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So this was a thing.
Anyone who's known me for any length of time knows how big a giant fucking nerd for the original tactics-RPG styled Shining Force games I am. I kind of fell out of love with the series once it went towards more generic Action RPG stylings, but for a goodly amount of time I basically was so in love with the Genesis games that my original online avatar was basically a sprite-comic-recolored version of the SF2 protagonist. This series is literally my childhood and I will never hate it. I can't even bring myself to bash on it despite its faults (Let's be honest, the Genesis games are a pair of strategy RPGs that were trying SO AMAZINGLY HARD to muscle out Fire Emblem that it's not even funny, and SF3's non-localized chapters have some... really bad cultural barriers) so that should give you an idea of how quickly I hunted down this romhack when a friend told me about it.
Basically designed as an AU of the original game (as its name implies), SFA tries to streamline the experience, only drip-feeding you exactly enough party members to fill a team instead of flooding you with them like the first two games did. This allows them to do a little more with those characters, too - they're more than just portraits and stat blocks, and they stay relevant throughout the game, piping in at various moments to let you know their thoughts on the situation at hand.
Oh, and also since it's an AU, your protagonist is genderflipped and literally the only characters you have that were recruitable in the original game are in your starting party and the hot birdperson. Everyone else is either a side character or a serial-numbers-filed-off palette swap named after one of the hack crew. This part I didn't mind; the part I did mind is that the original cast that wasn't recruitable any more (save for the two aforementioned self-insert palette swaps) all more or less showed up and a decent number of them were assholes. One hits on you, two others are actually boss fights... it kinda falls a little flat. Honestly, the writing is the weak point of this. It's certainly functional, but in desperate need of a proofreader and has a few points where I thought the tone veered towards a bit overdramatic in a way that doesn't mesh well with the series.
Speaking of not meshing well, the character portraits kind of have a lack of cohesiveness to them; they're all good on their own, except some of them are the original SF1 art designs, some look like SF2 designs, and one of the NPCs straight has a portrait back-ported from the GBA remake, which had its own vastly different artstyle.
I have to say though, when it cames to original spritework, to level design, to enemy balance? God, it was like actually playing a Shining Force game all over again. I know some people have described this already as a difficulty hack, but honestly, it's not any more difficult than Shining Force 2; it is at least as punishing as that is (SF1 never quite felt that rough when I played it even as a kid, SF2 I had to wait about ten years to actually finish the last quarter of without cheating because of difficulty spikes) but you have a lot of tools at your disposal that you wouldn't see in the series until maybe 3.
Everyone has MP and skills. For some characters, it's spells, but for your melee fighters, it's little combat tricks to help out. Your archer can spend an MP to hit an extra square away. Your centaur can spend some MP to hit two enemies in a line. That sort of thing. It actually adds a lot of variety and actual thought to the gameplay. In addition, while the game does (understandably) lean a little too hard on bottomless enemy spawners, it uses them to good effect, both to harry (most battles en route to a new town are less "sorties" and more "rush through the gauntlet in one piece" now) and to apply pressure (in the endgame where you're basically more or less gods and can generally nosell everything with a finite number of warm bodies to kill). And it manages to do this without reaching SF2's levels of stat inflation where enemies are one shotting your squishies! (It takes two or three shots, of course.)
This was a good hack. Script needs some proofing and maybe touching up, and it won't be for everyone, but the gameplay is 500% solid.
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Because it's good.
Hence, not hack.
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I'll just go.
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