A Late Spring Update and Tactics of Olde

A Late Spring Update

Note: In the Advent newsletter & some social media, I incorrectly declared that Shining Force came out in 1993. It was actually 1992! I have corrected it in the blog. Oops!

Well met, travelers! Doug here. It's been a few months (somehow) since the last blog, and I wanted to pass along a short update on Advent of the Reaper. As you may have seen from our previous post, MAGfest back in January was a huge success for us, and we are still riding that high! We don't have major updates to share right now, but things are continuing apace behind the scenes. We have a number of items that have been updated in line with the feedback from MAGfest, including…

Making it clearer to the player which menu option they are selecting
Making it clearer to the player when Reaper and Angel Units can Ascend, and the the special button action to trigger it
Decreasing wait time during the Enemy Turn

Additionally, we’ve been reworking the combat display system behind the scenes. The original implementation did not have a great way to switch a single Unit’s animations for different attacks, nor did we have ranged attacks/projectiles displaying as intended. A rework of the system to account for these scenarios is going to make things less of a pain for the programmers moving forward when dealing with different combat situations. Naturally, minor bug fixes have been addressed along the way. Our artists have also been hard at work, creating new character designs, in-game animations and portraits, and more visual treats to look forward to! We’ll be sharing some new visual assets in future updates!

And now for something completely different…

Revisiting Tactics of Olde: Shining Force (1992)

As something new for this post, I thought it would be fun to share some thoughts I had while playing through one of the earliest entries in the tactics/strategy RPG genre. Earlier in May, I played through Shining Force for Sega Genesis from 1992! This isn’t meant to be an in-depth review or analysis, but I wanted to highlight some things I liked (and didn’t like) from the game from both the perspective of a player and a game designer. A big thanks to Fantasy Anime and their awesome archive of JRPG info and media for letting us use some of their screenshots from the game!

The last time I played Shining Force was in the late 90’s (maybe the early 2000’s) - I was a preteen or younger. I remember it being quite challenging and not making it past the first few levels. I probably lacked both the attention and the commitment to go farther with it at the time. Of course, not the case with my most recent attempt! This time around, I played the game on the Switch via the Sega Genesis Classics collection. Also, here’s your spoiler warning for a 30+ year old game!

The Good (aka: Most of It)

Generally speaking, I’m always impressed going back and playing retro games. Knowing how much harder game development was with the technical limitations of the time, it’s truly amazing to see how far we’ve come. Shining Force was no exception - for releasing in 1992, it’s incredible how much they fit into this game and what a great experience it was.

Overall Game System - Combat felt good, and for the most part (looking at you, Cain) the difficulty scaled appropriately battle-to-battle. For a Tactics/Strategy RPG from the early 90’s, this was a very tightly designed experience and I’m looking forward to playing the sequels. The length was perfect (I didn’t do any dedicated Egress grinding - I didn’t actually learn what the Egress spell did until after I finished the game, see below), and had a few levels that needed multiple attempts.

Character Variety - I was actually really surprised at just how many characters your final roster ends up being, especially considering that I apparently missed opportunities to recruit several characters. I didn’t love receiving characters so late in the game that I was unwilling to go on a grindfest to make them matter, but I still appreciated how many options the Player is given. My party in the final chapter was largely made of early-game recruits - The Player Character, Max (who I named “Tunks” for some reason), Lowe, Mae, Ken, Luke, Hans, Tao, Gort, Anri, Guntz, Khris, and Hanzou.

Character Classes - I was similarly impressed that a game this early had a class progression system and that (nearly) every Unit could be promoted, with updated graphics to match. Of course, this was a mute point for characters you receive late if you weren’t going to go through the grindfest to get them up to snuff.

Battle Maps Transitioning to Overworld Maps - I thought this was a cool feature. We’ve played with the idea of having some time of overworld in Advent, but that’s just too far out of scope for the current vision.

Solid but Straightforward Story - While nothing groundbreaking here by 2025 terms, I enjoyed the story and its little twists (even if many of them were predictable) and various tropes. I couldn’t help but notice the parallel for the final chapter to Fire Emblem 7’s - beat the big baddie who is trying to summon a dragon through a gate, dragon gets summoned anyway, dragon is now the true final boss. I wonder if there was any direct inspiration there!

Cheekiest Ending Shot Ever - I actually burst out laughing on the final shot of the game for how cheeky is was. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. But it was SO cheeky. I won’t even spoil it. If you know, you know.

The Less Good (Modern Issues for Retro Games)

Character and Menu Selection - by far, my biggest frustration with the game was the UI. While things were fine for the core combat loop - select character, move, select action, select target (a virtually identical process for Advent’s Player Unit turns), the lack of a “Main Menu” interface in the traditional sense was not pleasant. For example, in order to equip a character with an item, you needed to go through the following process:

Select your character
Select “Item” from the tiny pop-up menu
Select “Equip” from the tiny pop-up menu
Select the Character to Equip
Select an Equipment
Select an Accessory
The menu system closes entirely upon resolution

Now this may seem like a natural flow, and you’d be correct - but the lack of a central Menu UI to return to after taking Menu Actions - instead returning directly to the “overworld” UI - meant a lot of unnecessary clicking, especially if you needed to trade equipment between characters, compare the resulting stats, and decide to revert your changes. Similarly, looking at a unit’s status could only be done from Headquarters - a specific building in each town - or by exiting the character selection during combat. Without the ability to snap to a unit on the combat maps, this was a lot of extra navigation with the cursor that would not fly today! I say all of this with the awareness and caveat that modern quality of life features simply hadn’t been established yet. I may be complaining in 2025, but I recognize that if I was playing this in the 90’s, this would probably just feel like that natural way to do things.

Game Object Details - Now this is kind of a funny one, ironically made worse by playing the game in a modern setting. There is no way in-game (that I could tell) to get information about items, weapons, magic, etc actually do other than by directly using, equipping, or casting them. I found a Secret Item that I had no idea what to do with - the internet informed me I had found one of two secret outfits that needed to be equipped by a specific character, but there is no way to know that in-game. As it clearly wasn’t required to know what this item did, I completed the game without knowing what some items or magic skills ever actually did.

Now what makes these observations funny? You know what games in 1992 came with? Manuals. Chunky ones. As far as I could tell, the Sega Genesis Collection I was playing the game through did not provide a way to view the original game manual(s) in digital form. I actually downloaded a PDF of the original Shining Force manual (conveniently available from Sega.com directly), and guess what it contained? Explanations what (almost) every item, magic, class abbreviation, and more did or meant. All of that context is just a google search away, but it was still an interesting observation in 2025 how much I would have preferred just picking up a booklet with most of the answers I sought sitting next to me. It really makes you appreciate the inclusion of a seamless tutorial (or tutorial-like instructions).

Some Slightly Technical Observations

Animation Restrictions - While certainly a product of technical limitations, it was interesting to see how Shining Force decided to present combat. Enemies always facing the player in the background, Playable Characters always in the foreground facing away from the Player. Keeping the character animations to a tight 2-3 frames of animation each, and always having the Units physically separated so there was no need to worry about animations “lining up” to the opposing units (this is something I’ve struggled with for animation combat for Advent, where every attack should reasonably look like it's landing a hit on the opposing unit in the side view). They did a great job with a wealth of environments for combat to occur in.

Centaurs! - It is, of course, common in games grounded in medieval fantasy like Fire Emblem for mounted units, such as cavaliers on horseback or pegasus knights, to have increased movement ranges from non-mounted units. I thought it was a very cool choice for Shining Force to use centaurs (and the anthropomorphized bird race) in lieu of traditional mounted units, serving the same purpose with some extra fantasy flair.

Wrapping Up

As a final note, we're thrilled to be back at the Enoch Pratt Indie Game Fest 2025 next Saturday in Baltimore, Maryland! If you're local to the area, come say hi and check out indie games from a variety of local teams and studios! It runs from 11 AM - 4 PM on Saturday, June 7th. You can find more information here!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget that you can wishlist Advent of the Reaper on Steam! We already have hundreds of wishlist additions, and that makes us so happy to see. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to support us in this way!

A Late Spring Update and Tactics of Olde