Wow, a Shining Force topic! I played through those games almost as often as I played through PS games. Almost.
My personal opinion:
- Shining in the Darkness: Excellent presentation, good ideas, well executed, a bit repetitive. Loved it.
- Shining Force 1: Awesome design, precursor to about every other tactics game ever, well done, excellent game overall.
- Shining Force 2: Upgrade. Better combat system, longer, fleshier but the story is a bit strange and borderline childish.
- Shining Force CD: Even better than SF1 and 2 gameplay wise, but even more childish than SF2, the story was very meh.
- Shining the Holy Ark: Dungeon crawler like SitD, very, very well done, excellent game, incredibly fun. Graphics are early 3D, terrible to look at.
- Shining Wisdom: Shining's take on Zelda except, is sucked. The controls and gameplay will make you cry tears of sadness and frustration.
- Shining Force 3 scenario 1: Well made, fun to play, great music but the few voice samples will make you doubt your own existence and will make you want to fix your ears with corkscrews.
- SF3 Scenario 2 and 3, I have not played becaused I could not be bothered with translating the japanese.
- I have not significantly played the "newer" Shining games as most of them sounded downright unpleasant to me.
There you go. Play SitD, SF1, SF2, and StHA at least once, they are worth it.