Shining Force EXA review

Nonetheless, he obtains a magical sword called the Shining Force almost immediately, dragging the whole group into a battle between two kingdoms. On the plus side, you also get a magic castle to use as a home base - complete with a talking dog caretaker - and can use its machinery to teleport around the world, upgrade your stats, and buy new gear. And it's cool that the party members you aren't using are sometimes called to defend the castle, eventually unlocking different tactics for them touse- though those battles interrupt the main quest unceremoniously.

So, why haven't we mentioned the battle system yet? Well, there's just not much to it. Your physical combos come from stamping the X button three or four times, your charge attack comes by holding X at the end of the combo, and your special attack comes from holding X again after your charge attack. You can map one item and one spell to the square and triangle buttons as well, and cycle through them with the d-pad - which sounds good until you realize you have to take your thumb off the left stick to do so, which makes it tough to do while running away.