Button mashing is mostly a viable strategy. After enough hours you’ll get used to the issues, but combat is never crisp, responsive, or precise. Special attacks have stupidly long charge-up times. The battles are dreadful, even for year-1999 standards. It’s classic overdesign made worse by slow, inefficient menus.Įven worse is the combat. But all this stuff is mostly a waste of time and not needed. Legend of Mana features item crafting, equipment forging, golem building, monster catching, and a musical instrument system. This re-release also keeps all the obtuse, mystifying, and downright vexing gameplay systems of the original. You must manually collect experience orbs in battle…or they disappear and you get nothing. At least it never once crashed, and I experienced no glitches. Much of this has to do with the 2D sprite animations being tied to very low framerates, but even special effects can cause the engine to chug. There’s something extra sad about a year-1999 game being unable to achieve a smooth framerate. For starters, the game engine stutters and runs at very low framerates. Unfortunately, all the fantastic artistic stuff is shackled to the dreadful play experience. If I were to judge Legend of Mana on creativity alone, the game would be a 10 out of 10.
For those who lean toward the literary, it’s positively magnificent. You just never know what’s around the corner when interacting with a new NPC. Still, I daresay it’s the cliché-subverting character dialogue that has made Legend of Mana such a cult classic. I’d tell you that all those lines will make sense once you play the game, but they won’t.
LEGEND OF MANA REVIEW PROFESSIONAL
I’m a CANARY!” Instructions on emotion expression are helpful: “Dudbears, you may cry now!” This young lad could use some professional help. Other phrases are more heartfelt: “People with pure hearts can go to a whole new world.” Some lines make little sense: “You will understand, once you become a rock.” Bleakness pops up: “There’s nothing good about life.” Important clarifications abound: “I’m not a chicken. We all have a good and bad otter within us. We don’t want to explode!” Or “Cowardice is the better part of valor.” Consider the greatest threat to any robot: “I’ll redesign you!” I really like this pirate’s take on life. Dozens upon dozens of quotable lines will be thrown at you when you least expect it.
The game is genuinely funny, in a heartfelt yet bizarre way. The dialogue is another massive selling point. The boldness and daring of its narrative and world-building are strong selling points for the game. Even some 20 years later, there’s nothing quite like it. In this way, Legend of Mana is very experimental and unique in its approach. There are several key character arcs, but there is no attempt to tie everything together. Rather, the game is a collection of 60-odd short stories, almost like a book of fairytales. The game features several towns with maps such as this that link to various town locations.Īs for the story, Legend of Mana is less of a grand ‘save the world’ tale. Enjoy this two-minute official sample of the game’s music. Newly recorded with actual instrumentation, Legend of Mana features some of the best JRPG music tracks of all time, in my opinion. Although the backgrounds are nice, some of the pixel art and effects are a bit dated. Although, the untouched PS1-era 2D pixel-art sprites for characters and monsters are visually hard to read and look out of place next to the high-resolution backgrounds. Character designs are bold and inventive. Every location is a vibrant joy to behold. The 2D backgrounds are lush and detailed, having been upscaled and re-rendered for this version. Legend of Mana is gorgeous in just about every way. Legend of Mana certainly is creative and colorful, with a unique game structure. While the colorful worlds, endearing cast, and gorgeous soundtrack are big draws, the painfully clunky combat, maze-like environments, and obtuse quest designs make Legend of Mana an overall drag of an experience. It’s also not worth playing, as much as it pains me to say. Originally an action-adventure RPG released in 1999 for the PlayStation, this virtually identical re-release of Legend of Mana is an imaginative banquet of charm, creativity, and quirkiness.
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