Dawn of Mana

This all goes to show that eye candy and excellent music mean nothing if everything else is weak.

Dawn of Mana has several things going for it that are good - a solid story, a quick and easy to learn melee attack system, graphics that please the senses, a score to please the soul, and voice acting that doesn't cause you ears to bleed - quite a few in the grand scheme of things.

Dawn of Mana isn't a complete failure as a game, it's just not what most people were hoping for from a proper 3D update. The concepts here were novel, but the execution of the main game still leaves something to be desired.

Dawn of Mana tries to bring something fresh and interesting but fails to recapture the magic of the classic that lit up our old Super NES consoles.

Picture a surfer being tossed into a vicious undertow--that uncontrollable motion is how fighting through Dawn of Mana feels. [June 2007, p.82]

Unfortunately, with shoddy character development, some weak combat and story mechanics and gameplay issues, this adventure is a passable successor in name only. It's fun in spots, but not nearly as engaging as the original title.

Dawn of Mana looks the part, but fails in most other aspects. If you're hankering for some role-playing on your aging PlayStation 2, pick up "Odin Sphere" -- which released the same day. It's even more beautiful, captures the essence of old-school, and you'll be having too much fun to feel the need to convince yourself that you're having fun.

With inexcusable control and targeting issues there is no reason to subject yourself to this game.

Best in small doses, Dawn of Mana continues the downward trend in what really should be a flagship series after the strong start it received back in the SNES era.

Dawn of Mana is an interesting action role-playing game that suffers from the same problems that Square Enix's Brave Fencer Musashi for the PS2 had - an unruly camera that is counter-productive to what the player is trying to accomplish.

Like Ocean’s Thirteen, there are a lot of amazing individual elements in Dawn of Mana that are worth the price of admission. But they just don’t come together to make a cohesive whole.

Sorry old school Mana fans, this is nothing like that gem back on the SNES. This is a pure action game with a gooey artificial RPG coating. The controls are horrible, the level design is seriously lacking, bosses can be frustratingly difficult, and not even the story will keep you playing. [JPN Import]

Hardcore franchise fans will no doubt want to play it because the story line does fill in some interesting gaps in the Mana universe's history, but this one's a rental at best. [June 2007, p.85]

Dawn of Mana is a tale full of marvelous art and storytelling that captures the look and essence of the older Mana games, but beneath the veneer is a different beast that has excised most of the gameplay elements that make the old games so memorable.