Trials of Mana

The game that everyone seems to be talking about right now is Final Fantasy VII Remake, and based on everything I am hearing it is a pretty great game. While I own it… I just haven’t been able to bring myself to booting it up and playing it. The truth is, Final Fantasy VII just isn’t that important of a game for me personally. At the time it came out I was super heavy into PC gaming and as a result I was playing Fallout instead. I did not get to play seven until it eventually got a PC release, and while it sounded amazing on my Yamaha based wavetable soundcard it already looked dated compared to the graphics I had been experience on the PC. Later on I got a PlayStation and the very first Final Fantasy game that I played on it was VIII, which probably holds that same game changing place that seven does for a lot of players.

The Secret of Mana series for me personally holds an equal place in my memory as Final Fantasy, and once I found out there was a third game in the Seiken Densetsu series I desperately wanted it to see localization. The Mana series blended two games that I absolutely loved… The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy and rolled them into an extremely engaging package. I even liked the not-officially-in-the-series-but-possibly-should-be Secret of Evermore, which effectively used all of the same mechanics but more like if the Mana series had a weird love child with Earthbound. I was never really a handheld player, so I completely missed the release of Trials of Mana until it recently came out as part of the Collection of Mana. However at the same time that was announced we got a glimpse of a proper remake of the game, and ultimately I held out playing it until now.

Trials of Mana has become my new main Switch game since I more or less fell off the Animal Crossing bandwagon. I’ve been playing this before bed and as a result I am not super far into the game, but absolutely loving it so far. It is a seamless blend again of two genres that I adore, the Zelda-like and the Final Fantasy style RPG. There are so many weird in jokes for those who have loved the original Mana series and some cross pollination with Final Fantasy as well. I had to look this up to make sure, but they absolutely substituted Final Fantasy IV/Shadowbringers style dwarves in place of what apparently were mostly skull faced guys in the original. I’ve not encountered a Lali-ho yet, but I am absolutely inserting them in my mind.

Some time ago I wrote about the demo, and I opted to load those save files but also still create a brand new game just in case copying the save does anything. Originally I went with a team of Duran, Charlotte and Reisz which was fine… but I did find Charlotte to be a little annoying. So in the reboot I am mixing things up a bit and choosing at Ash’s suggestion the diametrically opposed character to Duran, aka the moody space princess Angela. I kept Reisz because she looks badass and I am hoping if rumor is true I can turn her into effectively a dragoon later in the game. Mostly it was a toss up between Duran and Kevin… but it largely came down to me not really liking Kevin’s default outfit and wanting to swing a big sword. Duran also reminds me of the hero from the first Mana game I played, so there is an awful lot of nostalgia there as well.

As I said I am not terribly far into the game, having only gone through a few scenarios, but I am really enjoying what I have played so far. The demo takes you up to a specific point and I have played through a couple of different sequences that occur after that and have collected my second element. It sounds like there are six different elements that I need to collect, so I still have quite a long ways to go considering I figure there is a final act that probably occurs after having collected them all. The hardest part to get used to is that you the character level up abilities rather than having weapons that holy weapons that gain experience. So far I have upgraded my gear twice, but it has all been purchased through shops and I have yet to see any world drops.

I definitely suggest checking out the demo, which is probably a post I have in me at some later date talking about this new golden age of try before you buy. After getting my hands on and playing through the final released game, the Demo should give you a really good idea if the game is for you or not. The combat gets a bit more nuanced but for the most part it is a very fluid Zelda-like with jump attacks. The game feels like I remember feeling while playing Secret of Mana. While I have played through Final Fantasy Adventure which is actually the mislabeled first game in the series, I feel like I need to dig up the Gameboy Advance Sword of Mana remake and play it at some point on my RG350 emulation handheld.

It is the beginning of my third day of remote work and I already have no clue what day of the week it is. In theory this should mean that it is Thursday, but I am also deeply skeptical that time still moves in the same fashion that it used to. The weirdest part about working from home is how phenomenally busy I seem to stay, because I am having to exert so much effort to keep tabs on everything that is going on as opposed to news just finding me randomly. I spent most of yesterday on conference calls for various reasons and I think for the most part things are working as intended. My crew, also working remotely appears to be successfully knocking out things so I think the experiment is more or less working.

My evenings on the gaming front have been completely all over the place. Yesterday during the day I saw that Trials of Mana released a demo, and more important than that one that allows you to continue your progress in the full game. I have been exceptionally excited for the release of the remake of this game, largely because I have been waiting to play this game for legitimately decades. Back during the Super Nintendo era there were two games that made me want to learn Japanese so that I could play them. The first of these was Final Fantasy V, which I have played through several times now as part of the four job fiesta and attempted to play an early fan sub during the late 90s on an emulator. The other of these was Seiken Densetsu 3 or as we eventually came to know it in the west Trials of Mana.

The fan subs for this game were always lagging behind because the game proceeds in a manner that isn’t exactly like its predecessors in the “mana” series. Instead of having a fixed party you choose three characters to focus on and then that dictates what sort of quests and content you experience along the way. I remember there being a “golden” path translation that allows you to play specific characters, but even then… the game required way too much horsepower to be able to run on a Super Nintendo emulator at the time I was messing around with such things circa 1997/98. After that it was filed away in my brain as a game I would love to play if I ever got the chance and was quickly forgotten about as I transitioned mostly into PC gaming.

In June of 2019 the game was re-released as part of the Collection of Mana, but at that same time was announced that a fully 3D remake was on its way. Instead of playing the original 2D sprite based game I decided to bide my time and wait for its eventual release on the Switch in all of its shiny new glory. As a result last night I legitimately played through the entire battery on my switch poking around the demo and I have to say I am fully on board with this game. I legitimately loved the “Mana” series back in the day and Secret of Mana is among my favorite Super Nintendo titles. I even enjoyed the quirky Secret of Evermore that I still think is a hidden gem among the Super Nintendo era titles.

So far I have to say that the transition from traditional 2D Seiken Densetsu gameplay works pretty freaking well. The combat feels good and fluid and the jumping mechanics are functional for both getting to aerial enemies and traversing the 3D set pieces. I am enjoying the scavenger hunt aspect of the world in finding all of the hidden treasure chests, glowing items on the ground and pots to smash. The world map is adequate and combined with the in screen messaging does a good job of directing you towards the objectives you need to be paying attention to. On some level this feels like maybe a throwback to the Playstation 2 era of Action RPGs like Dark Cloud, but with significantly better visuals.

The demo allows players to get to level 7 and I believe through the initial story of each of the characters you have chosen. I fully expect to play my way through all of that and then continue into the full release when it comes out on the Switch on April 24th. My hope is that I can get Animal Crossing out of my system enough to give it some free reign in a month when it officially is available. This game feels like I had been hoping the most recent Dragon Quest game would have felt like, which I realize doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than myself. Since I played the original game with the Sprite as my healer, the girl as a dragoon and the boy as a sword wielder… I figured going for Duran, Charlotte and Riesz was the closest I could get to that sort of a setup.

In other news that absolutely made the world feel better for a little while… we saw Tripod last night. For those who have not followed the blog for long we have a community of neighborhood cats that we feed. We have super original names for each of them, but the most important one to us is the three legged female calico cat that we refer to as “tripod”. We promise we would give her a proper name if we could ever befriend her and get her into the vet. She comes and goes irregularly and is also way the hell too stealthy to get caught on the front porch video camera. This is a horrible quality photo take from my wife’s phone, but after a few months of not seeing her and fearing the worst we saw her up on the porch going for the food dish. It does my heart good to know she is okay and has made it fine through the recent cold snaps. We have a feeling that both her and the cat we refer to as “three” are actually living in our backyard, but any attempts to locate where they are staying have been unsuccessful. I believe however that they might be living way down underneath our slightly elevated wooden deck.