This is what all console strategies should have been. It is still one of the ebst strategy titles in gaming history.
There is nothing revolutionary. Its your basic, grab a party of 5-10 people, takes turns moving across a board of hexes(squares, wutever), and hope you can gang up enough guys on the tough enemies before a mage comes up behind you and decimates four of your party members at once kind of deals. It had a mostly generic fantasy story, but one that was still made interesting by fun chracters, most of which were relevant and made widdling down your party to the maximum limit very difficult, especially towards the end when you get the badd-arse ones. The leveling wasn't too hard, but you had to make sure to balance who kills the enemies in order for them to gain the same exp, say a Priest in the back row all the time vs. your main hero.
My favirote part of the entire shining series was the battle scenes. This game was one of the first strategy games to not simply let little-buitty sprites on the field move one pixel at eachother and cause damage. It attempted something more along the lines of anime cutscene and showed two pc's duking it out. Its somethign that shouldn't make or break or game, but if your into rpg's and such, you know then that its moreso these touches that add the experience than having 75,000 side-quests to acquire adam's golden apples. The style actually had a lot to do with some of the later animation of the battle scenes in games liek Dark Wizard or the awesome import Feda(why oh why didn't they bring this oversea's =[ ).
It was also difficult. This game made you think, even though the enemy mostly did the same thign on subsiquent playthru's, you had to find that one strategy that really worked and stick with it. Certain maps were unbeatable if brute force was your tactic.
This game was amaerica's answer to fire emblem and spawned a number of great shining series titles(pretty much only SF II, SF CD, and SF III were worth it) and, if you know whats good for you, you will play it right this minute because you owe it that much.