Legend of Mana is the best game Squaresoft made on the PS1, the pinnacle of the Mana series, and probably their best game ever made.
If you played Legend of Mana once, as like a ten year old, and immediately exclaimed "lol this isn't secret of mana this is bullshit", you're basically a joke of a poster. There's a lot of people like this, perpetuating the myth that the game wasn't any good because it immediately put people off ten+ years ago because it wasn't Seiken Densetsu 2 part 3. Analyze the game with a level head and you'll see where it shines.
Although some games don't work when looked at from a reductionist standpoint, let's break Legend of Mana down into categories.
Music: Does Legend of Mana have garbage music? Well, no. The composer was Yoko Shimomura, who you would know from all the Kingdom Hearts games, Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, Little King's Story, and a whole lot more--and this is her best original soundtrack ever. It's a sprawling 50+ song soundtrack with virtually no duds, excellent synth samples, and lots of solid emotional notes.
Here's one of my favourite tracks;
Youtube translates it as "The Great Virtue of Gathering Mana's Spirit. This is a moving piano place with interesting composition, a great piano sample and sound quality, and is used at a perfect place in the game.
Here's some kickin' rad fighting music;
"The Darkness Nova". It's high octane and driving synth buttrock, which is about what you expect from fighting. Synth quality is a little bit lower here, but the composition is great. Actually, it reminds me a lot of Mystic Quest's better rock tracks, which is a huge compliment.
Graphics: Legend of Mana is pretty inarguably one of the pinacles of 2D, sprite-based graphics on consoles. You've got
Excellent dialog portraits,
Cool large boss sprites,
and another,
Beautifully rendered backgrounds,
great use of colour,
and another, and of course,
great concept art. I don't really want to spoil anything here, but some locations like the final dungeon, the Bejeweled City, the seaside town, the Dudbear town, and a few others are spectacular.
Combat: Legend of Mana has truly excellent combat. The major decision they made that pays off is to get rid of being able to attack up and down, effectively making the game a true linear combat system; orient yourself to be on the same plane as the enemy, and attack. This makes combat feel significantly more precise that the earlier Mana games, where it was largely sloppy.
What kind of combat and combat-related mechanics do you have?
Well, you've got:
- You can discover at least 30 different combat moves (the game calls them abilities), largely by using existing combinations of other moves. This is really cool because it encourages experimentation and switching up your abilities. You start with a few basic skills; let's say Jumping and Retreating. Press jump, your character jumps. Press retreat, your character retreats. Press them together and s/he does a back-roll handspring. Combine high-jump with back-roll and you get a full backflip. Combine back-roll with back-flip and you've got flip-kick. At first you sort of intuit how skills come together, and you're generally rewarded with an ability that makes total sense. The best part is that this isn't grindy at all, doing this simply a few times will unlock the more advanced moves for use on your character.
- There are maybe 10 different classes of weapons. Battleaxe? We've got that. Bow and Arrows? We've got that. Just like that other Mana games, you've got an extraordinary leeway in how you want to play the game. Maybe you'd like to master all the skills, of course. Weapons bring with them techniques; techniques are special weapon moves which combine the unique attributes of the weapon you're using with the unique attributes of the abilities you've unlocked above. The game is excellent at integrating its manifold systems together and letting you use as few or as many as you'd like to use.
- Experience sharing is an interesting thing. When you kill enemies, they drop experience crystals. Your ability to share experience with combat partners depends on who picks what up. Very neat and simultaneously frustrating, just the way we like those kinds of mechanics.
- Weapons can be crafted. Your first playthrough of the game you probably won't bother, since you can use the stock weapons, upgrade them by buying new ones at stores, and move on. But if you so desire, you can multiply the strength of your end-game weapons by a factor of ten by using the awesome crafting system. Like crafting systems in most game's, Legend of Mana's is a little obtuse at the start (I won't hear anyone praise SMT's walkthrough-requiring demon fusion systems and criticize this one). The gist is that you apply raw materials which have obvious grades and organic items which don't and in the end you get a new weapon. If you want to engage in MMO-like min-maxing, the option is there. You can spends dozens of hours doing this. If you just want a quick boost, that option is there too. Awesome!
- Where do you get organic items, you ask? Excellent question. Remember that backyard orchard I posted in the screenshots above? There. You get seeds in the course of the game, and each seed matures, subject to some conditions, into a different fruit. So that's a second integrated crafting system to go along with the weapon crafting.
- So this pretty much describes all the aspects of the single-player combat system, but wait, there's more! As a free bonus, there's tons more you can do.
- First, two player co-op including a rudimentary form of character import is in the cards. Some might say "but Secret of Mana had three player co-op". I've never used the SNES Multitap, but I think if the difference between Legend of Mana being brilliant and Legend of Mana being garbage is support for a multitap accessory, especially in 2010, you guys are nuts. In the mean time, there's also a vs battle arena if you want to use it.
- Second, you often get a story related partner. These are of mixed utility. Some of them get in your way, some of them actively contribute to combat.
- Third, you can bring a pet with you. Although they're rarely required (I think the fossil digging quest might be the only non-pet quest that requires one), the system is deep. It combines a Pokemon-style daycare system with a wide variety of diverse pets. There's about 50 pet types, and raising them is enjoyable if you choose to partake in it.
- Fourth, you can craft a golem from scratch. This is probably the deepest system in Legend of Mana. You start by assembling great materials to give him high HP and high attack. This is basically like weapon crafting, but more expensive. But where the golem really shines is that you get to "program" him. By combining basic commands, you get various final combat attack patterns; specific skills have specific ranges. Very cool, very tough to master, and like raising pets and crafting weapons, totally option.
- I would be amiss if I didn't mention that the game has the best NG+ mode of any game ever made. If you want to play it like Chrono Trigger and use NG+ to steamroll over the game, feel free. If, however, you want a little challenge, there are two additional difficulty levels. I should warn you, it will take you 15+ minutes to kill the basic beginning of game enemies in the highest difficulty if you don't have an optimal crafted weapon. These modes really put your mastery of all the games mechanics to a test.
- I very deliberately left the world design feature until last. New areas appear on the world map when you use certain items in certain locations. The closer you put the items to your home base, the easier the enemies are and the worse the treasure and sold items from shops are. So building the world requires not only finding the items in question, but also placing them effectively. If you want to ignore this feature, ignore it. Stick stuff anywhere. If you want to really min/max the game, you'll have to master this. Speedrunners will note that putting the last dungeon right next to your home base is the only plausible way to complete a weakling run. There's also a system of elemental affinities involved here but it's one of the game's few underdeveloped mechanics.
Story and Quest Design: Legend of Mana doesn't have one storyline, it has three. You can do any of them or all of them. I won't spoil what they are, but each storyline consists of about ten quests taking you across as many locations, and you will certainly stumble on the genesis of each when you begin the game. Each story is pretty involved and requires you to get to know several characters and follow them. Where most RPGs have certain character vignettes in a town (say, FF6 with the injured soldier writing letters to his girlfriend on the Veldt), Legend of Mana logically extends this by showing you that the other characters in this world are on their own adventures like you're on yours. Follow their antics through towns and intervene to help them.
As you complete one or more of the story lines, the Mana Tree blooms in the background, bringing with it an inevitable final confrontation and the beginning of a new destruction/creation cycle. This is very consistent with the cyclical nature of history in other Mana games, and if you actually liked the stories of the earlier games, you'll like the story here. One storyline follows the story of the Dragon Gods--a story which will involve you dying and being brought through the underworld itself, one follows two star-crossed lovers--including through the carcass of a giant dead worm-God, and one follows the bizarre species of Jewel Beasts.
The quest design here is excellent. Some quests are your typical explore, combat, boss combat, story scene layout. There's nothing wrong with that, since virtually everything in all the rest of the Mana series let alone every other RPG does this. But some quests are truly unique. Consider the Dudbear language--at one quest, you agree to sell a bunch of lamps as a travelling salesman to help a guy impress the woman he thinks he's in love with (his romantic misadventures are a whole quest chain in the game and it's genuinely hilarious stuff). To do this, you need to learn the Dudbear language! Dub duba duda dubba! Dubba dadda? Dada dadda! The cool thing about this is that each conversation tree in Dudbear has a lot of leeway, so it's kind of like a non-English version of something like Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol in that there are many ways to steer the conversation to sell the lamps.
Or have you ever went on an archaeological dig with some students to help find parts of a bone? You'll have to do it in this game, and once you've assembled the bone, place it on the world map to create the next dungeon you'll be going into.
Have you ever let a stoned fortune teller trap you in a dream world? Noticed your pet cactus ran away? Helped a positively terrible merchant sell overpriced junk to unsuspecting citizens? Composed poems to help a guy get hooked up? Sure there's no Santa Claus and so it misses the opportunity for a quirk fourth-wall break like in Secret of Mana, but the quest design here is varied, filled with developed characters, and engaging.
Also you can play as a boy or a girl which is an option that more games should have.
Overall: Legend of Mana holds up better than any other game on a technical level from the PS1 era. The graphics and music are legendary for a reason. The much maligned game design is frankly never criticized in detail, just dismissed, and in the mean time I've demonstrated that the game can be as simple or as complicated as you make it, that every combat and crafting system integrates with one another very well, and that the game is rewarding and deep if you choose to make it so. The quest design is varied and despite criticisms of the game being story-light, if you realize that the story is about the characters of the vivid, lush world, instead of being a self-important angry teen saves the world quest, the story is actually one of the better ones both on the PS1 and in an RPG in general. Despite major changes to the Mana formula, it keeps intact the spirit and far moreso than the later much worse games in the series, provides a blueprint for how to modernize some of the Mana gameplay beyond the 16-bit era.
GameSpite readers will note that Jeremy Parish named the game the #1 most underappreciated game of all time and discussed it in GameSpite Quarterly #6. I won't transcribe what he wrote and I don't agree with him 100%, but relative to the hate the game gets, the title of #1 most underappreciated rings true for me.
I don't want to say "haters gonna hate", but virtually everyone who hates the game played it once a decade ago, didn't get it, and immediately bitched that it didn't match their expectations for a Mana sequel. If you have the maturity to come to terms with that and actually play the game for what it is, it is a masterpiece.
