Shining Force Gaiden-Final Conflict Ending

Ending 102
Shining Force Gaiden - Final Conflict
Developer: Sonic! Software Planning
Publisher: Sega
Game Gear
1995
I have been on a Shining Force bender lately. Played all the old turn-based strategy ones. Once I'm finished with Shining Force CD and post all these endings, I may even turn to the "others" in the series, the action role-playing titles. I say others because for me, there's just nothing like the original turn-based games. Well, technically, the original would be a first-person dungeon crawl, but....you know... this series has an identity problem. Let's take a minute to understand why that is.
The series is the brainchild of producer Hiroyuki Takahashi, formerly of Enix, who worked on Dragon Quest games among other things. In 1990, Takahashi left Enix to work for Sega and for CD4, a very boring company named Consumer Development Studio #4, which they thankfully renamed Sonic! Software Planning. He began with Shining in the Darkness, a game Hiroyuki wanted to make because of his love for the Wizardry series, for his knowledge of RPGs in general, and the lack of quality RPGs on the Megadrive at the time.
A sleeper hit with a shoestring budget, Shining in the Darkness was a success, selling 300k copies. Sega greenlit a sequel for the following year. Takahashi, pulling from his Dragon Quest experience, asked himself how they could make those battles from DQ more in depth and involved. For Takahashi, turn-based strategy was that logical jump. Here on out, the series was a different style from the first game, but retained the same motifs of color, palette, sound, animation style and themes throughout its Sega days.
After Shining Force III part 3 for Saturn, Takahashi left Sega and the series behind. Sega mothballed the series for almost a decade until the IP was redeveloped by a hodgepodge of companies from Nextech, Neverland, Flight-plan, and Media Vision, all having their own ideas for the series, never the same producer, never the same art style or story cohesiveness. It makes me a little sad.
I may be talking out my ass, since I haven't played the later games except for EXA and wasn't impressed by that one. Gone are the days of the struggles of a shining force of fighters against the three great devils, Dark Dragon, Darksol and Zeon. This game in particular, Final Conflict, is a tie-in game sees characters from the first and second games in the series united in an effort to defeat Darksol.
The game was never released in America, so I am playing a translated version. My thanks to those who translated this for play. Graphics are pretty good for a Game Gear title, though with the handheld's battery life, I couldn't imagine playing this unless I was plugged in constantly.
Final Conflict has all the same sounds, colors, animations and feels that everyone who adores the original Shining series has come to love about them, just crunched into a tiny package. If you can take the time to play the translation, it will be worth it.