Talking to your cactus after a quest will result in him writing a small diary about your exploits. When you toddle back, you are privy to several side activities that are a mixture of quaint, interesting, and complex. This charm permeates throughout the experience, especially back at home. This was originally released in a time where voice acting wasn’t the norm, but it is so well written that any and all emotions are conveyed perfectly. It helps greatly that the dialogue in Legend of Mana is top-notch stuff. These are worth discovering for yourself, and I will not ruin them here. You can have a partner with you at all times, and based on your partner, and the situation, unique dialogue will occur. What surprised me the most was the attention to detail. Heck, you could theoretically beat the game in a few hours without even realizing it. Many are missable, and without a guide, it’s unlikely you’ll find them all. No two playthroughs will be the same, and not all side quests will be accessible your first time around. The sense of discovery is what sucked me into Legend of Mana. This is a game about discovery, and going in mostly blind is the best way to go. I won’t get into any of them, because I’ve already said too much. Most of these quests have recurring characters which help tie them together into mini-narratives, but Legend of Mana also has 3 distinct side-quest arcs which drive home the power of its storytelling. There are 67 side quests in Legend of Mana, and each and every one of them is memorable. Oh, and there is also a subplot about a soulless brussel sprout with a sore tummy. How about a jewel thief who rips out the core of jewel people (basically their hearts), murdering a knight in mourning who recently lost his partner? All the while you are aiding a crazy dwarf-like detective in a village of mountain nuns. Next the village of Domina could be attacked by rejected child wizards and their army of pumpkins. One moment you could be fighting bandits with a stingy Bunny merchant who insists on rewarding you with the privilege of purchasing overpriced goods from him. These sidequests, however, are fantastic. In a sense, Legend of Mana is built on sidequests and not much else. Legend of Mana is more like a complexly interwoven collection of fairy tales filled with memorable characters, moments, and arcs that, if you let them, engross you in deeply personal turmoil and/or adventures. This might seem like a negative, I mean, what is a JRPG without a compelling, multilayered tapestry of vague concepts and characters congealed into one amorphous mass? Legend of Mana throws away these preconceptions and instead demands that you pay attention to the journey – not the destination. It’s not complicated, it’s just not that interesting and I forgot what I was doing, and why, fairly quickly. Not-Yggdrasil traps the entirety of the globe in inanimate objects known as Artifacts and calls on you to restore mana to the planet by believing places and people exist enough that they do. This process started to drain the world of Mana, which is bad. But why are you playing? Surely there is a plot-like device driving you towards an end goal only you can reach? Well, kind of…but also not really.Ī big tree known as the Mana Tree was once worshipped, then a big war happened, then it wasn’t worshipped, then it started to die. Bish, bash, bosh, you got yourself a house and you’re ready to play. You plonk your cursor over the area of land you want to exist in, it zooms in, and you plonk down a letterbox. Once you have gruelled over these life-changing decisions, you have a fancy view of the world map. Finally, depending on your starting weapon, you will come equipped with a low-level starter beatstick and a Special Technique for good measure – more on those in a bit. Your name defaults as YOU, so changing that is pretty much a must. Your gender changes the occasional piece of dialogue, although not by much. You pick a gender (good luck figuring out which is which), a name, and a starting weapon. When I booted it up, it became apparent, almost immediately, that this game is nothing like any Mana game or JRPG I had ever played. Well, that entirely depends on what you expect, and what you want, from Legend of Mana. LEGEND OF MANA COOP PCThankfully, Square Enix, in celebration of Mana’s 30th Anniversary, has remastered this mysteriously absent title for Playstation, Switch, and PC – what a time to be alive, right? In 1999 Legend of Mana was released on the ol’ PSX, just not for us dirty Europeans. The music, the visuals, the gameplay – they were, at the time, out of this world. Even though only one ‘Mana’ game was released in Europe – the Secret of Mana – it was enough to leave a lasting impression on my teeny-tiny Toasty brain.
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