Shining Force gripes

As someone who enjoys turn based strategy rpgs, I'm having a tough time adjusting to Shining Force. Shining Force is a pretty famous Genesis game, and I've known of it for a while now. Unfortunately, in the meantime, I've played a decent number of really solid strategy rpgs, including FFT, Vandal Hearts, Tactics Ogre, Phantom Brave, Disgaea, La Pucelle, etc. Some of the mechanics in Shining Force are so antiquated and awkward that I'm hours into the game, but I'm still not used to them yet.

The menu interface is more complicated than it needs to be. You can't interact with things with just a single button press; talking to people requires a couple button presses and opening a chest requires a few button presses. The whole system created to handle items is a nightmare. It is difficult to equip things, and there's no clean interface that easily shows the status of each character. There are so many chests all over the place, but I have to continue to remove things from my main character because if he is carrying a whopping four items (one of them being his main weapon), he can't pick anything up.

I enjoy that it has really nice rpg elements and areas to explore, but I'm not too fond of some of the battles. They can be really drawn out, not just because of strategy, but because of problems with the environments. I expected an experience similar to Tactics Ogre (which came out at around the same time, I think), but it isn't. In Tactics Ogre, you had to have some real strategy from the beginning, making the decision sometimes to choose characters to ascend or descend, incorporating heights into your battle plan. In Shining Force, the terrain only seems to exist to make battles seem drawn out. I feel like I'm constantly locked into situation after situation where I have clumps of characters and only a few are able to move at a time. There are bridges all over the place and enemies outside of them, which just makes things take forever.

I realize that I'm being really hard on this game. It is adorable and it has great sounds, and it also has a charm that is all its own. In fact, if I played this game years ago, I probably wouldn't care about any of these gripes. This is a game that helped invent a genre, and it is responsible for many games that I am in love with. Unfortunately, although I can appreciate the Model T, it probably wouldn't be much fun to drive.

BTW: This game has a really lame cover. Really lame.