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"A Shining game with a few flaws"

The Shining Series is perhaps the most unknown and underrated series in the past decade. It has spanned several games on half a dozen systems. The Sega Game Gear was fortunate enough to be blessed with a few of the Shining Games. Shining Force II: Sword of Hajya was the only one to be released in English, as far as I know.

The game itself is similar to most of the other mid 1990s Shining games in its format. Sword of Hajya consists of twenty four battles fought in a turn based strategy format. The characters range from physical fighters, to pure spell casters, to combinations of each and healers. Each spell caster in the Shining Force seems to be specialized in one elemental spell, though most of them learn at least two elements of spells. A battle is won when the all of the enemies, or their leader if applicable, are defeated.

There are 18 characters whom can join the Shining Force throughout the game, though only twelve can be in the party at any time. Deanna is the leader of the Shining Force, which means he is always in it. It seems a bit odd how a character found at the beginning of the game, whom no one else knows, emerges as the leader of the team, but, whatever. If Deanna is defeated, so is everyone else. My largest complaint with the characters in Sword of Hajya, unlike many other Shining games, is the similarity with the physical attackers. There are only a few differences; how much damage they can do and how much damage they can take. While on the outside, it seems as though this is true of all physical attackers in all games, it is especially true in this one with a fairly limited array of weapons.

Sword of Hajya, like many of the early Shining games uses a chapter system, as the game is a "story" being told by a young girl. This can be annoying at times. The main reason it is annoying is because it leaves no over world which a player may explore. There is also no going back for something you missed, though most items which can be missed will appear in the deals menu of shopkeepers. Because of this, gameplay is limited to shopping and battles.

Sword of Hajya has several unbalanced components to it, along with a major glitch. Casters do not have a great deal of MP compared to the cost of the spells they cast. This is very apparent in the later battles, when some enemies can withstand multiple castings of the most powerful spells. Healing characters get it even worse, as the boosting spells cost an insane amount of MP and last but a short time.

Characters level up fairly rapidly and most of them are able to be promoted into another class. Promotions can be done at level ten, but can be done as late as level twenty. In most Shining games, one can power level her or his characters by doing a late promotion, however, the stats gained per level after ten in this game are quite minimal. The same is true of the promoted class, as stats have a huge drop off and stop entirely by level 20.

Imbalances come in the methods of leveling up. Physical attackers get experience from hurting and defeating enemies. However, as their level becomes higher than that of the enemy, the experience becomes lower and lower, until it is but a point. Healers on the other hand can get 10 experience every turn for casting heal, 25 experiences for Aura and Boost, and a great deal from Quick. This can put them several levels ahead of your party if all you do is cast them and then retreat.

These problems themselves exist in most of the series though; Sword of Hajya has one huge problem to it, Freeze 3. This spell has the largest range and area of effect in the game, tied with several others. Unlike the other spells, it does an insane amount of damage, more than any member of your teams' HP when you first encounter it, most likely. The spell is not supposed to do this much, but it does the damage of Freeze 4, thanks to an error... oops. It's fortunate not many enemies can cast this spell and those who can a very limited amount of times. However, it is quite potent and will alter any gamer's strategy. Personally, I kind of like the fact the spell does way too much damage, as I am often needing to find an unorthodox way of winning, but the first time I played. Ugh, forget about it!

The AI is not so hot either. Enemies will often attack a character with high defense, to whom they will do one damage to, when there is a nearby weak character with limited life and defense. Likewise, they will sometimes cast weak spells when their attacks would do far more damage. They will go after Deanna, the leader, but in the late game he has so much HP and Defense it is a wasted effort.

Sword of Hajya has a very limited amount of special weapons and secondary equipment, which is another large grip of mine, considering how many of the characters use the same types of weapons, such as swords. There is also only one shop per chapter, which means using the same weapon for a very long amount of time.

Sword of Hajya has a very nice stand alone story, but does not link up too well with any of the other Shining games. For a Game Gear game, it has a fairly decent amount of text, though most of it is just chatter as a battle is starting or ending; thus a bit repetitive.

The graphics are great when you consider the system and timeframe of the game. All of the characters and important enemies have portraits as well as sprites. My complaint here is that some enemies look identical to others, with the exception of a different color skin or clothing.

The musical score is excellent as well, though there are not a great deal many songs. Also, some of the later songs get way up in pitch and being to sound similar to shrieks. The sound effects are not too bad either. Most actions have their own sound effect.

Scores: For those who prefer numeric data.

Music: 8/10
Sound: 6/10
Graphics: 9/10
Control: 7/10
Gameplay: 6/10 - This low score is due to the game literally being 24 straight battles separated by a short visit in a "town".
Story: 8/10
Replay Value: 8/10
Overall Score: 8/10

Buy? Rent? - The game is quite rare and costs a lot of money in most cases. I doubt you could still rent it anywhere. Hell, did anywhere ever let you rent Game Gear games?


Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/07/05

"Quite possibly the best GG game of all time."

During my preteen obsession with the Sega strategy/rpg masterpiece known as Shining Force (spearheaded by my childhood obsession with the Game Gear work known as Crystal Warriors) I noticed that a certain friend of mine possessed a non-working Game Gear. Around the room in
which it was found I also happened upon an instruction manual for Shining Force: The sword of Hajya. The resulting exchange went like this:

''Was this game any good?''

''Yeah, as far as I can recall.''

''Cool, I'll have to play it when I find a working Game Gear again.''

So day turns to night and back to day again, I find myself turned into a teenager with a working Game Gear emulator, and I saunter off to find Sword of Hajya online, thinking to find nothing much more than an okay port of a stellar game.

I never expected to find myself loving it more than the Genesis version.

Of course, the increased affection had nothing much to do with the GRAPHICS, despite the fact that they not only look nice on a Game Gear, but tend to be proportioned right enough to go easy on the player's eyeballs. Your walkabout characters lacked almost any distinguishing details whatsoever, but the battlefield backgrounds could impress( when they lacked in detail they made up for it in originality, and believe me, one gets far more happy feng shui by experiencing a completely new place and setting for every battle rather than fighting on the same old tileset for 5 or 6 battles, no matter how well drawn. ) And once your players and the enemies' met, the graphical battle representation tended to be nearly as good as in Shining Force 2, sans a few hundred colors. Although achieving this effect wasn't all THAT hard, since most of the battle animation on the Genesis versions were only a couple of frames anyway, it still spoke to how well the game captured the feel of the originals. It continued to do so with a terrific

STORY, from the long and involved opening sequence through all of the between-battle dialogue. Not only did the main story hold up rather coherently, there was a constant effort to maintain interest in the moment, what with the constant chase of the evil people. Even better, there's a great deal of almost Toriyama-ish mocking dialogue between the villains and heroes that was quite rare for games of that time. But heck, the entire game is one big chase anyway, the tone of which is expressed superlatively in the grand notes of the

MUSIC. Egad, oy Vey, or whatever other non-vulgar exclamation I feel like using today. This is the point where it actually got BETTER than the Genesis version, and that's a pretty tall order, considering how cool Shining Force 2's themes were! But lo and behold, so much lavish love and attention and care were poured out on the small 'n strong score that it still impresses somebody who's heard among the best of Oematsu and Mitsuda. At this point, I consider it the best Game Gear music of all time, and until some other crazed fanboy can come up with a game that convinces me otherwise, I have yet to change my view. Practically all of the pieces in the game strike the precise balance between being

a: Inspiring, but so short that the constant repetition soon drives it down to ''insipid,''

b: Long, but showing no musical creativity after going halfway through the tune, and thus falling to the status of ''forgettable.''

In other words, this music rocks and keeps on rockin' through the fast-paced

GAMEPLAY: Second great surprise: They took out all of the unnecessary and nonintuitive between-battle item hunting that plagued both Genesis versions of SF( Who here remembers the Mythril hunting and constant resets to get the best items?) by eliminating the notion of between-battle town and cave searching altogether, and ramped the absolutely INSANE later-game difficulty level down a notch or two so that one could actually use ALL of their units effectively in battle, rather than just powering up the hero and his healer. You CAN keep using Egress to power up your guys, but you don't HAVE to, which makes all the difference. Oh, and NO JOGURT OR KIWI! The helmeted clods from the previous SFs are replaced with a secret ninja AND a samurai, which is about as cool as if Jar-Jar Binks and Boss Nass were replaced by Mace Windu and Boba Fett as the people who got 75% of the screen time in Episode I. But I digress. Fear not, those who love their searches for items and secrets, for you'll still get to do them...IN BATTLE! That's right, rather than being able to simply consult a FAQ for the locations of every powerful sword and character in the game, you'll have to pull out your thinking cap in order to figure out how to effectively get all the items on the battlefield before you actually go slaughter everybody. Now that's quality, folks. This game really gets the idea that RPS are(should be) all about the fights and advancing the story, and the only reason to actually stop the action for a town is so you can sit around and buy supplies, not break into everyone's house to steal their stuff. The urgent pacing works great for this type of game, and I can fully recommend it to absolutely anyone who's looking to restore an old Game Gear or check out the Game Gear emu scene. If the latter, this is one of the best games to start out with. Shining Force fans should already have it.

GG logic: Makes no videogame sense at all. The evil people actually guess at the plots the good guys have going on and lay traps accordingly, the good guys very quickly form their good guy posse battle by battle when news of they bad guys spreads( nobody has to fight in duels to prove themselves before a new powerful character joins them ) in fact, the whole sequence of events seems like it could feasibly happen in a feasible fantasy world with nary a mysteriously floating platform to be found. This game is almost TOO good.


Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/02, Updated 03/11/02