News

It Looks Like Something ‘Shining’ Will Be Coming Soon From SEGA Forever

While the frequency of releases has slowed down quite a bit compared to the first year, SEGA Forever is still marching on, adding (and re-adding) classic SEGA games to the App Store in a nice “free-to-play-with-premium-unlock" kind of way. As is ever the case when a new release is approaching, the SEGA Forever Twitter account has been teasing the next release. The difference this time around is that it’s not perfectly clear which specific game it’s pointing at, but we can at least say that it looks like something Shining is on the way.

On Sunday, the account posted the following message:

If you’re a sharp-eyed SEGA fan, you’ll recognize that bouncing SEGA logo as being from Shining Force 2, the follow-up to the popular 16-bit tactical RPG that was part of SEGA’s previous offerings on iOS so many years ago. Shining Force 2 has yet to be released on any mobile or handheld platform, and fans have certainly been asking for it for a while now. Would they really go to the second game before the first, though? Maybe the clue is supposed to point at a spiffy new version of the first Shining Force, which had a nearly identical SEGA start-up logo. It makes a lot of sense that it would join the SEGA Forever line-up, given that some version of it was already released before. Mysteries, friends! But then, scant hours later, the account made a second teaser tweet:

Well, that’s still from a 16-bit Shining game, but it’s not from Shining Force! That sleepy old fellow will greet you when starting up Shining in the Darkness, the first-person dungeon crawler that kicked off the Shining series. It has never been released on iOS before, but it’s a great game on its own and I’ve always felt it would be a great fit for mobile.

So what’s going on here? Are we getting Shining Force? Shining Force 2? Or is it Shining in the Darkness? Dare we dream of all three? I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. If things go the way they usually do, these teases mean that there’s a release coming either this week or next, so we won’t have to wait too long to see what’s coming. No matter which of the bunch it is, we’re in for some great RPG fun of some sort. And just for good measure, here’s another tease from the SEGA Forever account from just a few hours ago: