Shining Force was an incredible series for its time. The number of characters you could field was amazing. The SF RNG routinely did a dance on my face, with my team's attacks missing and the enemy retaliation landing critical. That game could be brutal on occasion, but hey, no permadeath. SF #2's Kraken battle is one of my all-time favorite boss fight levels.

I'd love to play the later SF games, but the only way is to pirate, unfortunately, or shell out exorbitant amounts of money for old systems and games on eBay. I'm not game for either one.

Ogre Battle, forgot that one. It's a little different, in that it has two different scales and a sometimes frustrating economy as well as a bizarre reputation-manipulation metagame that forces you to make the game hard on yourself for your own good, or something. Still pretty fun.

Shining Force 2 is the only one I've played. Thought that was great, but its huge flaw for me was the XP scheme. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and you have to scavenger hunt for items to level up properly. Also, the gimmick for milking bonus levels before promoting was sort of cheesy and made natural prestige recruits fall flat needlessly, and it forced an awkwardly extended mid-game on you. If you knew how leveling worked, it was just totally wrong not to bite the bullet and slog through to that cap before promoting. The freedom to promote early was a fake freedom or at best an option for self-imposed speed run challenges or something.

FFT had a nicely balanced permadeath mechanic. I basically restarted whenever I lost anyone other than maybe a monster character, sure, but you had three turns to close the match out, and it actually added a lot of tension. It wasn't just an instant reset if you made one minor derp or took an unlucky crit at the wrong time. I could've done without permadeath, honestly, but this one I kind of had to respect and sometimes even appreciate.

@budgielover
If you often miss and often receive criticals you probably selected a high difficulty, because this is the main thing that difficulty affects. Play on easy or normal if it bothers you.

@mothwentbad
How do the "rich get richer" in SF2? The higher your level, the less XP you get. So it's much easier to level up lower level characters.

On a sidenote, there is a pretty good mod called Battle Royale for SF2 making it basically a completely new game. It fixes a lot of balance issues too.

If you aren't getting killing blows in and you aren't a spell caster, you can hardly level up at all. That's what I meant. Note how Peter always wants to be 5 levels higher than everyone else.

SF2 mod sounds nice. There's also a good mod for FFT, but it was too hard for me, at least at the time. I was doing ok until the minotaurs showed up, funny enough.

For some reasons gog censor my reviews so I'll post here instead.

It's a game wasted by some awful design details, it's a boredom (rate 1/5) for me because of basic points:
- Lack of save during the long combats kill the game, I played many games without save during long combats and it was ok. In this one this detail destroy the game because you can't predict the scripted events nor can predict the consequences of new rules spawning during a combat.
- You could have many characters during combats it's still not an army and has one killed is permanent or even for many of them it's combat lost. This makes even worse the combats lack of save but anyway it's not at all a Roguelike, there's almost no random, there's plenty scripts, and this game is just incompatible with permadeath even if it had a save during combats.

It's quite a wasted opportunity because the combats are clearly interesting but bizarrely the author choose ignore the numerous feedback about few awful rules and ended waste himself his game, too bad.