My favourite strategy game is Shining Force III, Scenario 1 to 3 on the Saturn. I guess its cheating a bit as its three games rather than one, but the three very well written scenarios (that are full games in their own right) form a complete story, with your saved game used between them. Each game has its own characters, and the games are fully (or partially for scenario 3) parallel to each other chronologically, so the heroes from the different games sometimes meet, and you can occasionally see the same event occur twice but from the perspective of a different protagonist, which was very cool.
Quite humorous too, as the Shining Force III games had a silent protagonist but when protagonists meet in the shared events, you will suddenly find the protagonists of the other games very chatty. The best element of this system is that decisions you make in one scenario affect the others. For instance, a non-player character you have the ability to save early in Scenario 1 becomes a playable character later in Scenario 2 if you save him.
The actual battles are extremely fun. Shining Force III has features that are fairly commonplace now (though far rarer back then), like characters helping an adjacent one on the grid in battle in some way giving a chance of resulting in a better friendship, kind of like the new Fire Emblem game. Though in Shining Force III this is purely battlefield related and gives them benefits such as resistances or stat gains when next to each other from then on.
Different terrains give movement penalties/defence bonuses. Each weapon type has its own set of special attacks that randomly hit (like criticals) that must be learnt, with some exclusive to certain special weapons. There are terrain advantages too. Some of the battle scenarios themselves are very fun, like the protect the refugees stage in Scenario 1, which relies on getting to a junction point and perfect timing.
I like that one particularly because it take you out of the strategy role-playing turtle comfort zone (where you very slowly push your characters across the battlefield together), and forces you to move forward aggressively to stop the refugees from dying. It took me quite a few goes to get this done back in the day. The character, Medion, in the cut scenes is the protagonist of Scenario 2 (this is one of the shared events I mentioned earlier, he battles the character General Varlent as part of this in Scenario 2).
And then there are the tombs. I love these, theyre almost like a mini-game with even more strategy. Some maps have tombs with items in them and if you have previously gotten a map to that tomb (generally from searching around during the town sections) you have a decision to make as to whether to split some characters off to get the treasure, which makes the main fight more satisfying as you have to make an assessment as to who you can spare for however long the tomb takes to clear without losing the level.
And you also have to work out whether those characters can even catch the thieves to make them spit the items out (your characters cannot unlock the treasure chests so you must wait for the thieves to get them first, and the thieves have a wider movement rRead More – Source
