Shining Empire - Massive Role-Playing Simulation

Shining Empire is a new kickstater game asking for $9,500. The game was originally a fan made project, but Sega pulled the plug.

Now I will only cover the game once since it is an MMO. So if your a fan of the older Shining Force games you might be interested.

Last June we began work on Shining Force Online - a free massively multiplayer version of the classic Sega Genesis franchise. Unfortunately, Sega shut down the game and we're left with a huge, feature-packed title we cannot release. Rather than give up and scrap the title, we're taking it to kickstarter to raise funds to replace all of the Sega-owned trademarks (the main one being art) so that it is an original title in the same tradition as the Shining Force series.

The goal is to release the game November 2014 (with betas starting this summer). We'll release on Windows (Steam as well as a downloadable Windows version on our site), Mac, and iOS. The price will be $10 and all updates (including new content down the road) will be free. There will be no microtransactions and no DLC costs.


In Shining Empire, we want the player to have an incredible amount of control. In other RPG's you walk into a town and there's a few townsfolk to talk to, often times giving you quests or hints. We want to populate each village with hundreds of citizens, most of which you can recruit to joining your party. Some will have specific requirements: They may request that you're a member of a certain faction, or they may view your party and see one of their friends has joined and that entices them to tag along. Some may even become discouraged if your ethics start to clash with theirs and they may threaten to leave.

Update- Thanks to new information from daveyd the game will not be an MMO now.

"We're evolving the game from a forced online experience to a hybrid of pure single player with the option of multiplayer features".

More information.

As a big fan of the original Shining Force games (1-3), I was initially disappointed to see this was ostensibly an MMO. However, from visiting the KS page, it sounds like that is no longer the case…. They are actually changing it to a mostly single-player game with some (optional) multi-player components…

"We're evolving the game from a forced online experience to a hybrid of pure single player with the option of multiplayer features".

So it doesn't sound like an MMO to me. However, I'm not sure if this is actually worth backing, mainly because of how the rewards are structured… In the description it says that the game will sell for $10 including any future DLC… But it appears that you have to pledge at least $17 to get a digital copy on KS, which means you are putting up almost twice as much money up front to get the game a week early? I submitted a question to the project creator to see if I'm interpreting this correctly..

Edit: Also, after discussing this on Shining Force Central, I found out that the original game was never going to be published by SEGA. The developer apparently made Shining Force Online without permission and was then ordered to cease and desist…

Thanks for the information daveyd. I'm only one man and can't find every piece of information about every new release. I'm glad their changing it from an MMO.