Shining Force Sucks

Well, this is disappointing. Tedium and terrible game mechanics? That's a big no from me, dawg.

On the otherside of the tunnel is the small village of Rindo. Its claim to fame is that there's theater there, and a circus is planned to go up soon. All the kids love it. There's a show to see in town about Guardiana and how it fell to Kane. I'm confused why Runefaust deals in propaganda, but okay. To the east side of Rindo is a ship that's owned by the mayor. Kane showed up recently to buy the rest of the fleet, so we need to walk to get to Anri. I'm confused why an evil empire is using capitalism, but okay. Leave the village and enjoy the camel that broke my back.

It's an absolutely massive desert! As with mountains, desert drastically lowers movement speed. Combine that with the stupidly large size of the map, and this is gonna be boring.
But before we get there, we need to get past a small bridge. The enemies won't come to you. The dark dwarfs will wait for you to march across the bridge, which is the only way to cross, and ambush you. The bats from the north will come down as well to make sure you're surrounded. They will replace anyone you kill, so good luck getting past the first square. Once again, bats are agile and hard to hit, so this is going to be boring.
And don't forget that bats that make people sleep. No one passed out until I had one bat left, but Cid got it and was out for five rounds. That was boring.
And then you need to walk, slowly, through the desert and hope the mage doesn't Flare 2 you, all while trying to take out the dark dwarfs. And after that, you need to walk through even more desert to get to the new unit type, zombies, and their two mage handlers. Zombies hit for more damage than anything else, have high defense, and can poison you. Well, this sucks. Oh, and the mages can still cast Flare 2...
And the piece-de-resistance, if Cid (Max) dies, you lose the fight and have to return to the last save. This fight took me an hour, listening to that god awful, repetitive music in the background, until I died to an unknown battle mechanic. Leader dying being an instant loss sucks now, and it sucked then. I didn't want to go through the bridge portion for a second time and deal with the bats, nor do I want this crap to appear again going in the future.  

I'm already done with this. I don't know what's going to happen now, but I'm putting this one down and not picking it up. Fatal Labyrinth, maybe?