Using these instructions, I got the Musical Colors visualizations back. If you use Windows Media Player, it can't hurt.

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Also - good GAD, Shining Force's third-to-last level is awful. O_o You get the feeling that they were reeeeally exploiting the no-permadeath feature to excuse the difficulty level.

There's a few rubbish enemies... and then there's the Chimeras and Blue Dragons. Now, the Blue Dragons have a defense-ignoring attack that does around 23 damage a pop, 50 HP, and the ability to move without terrain restrictions (since they can fly). The Chimeras have the exact same gimmick, except that they also have something like a 60% evade rate... and around 30% of the time (or something like that), they attack twice.

So anyone with less than 46 HP can potentially get 1HKO'd. By what pass for generic grunts.

So they're basically a 'Have you been training your mages?' & 'Did you know that some weapons can be used to cast spells?' gear check. Well and good! But I wasn't expecting that, since the 'best party' lists didn't mention that there would be raging-jerk enemies with about 60% evade rate!

Fortunately, Arthur is an 80 HP/67 Attack/7 Move/magic-wielding horrifying demigod by now (some games REALLY love the Magikarp Power trope), so he can soak up hits if I play my cards right... but still. And it doesn't help that my stat-level-ups seemed to be confused for a while, so half the characters weren't as good as they were supposed to be. They've evened out now, buuut... Well, I'll talk about that next post.