I'm being a bit unfair by rating a product I did not try, but I have spent hundreds of hours playing Mana games, I still own my copy of Secret of Mana, as well as the SFC cartridge of Trials of Mana, aka Seiken Densetsu 3. My japanese is pretty poor, but I used the SFC cartridge as an "excuse" to play the fan translated ROM. Many times.
I love Secret of Mana, but there may be a bigI'm being a bit unfair by rating a product I did not try, but I have spent hundreds of hours playing Mana games, I still own my copy of Secret of Mana, as well as the SFC cartridge of Trials of Mana, aka Seiken Densetsu 3. My japanese is pretty poor, but I used the SFC cartridge as an "excuse" to play the fan translated ROM. Many times.
I love Secret of Mana, but there may be a big nostalgia factor going on here. I love the look and music, but I probably enjoy the gameplay more than I should. It's kind of a wonky system, when you think about it. Level-charging attacks is slow and boring, going into the menu to activate spells grinds the action to a halt, waiting for the attack gauge to get up to 100% just to do a normal attack is also a strange design choice. It's possible to cheeze bosses by linking attack spells... I could probably go on and on. But I still like it all, which is probably indication I'm seeing things with rose-tinted nostalgia goggles.
The dialog is pretty terrible however. In case you're one of the 5 people who don't know why, memory constraints was an issue during translation and tons of stuff was cut out.
Anywho, what everyone else is getting all teary-eyed about is Trials of Mana being "finally available" in the west. Well, as someone who has played it to completion once - and tried and stopped more times than I care to remember - it's not nearly as good as people make it out to be. The game has some glaring flaws that people seem to gloss over. Obviously it has some extremely strong points as well.
The game looks amazing. I can't stress this enough, It's probably the best looking SNES/SFC game ever made. Boss designs in particular are incredible. The music is top notch, just like Secret of Mana. The story is quite a bit better this time around, and offers 6 main characters and 3 main story paths. The world is even larger this time, and the amount of content is quite impressive.
Sadly, I find the action terrible. Characters often move by themselves between attacks. It's never really clear how long you may need to wait after an attack to attack again, sometimes it's instant, sometimes it takes forever. Hit detection is average at best (to be fair, this was also an issue in Secret of Mana). Enemies and characters don't stagger very often when hit, so there's always of mess of sprites going at it with numbers flying everywhere in a small pile on screen. However, for the majority of the game, all this is pretty tolerable.
Once you get near end-game, that's when the feces really hits the propeller. Remember when in Secret of Mana you would occasionally get a special visual effect for maximum level spells? And everything would stop for effect? And your mind just exploded? Trials of Mana does this.
For every. Single. Skill.
In boss battles in particular, lots of spells get cast, all at the same time. If you make the mistake of using a charge attack with a special animation, your character will stand there until all the previous skill animations have been played through to actually go through with the attack.
Just standing there. Unable to move. Getting pummeled. Waiting.
Other frustrations include getting items for class change - because the drop rates for the good ones are super rare, enemies having access to level 3 techs as soon as you enter a screen and blowing you to smithereens before you even see them, the menu being terribly slow to navigate (it sounds absurd, I know), often obscure goals, difficulty spikes, slow walking and running speed... I suppose that's probably enough for now.
I'm honestly looking forward to the 3D remake, because the game and story have so much potential, so much amazing content, and a full remake has the opportunity to rid the game of the mostly mechanical issues I have with it.
Oh, and Final Fantasy Adventure? Meh.… Expand
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