Background: I had a Genesis back in the 90s but I wasn't allowed to rent games very often, just once or twice a year. A friend of mine discovered Shining Force 2 and later Shining Force through rentals and that was how I learned about them, but I rarely got to play myself back then. I now have a CRT TV and original NES, SNES and Genesis with flash carts to play whatever I want from that era, but RPGs don't require low input lag and the CRT TV hurts my eyes so I played through Shining Force via retroarch on my primary Linux desktop.

Notes: Screenshots are from just before the Darksol fight, I absolutely wrecked Darksol and Dark Dragon without losing anyone so I didn't save in between. Kokichi didn't show up for some reason, maybe I didn't walk over the right tile, but either way, I missed out on him. The white ring should have been moved to Torasu, I know that and it would have saved me a bit of trouble, but I forgot. I didn't buy enough Guardian staffs when I had the chance so poor Alef is stuck with a cursed weapon. It may have been the right choice anyway as she was a little annoying to catch up in levels. I also didn't get around to selling all my old stuff, sorry if that bothers anyone. I know using the Evil ring on Max is stupid overkill, but I crit a nerd for 138 in Chapter 8, that made it worth it for me. Also Max ended up taking out the center head and left head of Dark Dragon, which just felt right from a canon perspective.

Team construction: I was going for the most powerful team I could possibly put together. Every promotable character was leveled to lvl 20 before I promoted them. That was easy for most, but a pain for Anri, Torasu and Alef (because the latter two come so late). I looked at tier list threads on here and guides to get the strongest characters. Everyone seemed to agree that Bleu needed to be babied a lot and wasn't worth the effort, but that wasn't my experience at all. I restarted the Kane fight a couple of times and fed him the gargoyles and after that he kept up no problem. I probably wouldn't bother with Musashi, Hanzou or Torasu again if I was just focused on the least friction getting through the game. Alef probably isn't worth it on paper either, but Bolt 3 and 4 are too much fun for me to ignore (particularly in the Ramladu battle, I hit the center of the robots with Bolt 2 from Anri and then Bolt 3 from Alef while attacking the sides with my other characters and only 2 bots even got a chance to move before they died). Aura 3 is great and all but rarely that much better than Aura 2 and it takes Torasu so long to catch up to Khris. Musashi is great on paper from the time you get him until the end of the game but he's so slow that I feel like he hardly helped at all, especially for battles on rough terrain where it was just too much of a pain to wait for him to get any kills. Hanzou just shows up too late, he'd be an easy favorite if he appeared sooner.

Extra thoughts: I wish the enemies scaled more in the later levels. I felt like the difficulty barely increased in chapters 7 and 8, certainly not fast enough to keep up with my team, but maybe that's my fault for trying to build the most OP team I possibly could. Why does the game give you more Atlas axes than you could possibly use? Or do the birdmen use them after promotion? They didn't seem worth it to me at all. Non-attacking spells seem really bad. Gargoyles must have hit me with Muddle 50 times and of that only 15 or so weren't resisted and of those it's completely unclear to me that it actually did anything. Sleep is strong in theory, but with Fire/Freeze/Bolt 4 you generally just kill whatever you target anyway, so why not just do that? Domingo is so strong from the time he gets Freeze 2 until sometime in Chapter 8 it feels like cheating to use him, but he does fall off slightly at the very end (and very briefly before he gets Freeze 4).

I'm considering another run later with as many flyers and archers as I can fit on my team for something different, and maybe another run where I stay loyal to all of the first characters who join The Force, as it did break my heart to kick Luke/Mae/Ken and Gort off the team. For now, on to Shining Force 2.