the best RPG's on the Dreamcast nobody talks about. Shining force Neo is like the missing link between the Record of Lodoss War and Shining Force Exa where it's still centered around melee but also has magic... except that magic in that game is heavily unbalanced in a deceptive way and my recommendation is to never go full mage and instead branch out into melee or archery. Spells are powerful but late game enemies and bosses are near immune to elements, meanwhile melee gets loads of passive modifiers based on enemy characteristics which stack for absurd amounts of damage. In general I'd recommend just playing Exa over Neo since most assets from Neo were reused in Exa and it's just a better, more polished game. Record of Lodoss War is still worth a whirl since in my opinion it's got a a bit of a different flavor compared to it's shining cousins
I suggest you to go back to the GBA and try Shining Soul 2! It's leaps and bounds compared to the first one, and is a mix between diablo and LoZ (for the fighting stile and angle)
Fun fact every Shining game between Shining Force EXA and Shining Resonace excluding the fighting games were all some form of turn based but some JRPG fans are like people who believe in white replacement thoery when it comes to action RPGs.
I always loved the endings of this game just boiling down to "How convenient! The leaders of the warring countries are of opposite genders and find each other attractive! Just have them marry each other!"
one nostalgic and best anime game for me, at that time weeb are less in my country , so I cant discuss my hobby to my other friend(playing shining force exa) they only know that just a cartoon games
I only use music from the soundtracks for most videos. If it's the intro theme of the game, the US version removed that to play one of the regular BGMs in that version.
Almost every "similar" channel to mine I come across does near exclusive SMT content. There's no point in just doing what everyone already is doing when trying to make something new. I do love Devil Survivor a lot.
To be fair, a lot (if not, most-) of the game elements in EXA was ripped straight from Shining Force Neo (including several full maps and music tracks). I did enjoy my time playing EXA and even made the biggest mistake by using an underdeveloped Cyrille for the final boss, but my experience did tank a little knowing how many of Neo's elements were copy&pasted into EXA (with a few of Neo's music tracks remixed). If you want to check out Neo, it'll play almost exactly the same, just without the dual-protagonists gameplay, charged combo attacks (in Neo, some weapons will need a Secret Art to unlock an extra attack), and defense segments, but with a longer story/experience, full 2D-animated cutscenes, and (tbh) a bigger world. Now if there is one thing I advise you'd watch out for, it'll have to be the typically-mixed-between-good-or-bad 2000s English VAs, and this game, sadly, is more on the bad spectrum... "Hot stuff coming your way!"... Eugh.
I've played this game for 10 hours now and decided to abandon it. The presentation is great, the setting is interesting, the gear progression isn't really to my taste but it's fairly decent, and the combat is pretty alright in my book. But oh my god am I sick of playing as the girl and the freaking defense battles. Her magic is godawful and fiddly and the defense battles are the definition of tedious busiwork. No way in hell am I sinking another 40 hours of my life into the completion of this game, I'd rather spend that time at work. Yes, I enjoy actual work more than half of the game. That is...not good game design.
I love Shining series, it's a shame that after shining force 3 it have only a few good games. Maybe is because Sega change every 2 games or so of developer, so it not have a continuity
I'm probably 1 of the few people who loved seeing these 2 in Project X Zone along with Riemsianne, due to how many hours I put into this game's addicting grind growing up. While feeling like an Anime parody. I still remember finding Avalon's bones and just enjoying the supporting characters' company. I regret trading it as a kid for the next new game at Gamestop, but you never anticipate yourself growing up to be a nostalgia collector. 1st found out about it, when G4TV used to review or show cinematic PVs. Ahh!! nostalgia! th-cam.com/video/Ti3UmGNd3es/w-d-xo.html
![Top 30 Best RPG Games for PS2 [Recommendation]](/img/n.gif)
I feel like there's a ton of Diablo-adjacent jrpgs out there that deserve to get dug up and reexamined. I had no idea this game existed and I loooooove these kind of games!
Definitely. Even fairly major ones back in the day like Dungeon Siege are barely even discussed anymore. Let alone the stuff that wasn't immediately visible on release. A good number of them are still pretty good, but you'll rarely hear about them so they can be hard to dig up.
@@Aboveup So glad you came back!!!! Love the review!!!!!
@@Aboveup can you make a list ? I’m looking for some
I am late to the party but I feel so happy any time I see somebody giving this game an actual shot. Its my favorite game in this particular subgenre of ARPG and I love seeing people set aside the fact that its not an SRPG to find the solid game underneath it all.
This game's chara design is amazing
The translation looks surprisingly faithful for the time it was made too, at least judging from the few cutscenes you put in the video
Yeah, I had to look up the artist for this game, and it turned out to be Pako. If you're not familiar, he's worth looking into. Lots of very good F/GO art and designs. Also designed Sana from Hololive recently.
And the translation is surprisingly very good, I'd agree. There were a few text boxes here and there that weren't completely on point, but that's across a 40 hour game with a lot of voice acting in it for comparison. They'd also changed a few lore names, probably to keep them sounding as exotic and strange as they did in Japanese to western audiences. But overall, very solid translation work for the time.
Fascinated by console Diablo-likes.
I played Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II and it was interesting seeing a normally mouse-based control scheme fit nicely on controller.
I remember the old marketing for Diablo 3 trying to really zone in on the idea that this sort of gameplay on a console wasn't a sure thing if it could work. Never done right before, will it actually function? And I always thought that was strange since the couch co-op journeys through Dark Alliance 1 and 2 were some of the most fun I've had with the genre up to that point.
Now that I have seen your review. I cannot believe that I passed on this game on the ps2 era. Looks super fun
The start is slow and boring, but it gets better the more you play it
I pretty much completely missed out on the PS2 in it’s time. I grew up with a GameCube mostly playing Nintendo’s own games on there. I love finding out about stuff like this that looks like something I would have loved as a kid. Awesome video 👏👏
I had the ps2 Xbox, Gameboy but I missed out on the wii and GameCube but I got the Ds and 360
I picked up this and Neo earlier this year. Haven't spent any time with them yet, but loved your review! Game looks nuts and this has bumped it up on my backlog list. Thank you!
Excellent insight as always. Thanks for bringing attention to Shining, yet another long running series that ticks a hell of a lot of different boxes that I somehow haven't heard of before now.
Awesome video and good analysis man! thank you!!
Watching a review of this unique game in 2021 surely is a rarity.
Great video I remember playing shining force neo a few years back but never finished since I had a bad character build, definitely regret not playing EXA instead.
this was my FAVORITE! I suddenly remembered playing a PS2 game rpg, and had to look up the title.
Love this game.. Exa and Neo.. still playing it again and again..🥰❤️
One of the few positive reviews about Exa well done.
I completely missed this game back in the day. 100 hours of Neo left a sour taste in my mouth so I never really gave it a chance. May have to pick it up if I see it in the wild!
Didn't expect to hear "Reinhard von Lohengramm". I cannot wait to play this.
Oh hey it's those kids from Project X Zone!
Nice to hear that their game is good.
They got put in Project X Zone? Good on them.
@@Aboveup Only in the first one, but yeah. One of their villains also shows up and they discuss things that are probably spoilers for the original game? I'm guessing it's the stuff you intentionally avoided discussing in your video, but I haven't played EXA so I wouldn't know.
I went in mostly blind to both Project X Zones and have no idea how many games they've spoiled for me. It's an odd feeling.
I loved this game. Picked it up because of the cool anime cover and rest is history.
I love that you can access areas outside of your level with a warning posts for game breaking rewards.
I think this is what set my love for game breaking mechanica like Disgaea's
After watching some walkthroughs of this game plus your review, i will finally buy it, it looks like a really good game. And i love diablo-like style games.
Shining Force EXA has an original style of combat system (diablo-like) for an RPG, you can also defend your base by switching characters, the dubs are very good, the portraits are gorgeous, the music is very good, the graphics are good for their time, the story looks good too !
Damn, that's an hidden gem for me ! I will definitely play it on my PS2 !
I loved this game. Great video!
I remember really liking this game but getting softlocked early on because one of the first invasions was impossibly difficult. I guess I somehow messed with the game's balance since I managed to cheese the trial at 11:41 and got a lot of exp and equipment I probably wasn't supposed to get, so the game thought I was strong enough for a more difficult invasion. I eventually gave up on that save, but will give it another go someday.
Sold a sealed copy of this forever ago. Kinda kicking myself over it now
I love myself some Inoue Kazuhiko!
Whatever it's his voice as Jerid Messa, Reiji from Namco X Capcom
...or just a random BLCD.
There's something clicked to my head that i remembered this game and by watching this video Cyrille was my forgotten wifu 🤣
played this game when i was a kid btw...
I had a blast playing this game
I never finished this game because I made the mistake of not grinding Cyrille's stats and when I went late game and a late game raid happened while I was using Toma
Let's just say I was stuck in a perpetual limbo never able to continue because I only use one save file :)
I had the same problem my first attempt. My mistake was using all my mythril to level Toma. I ended up restarting it and separating their equipment before breaking it down. Anything meant to be used by Cyrille, I broke down and used it to level her up and broke down Toma's equipment to level him up. It kept the characters more evenly balanced.
@@cmudd9788 that's why EXA has a special place in my heart because unlike other jrpgs, you can't one trick pony your way through the game because it forces you to adapt and manage your characters
Cyrille is way more bonkers in the late game long before Toma could match her.
The books man. I tell you theyre broken
Yoooooooo! I actually played this game earlier on in the year, really good for a PS2 JRPG actually. Cyrille quickly became one of my favourite females in gaming
It was during one of those spikes in difficulty that I had to double check the HLTB average because something about that felt off, and found out the average was between two entries. One at 60 hours, the other at 20 hours from a privated account. Either that lower end timer was lying, or misrepresenting a highly optimized, cutscene skipping replay as a normal playthrough. I didn't mind too much on the game's end, they give you enough ways to power up, but always frustrating when HLTB timers end up being weirdly unrealistic for a first-time playthrough.
Fun thing about Shinging Force Exa is that it's actually a weird twice removed cousin of a sequel to Record of Lodoss War for Dreamcast.
Same devs, basically the same gameplay except centered around melee completely. It's a very fun game and probably one of the best RPG's on the Dreamcast nobody talks about.
Shining force Neo is like the missing link between the Record of Lodoss War and Shining Force Exa where it's still centered around melee but also has magic... except that magic in that game is heavily unbalanced in a deceptive way and my recommendation is to never go full mage and instead branch out into melee or archery. Spells are powerful but late game enemies and bosses are near immune to elements, meanwhile melee gets loads of passive modifiers based on enemy characteristics which stack for absurd amounts of damage.
In general I'd recommend just playing Exa over Neo since most assets from Neo were reused in Exa and it's just a better, more polished game. Record of Lodoss War is still worth a whirl since in my opinion it's got a a bit of a different flavor compared to it's shining cousins
I suggest you to go back to the GBA and try Shining Soul 2! It's leaps and bounds compared to the first one, and is a mix between diablo and LoZ (for the fighting stile and angle)
Yes want to agree and echo this. Shining soul 2 is great
"Flower won"
You say, as a pizza graph on screen shows Fire on the majority
Fun fact every Shining game between Shining Force EXA and Shining Resonace excluding the fighting games were all some form of turn based but some JRPG fans are like people who believe in white replacement thoery when it comes to action RPGs.
3:21 Ryo Horikawa 😳
I always loved the endings of this game just boiling down to "How convenient! The leaders of the warring countries are of opposite genders and find each other attractive! Just have them marry each other!"
one nostalgic and best anime game for me, at that time weeb are less in my country , so I cant discuss my hobby to my other friend(playing shining force exa) they only know that just a cartoon games
Is the song that play on the credits video from the game?
Remember playing this and Neo back then and was having a blast. Rather play this than Diablo Immortal any day.
What is the music that play right at the beginning of the video?
I only use music from the soundtracks for most videos. If it's the intro theme of the game, the US version removed that to play one of the regular BGMs in that version.
do you plan on reviewing any of the shin megami tensei games or are they not your cup of tea
Almost every "similar" channel to mine I come across does near exclusive SMT content. There's no point in just doing what everyone already is doing when trying to make something new. I do love Devil Survivor a lot.
This game needs more people talking about it. It was one of my most loved games.
The pie chart makes it look like fire won. A little confusing!
To be fair, a lot (if not, most-) of the game elements in EXA was ripped straight from Shining Force Neo (including several full maps and music tracks).
I did enjoy my time playing EXA and even made the biggest mistake by using an underdeveloped Cyrille for the final boss, but my experience did tank a little knowing how many of Neo's elements were copy&pasted into EXA (with a few of Neo's music tracks remixed).
If you want to check out Neo, it'll play almost exactly the same, just without the dual-protagonists gameplay, charged combo attacks (in Neo, some weapons will need a Secret Art to unlock an extra attack), and defense segments, but with a longer story/experience, full 2D-animated cutscenes, and (tbh) a bigger world.
Now if there is one thing I advise you'd watch out for, it'll have to be the typically-mixed-between-good-or-bad 2000s English VAs, and this game, sadly, is more on the bad spectrum... "Hot stuff coming your way!"... Eugh.
It's a mixed bag. The woman who does Maebelle and the guy who does Gadfort are both really, really, really good.
#justacommentofappreciation
This game is amazing, the start is slow and boring but its gets better and better
The best ones are the ones made by Camelot/Sonic/Climax.
I've played this game for 10 hours now and decided to abandon it. The presentation is great, the setting is interesting, the gear progression isn't really to my taste but it's fairly decent, and the combat is pretty alright in my book. But oh my god am I sick of playing as the girl and the freaking defense battles. Her magic is godawful and fiddly and the defense battles are the definition of tedious busiwork. No way in hell am I sinking another 40 hours of my life into the completion of this game, I'd rather spend that time at work. Yes, I enjoy actual work more than half of the game. That is...not good game design.
I love Shining series, it's a shame that after shining force 3 it have only a few good games.
Maybe is because Sega change every 2 games or so of developer, so it not have a continuity
This game’s premise and artstyle look right up my alley, but the combat looks super boring :/
I hate Diablo. Gameplay
I passed on this game they should have stuck the original format imo
I'm probably 1 of the few people who loved seeing these 2 in Project X Zone along with Riemsianne, due to how many hours I put into this game's addicting grind growing up. While feeling like an Anime parody. I still remember finding Avalon's bones and just enjoying the supporting characters' company. I regret trading it as a kid for the next new game at Gamestop, but you never anticipate yourself growing up to be a nostalgia collector. 1st found out about it, when G4TV used to review or show cinematic PVs. Ahh!! nostalgia! th-cam.com/video/Ti3UmGNd3es/w-d-xo.html