I've finished a few days ago Shining in The Darkness for Sega mega Drive
Now, I've seen this game being defined as "shallow", but sincerely I don't find it any more shallow than Phantasy Star 2 only with much less bull****.
Yeah, the plot and setting are much more conventional but it's used much better, apart from the main character there are only two party members but they fill their role in combat and communicate much more personality with their design alone.
The art style is sort of a middle ground between 80s anime and 80s Disney, and it' sprobably one of the best things about the game.
I played both SiTD and PS2 with the assistance of maps and walkthroughs but even then PS2 made me ragequit more than once, probably because random encounters feel much longer there even if they last just one turn and in general combat is much snappier in SiTD which makes grinding less of an issue. Grinding however that isn't as heavy anyway, since usually just exploring the dungeon you find yourself getting back to town to rest and save often enough that you "grind" without even noticing after the very first level.
I sincerely cannot fathom why this isn't as appreciated as other early 16 bit JRPGs.
Ace Combat: Assault Horizons (PC)
The helicopter sucks, I had to mess with the controls a lot to map them decently.
Strangely enough it has full multiple peripheral support so no need too set up profiles and such to use both joystick and throttle, it's only necessary to be very patient and redo all the control mappings from scratch in the options because apart from button 1 and 2 everything is all over the place.
The guns and rotation of the helo were assigned to the joystick hat switch by default, is it because it's like that in real life or it was just a quirk of the game?
Anyway I had to remap that function to the throttle ministick since it made impossible to orient the guns and use any button that wasn't the trigger while on the main hat switch.
However dogfights on fighter jets are a lot of unbridled dumb fun, even the criticized dogfight mode is not as guided as reviews made it seem to be and it's quite spectacular to boot.