Canon - Legend of the New Gods

• Canon has the turn system of Shining Force, the graphic style of 16-bit Square RPGs and funny death screams like Langrisser 1. • The story is a liberal adaptation of the chinese novel Investiture of the Gods, and has much of the tropes and issues of chinese literature. • The game can be fairly long, and a lot of battles overstay their welcome, the game is a hard recommendation for anyone, it’s not a bad game but 30 hours of “Meh” is too much for the couple of memorable moments in the game. Canon, originally called Fengshen Yingjie Chuan, was an unlicensed game for the Sega Genesis, developed in Taiwan by Chuanpu Technologies and published in 1996. The game was translated to english by Super Fighter Team for a physical release during the mid 2000’s with apparently little success, since information about that release is scarce. Now published by Piko Interactive, the game released on Steam late into the 2020 as a Rom packed with the Mednafen emulation core. This t...

Behold: it's Taiwanese Shining Force! Greatest SRPG of a generation? Hardly. But for what it is, it's a solid game. This is a 1996 bootleg title, originally for the Sega Genesis, made in Taiwan by an obscure studio by the name of "Chuanpu Technologies" and localized recently by Piko. Astute followers of fan translations will recognize a familiar face behind the programming - "D," who also worked on the English Der Langrisser translation back in the 2000s. I always appreciate the effort that goes into localizing these obscure, otherwise-forgotten pieces of gaming history. Fan translators are the unsung heroes of the gaming industry! Fengshen Yingjiechuan (I'll just call it "Canon" from now on, I suppose) utilizes the same fundamentals as Shining Force: grid-based, initiative-based combat with things like basic attacks, item usage, and spells with similar AoE ranges. Compared to Shining Force however, Canon gives you far fewer options for party building. To put things in perspective, y...