Started out looking good, and then it fizzed out.
Well, first off, the game starts off looking pretty good. You get the pleasure of choosing out of four different characters to play, (Honestly, though, it's not a very big dilemma. When given the choice between a bulky fighter, a weak magician, a dancer, and a rounded swordsman, and especially in a game that requires both magic and fighting, the most-rounded character is always the choice.)
Anyways, at the beginning of the game, everything looks really good. The characters are quirky, the scenery and maps are colourful and outstanding, and everything is just, in a matter of speaking, plain cute.
The storyline doesn't start too bad, even though it's a little generic. Some new evil that you don't really know anything about, so it's up to you to randomly start traveling to new places and somehow do something about it. All in all, it works, but it's really not very exciting, and doesn't pull you in like many other games manage to do right off the bat.
The biggest problem that I found in Children of Mana was the gameplay. Instead of traveling through maps to visit new towns to progress through the story, you now only have one town to act as your base. From this town, you simply select a location on the map, which becomes a dungeon for you to fight through.
Doesn't sound all TOO bad, does it? Well, here's the thing. The dungeons are made up with level after level of generic, repetitive rooms. Basically, you fight through more or less the same dungeon room over and over until the point where you finally reach whatever the quota is. What's more, as you progress through the game, the number of rooms in each dungeon increases drastically. I didn't get very far in the game, but already I was traveling through 20 levels of an area, fighting the exact same enemies that spawned out of the exact same places. Before I finally quit, I found myself stopping at every single save-point I could get to to take a break from the game.
Aside from the actual storyline, once you finish a dungeon, you can partake in a number of sidequests in that area. However, these sidequests are no different than the storyline dungeon-crawling. The only difference I found was that the number of rooms in a sidequest for the same dungeon somehow increased. (How a tower can have 10 floors at the beginning of the game, and then suddenly have 15, I really don't know.)
Furthermore, for both the main AND side missions, there's no story quality during the dungeon crawling. It is just endless - and it really seems absolutely ENDLESS - hack and slash through level and level after level until you get to the final floor, which usually holds a boss. At this point is when there's finally a little bit of dialogue, but it really isn't much, and then it's back to hacking and slashing, only this time, it's against a BIG enemy. Whoopdy doo?
All in all, if you have the brain capacity (or lack thereof) for mindless button mashing, by all means, buy this game. If you're more of a fan of game with actual quality and excitement, I'd recommend almost anything else.