What is MANA to you?
GAMEPLAY ~
+Positives+
You choose between 2 characters, a HERO and a HEROINE and they have this adventure for revenge and knowledge! cliché! Its a hack-and-slash game which means you will be doing that ALOT! But after you learn the combo tech with some of the more powerful weapons its easy to vanquish foes quickly. The magic system works well and the enemies have a distinct pattern which makes leveling up so easy. And a cool kinda new feature is the frowning fruit idea to assist in tempering weapons. It plays like Secret of Mana, but looks like Legend of Mana, which are both extraordinary games!
-Negatives-
Too bad this one falls short of both. The select menu is horrendous! For the first half of the game I had to keep going through all these menus JUST to get to weapons (than I learned that weapons and magic are accessed through the top L & R buttons, duh! but still too much!) Your teammates are completely USELESS. Half the time they float around as specters cause they can't hold their own in battle. And that way, they are now useful cause they don't get in the way! And lets not talk of bosses! This was pathetic! All you will end up doing is slashing away and EVENTUALLY you beat em, that is to say if the battle last more than 2 minutes!
STORY ~
Can ANYONE tell me what is going on? Do I actually have to play this game TWICE to figure it out? They give ya HALF THE STORY! And it has to do with Revenge or the understanding on why the MANA people were killed, so play it twice and lets hope you remember what happened the first half!
GRAPHICS ~
+Positives+
Can't complain much on this one, the game looks good and the characters look like they do belong in the MANA series. The backgrounds are gorgeous and the boss enemies are really cool to look at!
-Negatives-
Why is this game so brown? Its like every stage is a light shade of brown or tan, I know it has to do with MANA but lets give this game some more color! S.o.M. was so bright and shimmering and L.o.M. was as well, this game falls kinda short on the basic look category. And why does the HERO of the game move like Strong-Bad when he is having a nightmare sequence? Block mouth and everything? So very annoying...
SOUND ~
The opening theme sounds like a Day-Time Soap Opera, like if its “Days of our lives” all over again! This game doesn’t have good music, in retrospect the tune played by LESTER is a rework of the RYDIA theme from FF4, so congrats on the originality part there, Square.
REPLAYABILITY ~
This game has a high replay ability, that is, if you wanna get the whole story! And there are several side quest that include finding sparking stuff on the ground, upgrading your spirits and forging the finest weapons!
OVERALL ~
This game was a good attempt at a MANA game mixing both Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana into a handheld smorgasbord. The only downfall is that it inherited the two other MANA games faults and doesn’t seem to want to move ahead with any ideas, too bad MANA became another one of those game titles (Final Fantasy included) used to sell games, cause this would have been an EXCELLENT non-mana game!