Saturn Emulation: The Force Awakens

I just did something I've been waiting to do for 20 years. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance, but here it is, right in front of me, and I wish my dad was still alive, so he could enjoy it, too. I'm playing all three scenarios of Shining Force III. In English and without broken sound, music or graphics.

This is gonna take some explaining and I don't believe anyone who frequents this blog will have even a single fuck to give. That's okay. But I'll write this down, if only to get it out of my system. This is probably something I'd be sending to my old man in an email right now if he were still around.

Shining Force was one of the main reasons why I wanted to become a games journalist and a part of the games industry. I got hyped for the original Shining Force in the early nineties, when I saw a review in German Powerplay magazine.
The editor, Michael Hengst, joked about having to throw out his girlfriend and stocking up on junk food and coke in order to fully immerse himself in the game, which was the funniest shit my 11 year old self had ever read in a magazine. That guy was my hero and I thought he had the most awesome job in the world. That and Shining Force looked like the most awesome game I had ever seen.

I didn't believe videogames could look so cool when I saw the screenshots.

Shining Force was the one thing my dad, my brother and I constantly talked about when we finally had a chance to play it. We took turns, watched each other play, compared our forces and shared secrets about hidden bonus characters. There was some serious bonding going on there and Shining Force had always been special to us.

Over the years I have probably finished the first game alone well over 20 times. I've played them all - on the Megadrive, Sega CD, Gameboy Advance, I've even played the Japanese Game Gear titles all the way to the end before there were emulators or translation patches. I loved absolutely everything about the Shining-series until Sega did what they do best and fucked it all up. But not before taking one last massive shit on a huge portion of their fan base with Shining Force 3.

Was Shining Force 3 a terrible game, then? Not at all! In fact, it's probably the best game of the series. However, it was split up into three parts or "scenarios" as Sega called them. And in an absolute dick move they released the first scenario in Europe and North America, ended it in a cliffhanger, then never released scenarios 2 and 3 outside of Japan.

I imported the other two, but... yeah.

Fans translated the dialogue and released scripts on the internet, so for a while I tried playing the Japanese version of scenario 2 using a printed script. But there were gaps, the plot was difficult to follow and the whole experience simply wasn't very enjoyable. Years later they released an actual translation patch, which could be applied to an image of the original game disc, but by then my Saturn had gone the way of the dodo.

Sure, there were emulators, but Saturn emulation used to be absolute garbage until fairly recently. First there were performance issues, graphical glitches and crashes. These problems went away over time as hardware got more powerful, but one annoying problem, which persisted across all emulators was abysmal sound emulation. Shining Force 3 has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack by Motoi Sakuraba, which got completely butchered by SSF, GiriGiri, Satourne and whatever other emulators I've repeatedly tried over the years. Yes, I could have completed all three games with shitty music, but I absolutely didn't enjoy that.

Most Saturn Games were always ugly, they aged horribly... at least let me have proper music!

And then my friend Haggy started a Facebook post about Saturn emulation through Retroarch. I've been using Retroarch on my 3DS for a while and really enjoyed it, but I was willing to bet my life that their Saturn core was just as shit, broken and flawed as every oher Saturn emulator I've tried so far. Heck, I tried half a dozen emulators earlier this year and gave up in frustration when all of them ran or sounded like shit! But I gave Haggy the benefit of the doubt. After all, they did finally crack the Saturn very recently. So... maybe? Worth a shot? Nothing to lose but time and all that.

So I fired up Retroarch, booted up the Mednafen Saturn Core, fed the first scenario of Shining Force 3 to the emulator and prepared for disappointment as the intro loaded up. But what do you know? It looked and sounded exactly like on the original hardware! I couldn't fucking believe it! After so many years I pretty much gave up on the idea and just checked back on the emulators every once in a while, because eh, what else are ya gonna do with all that spare time? None of them ever did the job - until now!

The filter I'm using makes stuff look like stained glass. Looks slightly less awful than the pixellated default look.

I've just completed the first scenario of Shining Force 3, then transferred my savegame to a patched, fully translated version of scenario 2. After two decades I finally get to see how the story continues. I can play the final two parts without having to put up with printed scripts, crashes, performance problems or broken audio. And every now and then I get all giddy over scenario 2's little graphical improvements, added features and other crap in a game, which is old enough to drive and always looked ugly as sin.

I named the first scenario's main character after my dad's character and did a complete playthrough, with all the hidden shit, the bonus battle, all the stuff I'm normally too lazy to complete, because my old man used to love this sort of thing. Now I get to experience the rest of the story. I wonder how he'd feel about these translated scenarios if he was still around. Heck, I wonder what he'd say if I told him I'm writing quests and translations for actual games now. Or that I'm the community manager for a game, which may end up being 'the next Baldur's Gate'. I still can't believe he's gone. There's a million things I wanna tell him.