It's not often that we come across many Shining Force fan projects, but recently we were made aware of a new, unofficial tribute to Shining Force III that is being put together by the German programmer Andreas Scholl.
Scholl was previously responsible for an impressive tribute to Sonic Team's Burning Rangers, which was released as a demo during SAGE 2021, as well as a gorgeous Sonic X Nights Into Dreams Unity mash-up (which we previously covered here on the site). Now, though, it appears that he has turned his attention to the classic Camelot RPG (which was published by Sega), with the coder sharing a short 30-second clip from the Unity mockup on Twitter last Sunday.
Shining Force III, in case you haven't heard of it (or are in need of a refresher), was an episodic RPG in the Shining Force series, which was released in three parts for the Sega Saturn. The first part was released in 1997 in Japan, before launching in North America and Europe a year later. The two final installments, meanwhile, were made only available in Japan in 1998 and never ended up receiving official Western localizations to the frustration of fans (though fan translations have since been released to soften this blow).
The short video Scholl posted of his tribute features an imported 3D model of the Monk Irene walking about a faithfully recreated depiction of a church (an area of the game where players can revive fallen allies or save their data), with Grace, Synbios, Dantares, and Masqurin standing in the rows of pews. After it was uploaded, it received a fair amount of praise online from those who were fortunate enough to stumble across it, with some wanting to know whether it was a tease for an upcoming remake project.
Scholl, however, has since clarified that it is only meant to be a brief demo representing a very small portion of the beloved RPG.
We asked Scholl whether he intends to release the demo once it is finished or whether it is just purely for fun. Here's what he told us:
"Its purely for fun and experimenting. There is a github page for it. Although I didnt update that in a while."
If you're at all interested in the project, we recommend that you follow Scholl on Twitter to receive more updates and videos as they emerge.