If you make a beeline for certain abilities, you may neglect your talents in other areas, for example. Each level-up gives you points to allocate towards one of five stats, which not only affect your proficiency in said stats but also what skills and moves you’ll learn. This is all compounded further when you take the game’s character building aspects into account. Combos are simple to execute but feel satisfying and weighty and toss in spells, character switching, and special moves, and the game feels not only fast-paced and fluid, but surprisingly dynamic. Each character has their own, distinct moves but use the same button combinations based on a mixture of weak and strong attacks. Action games have progressed a long, long way in the quarter-century since Seiken Densetsu 3’s original release, and while Trials of Mana doesn’t necessarily push the envelope in the way a Platinum title might, it still brings a very enjoyable and updated experience to the table. Really though, Trials saves most of its overhauls for the gameplay side of things, where they’re sorely needed. (If you’re a dub lover though, be warned that the snippets I heard were… not great.) The only knock on the audiovisual end of things is really the English voice acting, but I switched over to the Japanese voice track soon after starting and enjoyed the A-list cast there. Meanwhile, the game remasters Hiroki Kikuta’s classic soundtrack to charming effect, offering a variety of mellow and pleasant tunes to lose yourself in (and if you don’t like the remastered versions, you can switch over to the original). Enemy designs retain the charm of their SNES counterparts, and the jump to 3D allows some breathing room and variety in level design that goes much appreciated. What about the things that can - and should - be updated? Graphically, the game is bright and vivid, with a distinct art style that’s part cartoony and part anime. While hardly the most egregious writing the world has ever seen, it’s definitely not the game’s strong suit (especially given some odd localization choices like… giving Charlotte UwU speak for every single line).īut that’s expected to be pretty similar, given it’s a remake and all. While the fact that the ultimate antagonist (and final dungeon/bosses) changes depending on who you pick as your lead is neat, the broad story is flaky enough to allow for these changes, making it the overall plot somewhat flimsy. Individual character arcs vary in quality from passable to middling, with generally thin plots and simple motivations transplanted from the original. Plot-wise, this flexibility of character choice informs most of the game’s story structure, as you’ll witness your main character’s origin story before setting off with them and eventually encountering your other characters of choice. (For the record, my playthrough starred Riesz, Hawkeye, and Angela.) Toss in a huge number of branching class lines for each characters and you have a very strong replay value for such a linear JRPG, making an already nice 20-30 hour experience have the potential to extend much longer. There’s a pretty decent variety of options, from the brawny Duran to the werewolf Kevin to many more, and depending on which main character you pick, you’ll have one of three different slight variations on the game’s plotline and Big Bad. Trials of Mana is a game featuring six different characters, of whom you play through the game with three of them. And in the wake of both finally releasing the original in the West and a very disappointing Secret of Mana remake just a couple years back, it begs the question: why remake this game at all, and not simply be content with the original? Once one of the Super Famicom games most sorely missed on Western shores (Seiken Densetsu 3), Squeenix surprised the world last June by not just releasing the game with a localization as part of the Collection of Mana three-pack, but revealing a full-on 3D remake due this year. We’re here to talk about Square Enix’s other remake of a mid-’90s RPG that came out in April, Trials of Mana. Obviously, however, we’re not here to talk about Final Fantasy VII Remake. Figuring out how to fit an all-time classic into the modern gaming landscape is no easy task, but in April of this year Square Enix lay it all on the table to release one of the highest profile remakes ever released, garnering a mixture of praise and derision that shows the foibles that such games inevitably fall into no matter the intention. You have to thread a needle between remaining faithful to what made the original great and updating it to fit modern sensibilities, choosing what archaic charms to keep and what to throw away. Remaking a game is always a sticky business.
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