And my brain proceeded to know absolutely NO chill this weekend.
(Okay technically most of "Can't hold me down 'cause you know I'm a fighter" was done last weekend, but it was still Outstanding⢠and had to be finished. The rest were all done in the time since Friday afternoon.)
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Off-the-Cuff First-impressions Review: Trials of Mana
I got Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana in the mail today and am surprised by just how excited I am about it. After the admittedly predictable letdowns of the Secret of ManaĀ āremakeā and the FFVIIIĀ āremaster,ā not to mention the iOS revision of the former, youād think Iād be jaded at this point.Ā
But! FFVII remake is Actually Good, and so far it looks like Trials of Mana is, while certainly lower budget, also Actually Good. The voice acting is kinda meh, but not bad enough to detract from the game in my opinion, and considering they are working with SNES-era scripts (the dialogue is 99% word-for-word the same as the more recent translation of the original SD3 game, so itās going to be a bit stilted anyway) itās really not bad at all.Ā
Besides, the actual meat of the game--the world, character and monster design, and the gameplay--is extremely solid and I have had very little trouble acclimating to it. Itās fun to play, it feels good to run around and explore the world and the battles are both very simplistic in a way that is familiar to an old fart like me and very satisfying in the way they function. One of the biggest weaknesses the original game had was absolutely horrendous input lag in some areas due to 1. the sheer size of the loaded map section, such as Rolante/Laurant, 2. The number of on-screen instructions the SNES had to process during battles, particularly during fights where you had massive sprites taking up the entire screen (the awful awful wall-guardianĀ āGenovaā [harhar] is probably the single hardest boss in the game purely due to input lag/drops; when you attack an enemy, even assuming your weapon swings when you tell it to, and thatās a bigĀ āif,ā the monster you are attacking is actually in a state which is several frames ahead of whatever state it visually appears to be in on-screen, making it extremely difficult to time your attacks properly to both defend and do optimal damage to what should have been a relatively minorĀ āminibossā fight). Trials of Mana, on the other hand, has none of those problems, simply thanks to more modern technology. So far every fight Iāve engaged in has been smooth and responsive as well as very visually appealing.
And wow is this game pretty. Itās not the most amazing example of the best graphical advances in gaming history, to be sure, but I genuinely donāt think that matters, as itās still beautifully detailed and really does look like they took the original graphics and magicked them into more modern models. The re-imaginings of each area and monster are very faithful to both the aesthetic and the layout of the original design while at the same creatively expanding on them; I've had no trouble finding my way around familiar maps or identifying the bestiary, but I have found a lot of added depth to them, such as the ability to jump down on rooftops and find hidden nooks that were just static backdrops or otherwise out of sight in the original. The areas are more layered and interactive, but very importantly, nothing is missing. Not even the dogs and cats, who still bark and meow at you if you talk to them. I feel like Iām being allowed to see and explore the original maps from angles I didnāt have access to in the past. It really makes the 16-year-old in me unbelievably happy, to be able to finally, actually see and do these things I could only wish for back then. For people who have never played it, itās probably a very pretty, if otherwise unremarkable experience, but for me itās the granting of a wish Iāve had for a long time, but never expected to happen.Ā
Similarly, I think a lot of people will look at the plot for this game and go,Ā ā...what?ā Because it really doesnāt seem to have been changed at all from the SNES version, aside from a few little tweaks to the dialogue here and there to ease the transition between some sections or correct for differences in game mechanics (of which there are only a few; again, this is definitely a remake--it remains the same game with the same mechanics at its core). This can lead to some pretty awkward interactions between characters, and at times it seems pretty clear that the voice actors werenāt given a lot of direction about the context of their lines. Itās not a bad story, but itās a very simply told one, and feels more like itās targeting 12~16 year-olds (which it probably is, to be fair) who might not care so much about nitpicking the semantics of the plot and character motivations. Which is to say, most of the characters who are not main protagonists or villains are painfully cardboard-flat. They do what they do and say what they say because it advances the plot for them to do and say those things. Elliot falls for aĀ ātrickā that Iām pretty sure most 4-year-olds would see through. The Bad Guys are 1-dimensionally evil, wanting to either destroy or take over the world, with the possible exception of Lugar and Koren who have slightly more complicatedĀ āIām your rivalā reasons. That leaves the complexity up to the protagonists to shoulder, and while I havenāt played that far into the game yet, thus far is is beat-for-beat and shot-for-shot the same as the original, so I expect that character-building will be left largely up to the player to mentally write in, especially since the game features light/dark class-changes as a feature of its progression. (I do kiiiind of hope that your choice in class changes has a more material effect on the endingās outcome, but I think that might be asking a bit too much from a remake of this sort.)
But the somewhat archaic plot and character arcs are not surprising and for me donāt take away any of the gameās charm. Nikita is still the best, the shop owners still dance inexplicably, the fact you can play a werewolf is badass, rabites are still cute, Don Perignon is still kind of a jerk. Iām very nervous/excited to get Busukaboo and Flammie and hope theyāll be as much fun now as they were then. And the whole world is so damn pretty, Iām just glad to be there.Ā
Iād be remiss if I didnāt mention the music. Iām not sure how much of a hand Hiroki Kikuta actually had in this remake, but the synth-orchestral arrangements of his originals are excellent so far. Theyāre both accessible/adaptable to the gameās sudden scene transitions (āNuclear Fusionā starts and ends just as cleanly) while being a richer version of the themes, keeping close to the original sound while making better use of all the instruments that the SNES just wasnāt capable of emulating well. It blends very well with the rest of the game and I hope that continues to be true.Ā
I do have nitpicks; while I know itās a popular mechanic, I donāt like theĀ āshift-lockā sort of dash using the left analog stick as both directional and a button. I think the camera controls are solid, but I do wish there wan a toggle-option to have the camera just follow over your shoulder wherever you run until you either run into a battle or turn it off. The character models donāt seem especially affected by anything except the most intense/pervasive lighting and sometimes feel oddly out of place, like Iām watching one of those old movies where an animated character comes into the Real World. Some of the monster designs seem cute-ified more than Iād like. And I canāt help but think that if the game can be this nice as a third-tier title for SE, what could it have been if theyād but the resources behind it that they obviously did with FF7? I understand why they didnāt, but itās hard not to wonder what it could have been if they had.Ā
Seiken Densetsu is one of the most fraught series in the history of home video games and the fact that itās even still around is something of a miracle, in my opinion. After the last...four?...titles following Legend of Mana, and the disappointment that was SD2ā²s (second!) remake, I really didnāt go into Trials of Mana with high hopes. I have been really, honestly pleasantly surprised. Even if youāre a diehard old-schooler who really doesnāt like modern JRPGs, if you have any nostalgia left for this series, you should give this one a go. I think it translated really well to 3D models, and what little it loses in the switch, it makes up for in playability. Itās not hard to pick up, itās easy on the eyes and ears, itās less grind-y than the original, and it doesnāt try to be more than what it is. Iāll probably always prefer the original, of course; there are too many memories attached to it for me, too many things that were groundbreaking at the time that are now old news or completely obsolete nowadays, and the new game certainly doesnāt push any modern boundaries. But itās worth checking out, and especially if youāve spent 20 years feeling let down by the Mana series, this might actually be the game you were hoping for, albeit maybe a decade late.Ā
Trials of Mana is pretty much one of my favourite RPGs, so the remake has me So Excited
I hope they have made new models for the class changes and such, I always loved how the sprites in the menu had different outfits!! I kinda went with the archmage class for Angela here