Legend of Mana Review

Oh the 90s, what an absolutely wild time. People still hadn’t come down off the powder laden 80s, developing children’s programming that was simultaneously amazing and also far too mature, though we’ll let Rocko’s Modern Life slide for the sake of the phone sex workers out there. Everything was fair game, and games were no different. While we were still riding the “here’s an Italian plumber that’s probably experiencing a bad acid trip” wave, developers were still experimenting with mechanics and narrative delivery. Legend of Mana sort of neatly falls into this category. Somewhere between an acid trip and a cornucopia of mechanical ideas, it’s certainly not your run-of-the-mill JRPG – if you can even classify it as that. With this new remake having landed, it must answer the same questions as all of the other remakes that have been launching recently: is it any good and who is it for? Is it for those who played it when it first released and are wanting to relive the experience, or is it something completely new players can enjoy, too?

Let’s start by my failing to try and describe to you how this game works, because truth be told for better or worse this game is unique so try and keep up. You get dropped into an empty world with a mailbox. You plant that bad boy down somewhere that looks homey and your home sprouts from the undisturbed soil. Where you plant your home actually does have some effect on your game experience but we’ll get to that later. Your home comes complete with a bed, a miniature cactus that is a hobbyist writer, and a study that houses all of your collected info in your playthrough. You aren’t necessarily the main character in this world, but you’re really great at showing up where other people want to get your help.

How do you get to these places, you ask? Well, you simply obtain artifacts and then plant them in the ground and watch them grow into full-blown locations to explore right before your eyes. Remember how your home location can change your experience a bit? Well, this is where that comes into play. Depending on where you drop an artifact, the elemental affinity of that resulting area, and the areas surrounding it, will change. The greater an elemental affinity a location has, the more likely the enemies you find will be of that nature, quests might become available, and more. The game doesn’t exactly explain much of this particularly well, however, and it might seem more important than it is because of it but it’s arguably something to be more hung up on for subsequent playthroughs, which they expect you to do.

Once you’ve got your green thumb put to work and you have your first areas to explore, you do just that. Each area has various quests that can become available to you, and depending on which you take it will determine how the story unfolds before converging on a shared ending. If you’ve played or know about the much more recent Octopath Traveller, it’s not drastically dissimilar to that but with a properly convergent ending. While that is a welcome difference from Octopath, the individual stories you’ll be briefly taking part in are almost entirely too simple, and uninspiring. There are a few well-done quests for certain, however, and a couple of good laughs along the way, but even for its time the writing and characters are below average.

Several of the quests you’ll embark on will also see you teaming up with other formidable, and sometimes less than formidable, allies who will join you in combat. Combat in Legend of Mana is perhaps the worst-aged part of the game, sadly. It’s a real-time actiony combat style that’s about as rudimentary as you’d imagine for a game this age, and just as janky if not more so. Each weapon you wield has combos you can dish out that can include light attacks, heavy attacks, as well as jumping attacks. Using them enough results in learning new attacks and new special attacks that you can then use in battle. You can also use various forms of magic if you wish, though I actually forgot it was even an option until nearly the end game despite it being pretty effective in certain situations.

The combat takes place on planes similar to a side-scrolling beat’m’up like Streets of Rage, and if you know the frustrations of thinking you’re on the right plane but still missing your target, Legend of Mana is like that but worse. What’s equally frustrating is that there seems to be a fair amount of input latency as well as input buffering. I asked community members who played the original if they remember that being the case to which they said they thought maybe it was, but I can only tell you what my experience on the PC remake was, and both were certainly present. It results in aiming in the wrong way before attacks, jumping instead of attacking, using the wrong combo, or having attacks in the wrong order, etc. Thankfully, Legend of Mana is not what you’d call a difficult game, so while the combat isn’t as tight as it probably should be, it’s not something that will likely get you killed much if at all. You also have the option to turn off encounters altogether, aside from story-specific ones of course. This is a blessing as you’ll definitely be running through areas multiple times and grinding isn’t a necessity in Legend of Mana.

At some point in your…journey I guess we’ll call it, you’ll unlock the ability to both do some crafting and monster ranching. Crafting allows you to build instruments, of all things, which can be used for wielding magic in combat as well as luring elementals closer to you for item collection should they appear out in the field. The items that you collect from those elementals are in turn used for further crafting, and as you can imagine those elemental affinities you got whilst planting your artifacts will affect what you’re likely to run into. Should you be so lucky, you’ll be tasked with choosing what kind of tune to play, and up to two instruments that combine to play the elementals the song of your people. If they’re interested, they’ll move closer, if you accidentally play Wonderwall, they’ll start running in the opposite direction. In the same way, you’ll run into elementals you’ll run into monster eggs with monster legs sticking out the bottom.

You don’t need to play them any music, but instead, you’ll lay certain food bait around them and wait for them to overindulge before snatching them in their sleep. Each egg is a certain type, leading to different possibilities upon hatching back at your barn. Monsters can be brought with you as combat aids, and each have their own special abilities and stats. Similar to Monster Hunter Stories, you can also choose to send them out on expeditions of sorts, where they can gain experience while you’re off doing other things. You can also, should you wish, have them aimlessly wander around your property to graze, just in case you’re feeling particularly benevolent that day like a free-range chicken farmer. I did make some use of a couple of monsters I found in my playthrough but they weren’t much help in battle thanks to needing a fair amount of levelling to be remotely useful. It may be, perhaps, that like having other allies in combat, it’s probably more useful at higher difficulty levels should you go that route.

Speaking of levelling, one of the more bothersome aspects of Legend of Mana for me was how experience and items are obtained during combat. During is the operative word here as Legend of Mana is one of the rare handful of games that has you collecting experience orbs and items during the combat itself. That’s usually only a minor inconvenience, but the experience and items both will disappear after a relatively short period of time. Sometimes in combat, you aren’t able to get to them in time while you’re still fighting, resulting in the loss of experience and items. This also makes levelling your monsters or other allies difficult as you rely on the AI more or less accidentally walking over the experience orbs. Technically you can plug in a second controller to also control your ally, though not your monsters, which means you can at least have some control over the process albeit a bit of a bothersome process. Speaking of that second controller, as you can imagine it does mean that you and a friend could play in coop when you have another ally in the part to control. There is also, believe it or not, PVP multiplayer for those who have files handy with characters to bring into the arena. While I didn’t get a chance to try this out, I was definitely a bit surprised when I happened across it all the same.

Depending on who you ask, Legend of Mana’s combination of pixel sprites and more painted backdrops will either be praised or booed out of the room. While I do love sprite work of nearly any kind, it’s usually best done when taking into account that players today aren’t on CRTs, and so without the help of scanlines, the sprites might not always look that great or detailed. With that being said, I didn’t hate what I saw here, though I do think the sprite work could have been updated a bit more to not be so jarring against the painted backgrounds. The music, however, is universally wonderful and is highlighted by the ability to either have the game deliver you the original tracks or the updated orchestral versions. The music does occasionally get a bit too hyped for what’s happening on screen, and sometimes you’ll hear the same looped track for longer than you might like, but it doesn’t much change the fact that the soundtrack is a particular stand out.

Legend of Mana is undoubtedly a unique game, and sometimes that can result in a bit of a confusing experience. It often felt to me like there were maybe one too many ideas being worked into the game, leaving little room for many of those ideas to breathe. It definitely seems that, for those who end up enjoying this unconventional experience, much of the value in Legend of Mana is in playing it a few times over to see and do everything you can figure out. I don’t doubt that completionists could spend hundreds of hours accomplishing such a task. For those who never played it originally, Legend of Mana might not land particularly well despite its pedigree. For those who did play it on its original release, the polish and quality of life changes could be enough to convince them to plant their mailbox and save the world one more time.