Recreation of the small pixel font from the european/north american release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

This font is unusual, as each character not only comprises two tiles (for its height), but also features characters that are wider than the maximum 8px tiles. In the game's tile set, this was achieved by using a custom encoding, where a single tile contains the combined values for two horizontal tiles.

See this short Twitter thread for a little dissection of the tile set.

The width of each character is also variable and encoded in the bottom tile for each character. Unfortunately, I was unable to work out the logic behind the width information bits - so, for characters used in the game, the correct width was matched manually, and for any characters not encountered (yet) in any of the dialog boxes, I took an educated guess...

Due to the complexity of this encoding, I won't tackle the hiragana/katakana large font from the japanese release.

Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included

Recreation of the small pixel font from the japanese release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

Compared to the european/north american release, the alphanumeric and punctuation characters are all shifted by one pixel to the left, and one pixel down. The "U" is also different, and the font lacks a lowercase.

This font includes a full set of hiragana and katakana characters. In the game's tileset, the dakuten and handakuten are separate tiles, positioned in the line above the character they relate to. In this recreation, these characters are pre-combined into a single glyph.

Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.

Recreation of the small pixel font from the european/north american release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.