Sword of Mana

[Dracos]

Boy what a way to start a vacation.  This game is fifth game in the Seiken Denestu series (technically, it's a remake of the first, but I think it is different enough to consider it it's own game).  Most of the reviews I've heard of this game have been raving, and there is quite a bit to rave about...  but it's no where near as good a game as many a rant seems to say.  Instead, it comes across as a just average game with a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones.  Such as the monster design.

I must wonder what the guy who was assigned to this was doing.  It couldn't have been monster design given almost every single monster sprite was ripped from previous games directly.  A little more creativity in this regard would've been nice as even though they ripped old enemies, a lot of them simply lacked the life and vibrance of their previous incarnations, not having quite the same movement and attack range or, in my observation, the AI to use them.  Instead, to create an atmosphere of difficulty, they produced an overly complex range of weapon and element defense and weaknesses for every monster.  In other words, some monsters were all but completely immune to attacks by certain weapons or spells.  This occurred often enough to achieve two effects on me as I played through.  The first, obviously, was an annoyance at constantly having to swap weapons in order to damage enemies (or in some cases, swap weapons AND magic).  The other was a realization that due to how they built the weapon leveling up system, the absolute best way to level a weapon was to go hunt down a slow enemy who was immune to it.  By just striking them a few hundred times in a row (hitting the button as fast as possible), you could quickly build a weapon's skill level while dealing out zero damage again and again.  Notably, after a while, even the fact that the enemies are technically immune to damage from that weapon, you'll eventually kill them by random chance of breaking past their defense and dealing some tiny amount of damage.  Overall, a poor showing in the monster department.  I think I counted one interesting new non-boss monster in the entire lot and it appeared a grand total of once, easily slain like all the rest in the same time honored stab and ignore everything else.

The leveling curve in this game was smooth.  Incredibly so.  I'd almost point to it as an example of how all leveling curves should be save that it errored on the side of too easy to level.  Even ignoring level up commands (you have to enter a menu before you level up), I stayed easily ahead of the curve the entire game.  Checking faqs I'd often find myself 5-10 levels ahead of 'recommended' level, by doing nothing more than just relaxingly slaughtering enemies as they appeared and moving along screen by screen.  Additionally, this provided an interesting insight as one could delay level gaining for however long one wished...and instantly go to max hp/mp when one chose to take levels.  What did I do with this?  Levels became a sort of elixer as I traveled through the game.  I ignored inns altogether as soon as I realized this, just using the quite frequent gold mana statues that restore everything to max and the stored "level gains' to be able to quickly restore myself and make myself even more powerful whenever I needed to.  Further on the level gaining, was that it could be split between various classes.  A clever idea and fairly well implemented save for the complete lack of any instructional information in the game on it and no classes resulting from simple specialization in fighter.  Clever, but generally the whole level gaining angle of this game could use some fine tuning to improve the general playability of the game.

The game stole a lot from Legend of Mana and did so in an interesting fashion.  I really don't know WHY the whole house effect was hauled in from there but at least they cleaned up a lot of the features of it.  The forge came back again, but nicely they'd done a rather good job of fixing it up so it was almost convienent to use.  I say almost, because while the redesign was far more intuitive and informative, developing a good weapon generally involved camping several enemy locations for hours on end and the best weapons and armor required slaughtering literally thousands of the same enemy and then several hundred of a few other types.  Clever idea, but I have to say it didn't work well in practice.  The little cactus came back too, also improved from that game.  Instead of only having a memory of the last quest you completed and not recording anything you did before that if you finished multiple quests in a row, it now would allow you to tell the little cactus everything you've previously done so he could write down his little writeups of it.  Unfortunately, it still could use improvement as you have to walk out of the house every time for each quest before he'll write down another.  Having the cactus write down every quest you were on would've been a lot better.  Treant returned again and was for some reason cut back.  He required collecting the now far more rare seeds and giving him two just for a single fruit or vegatable and no extra seeds.  Needless to say, this made transferring the seeds into the all important for forging and tempering vegatables and fruits extremely tedious.  There may or may not have been a monster raising subquest.  There was a handy selection of meats I picked up during the game that I am quite at a loss of what to do with and never saw heads or tails of any explanation of them save for the fact they look a lot like the same monster meats from legend of Mana.

The music, well, I've heard a lot of raving on it but really didn't find it anything special.  Maybe my ears are just spoiled but I turned it off after a while.

The art of the game really doesn't get much beyond middle super nintendo era.  It's okay, but nothing special.  You are in for a more glamorious show if you go look at the much older Seiken Denestsu 3.

Now, we have to get to what really hurt the game in my opinion: The rushed storytelling.  I understand they were fleshing out a rather old game and trying to make it fit, but the way that things just fit together was crude and almost insulting at points.  The game played like it was on rails most the time, making the various added side-quests and 'missions' feel completely and utterly out of place.  It didn't help that they almost to a quest consisted of fetch quests, listen quests, or pay money quests (FIND THE GEODES!  You can hunt down eight little one pixel sparkles of light scattered about the entire world with no hints, right?).  The additional characterization was painful for a story telling perspective.  Often there was little to no lead in for plot twist they'd reveal and a disturbing lack of pacing and depth to the whole telling that made it all fall flat.  I couldn't picture the 'Hero' feeling sorry for the guy who killed his parents, razed his home, and imprisioned him in the arenas for ten years.  It just didn't make sense.  And whoever came up with having a leader of a country acting as the moral 'good guy' to his people named "Dark Lord" should be shot.  Who the fuck picks a title of 'Dark Lord' and tries to rule by subtle manipulation of the people?  Utterly retarded.  The constant pity trips were a pain in the arse too.  "Oh, woe, we killed someone who has been murdering hundreds of people.  Oh woe, we killed vampire who was having people turned into animals.  Oh woe, we killed the reincarnated emperor of the dark ages who pulled himself back from the dead just to conquer the world.  We are such wicked people."  Whoever let this get past basic scripting should have a special place in hell reserved for them.

That aside, they did do some nice and not nice things with the battle system.  I loved at first the revisions they made.  Strike anytime instead of waiting for 'readiness', build up your charged bar by attacking regularly, and just the general feel of it was nice, fast moving, and fun.  Kudos to them for that.  This blended nicely with the clever magic system that allowed spellcasting without menu circulating for a single spirit at a time.  Unfortunately, alongside this they decided to make some...less than wise decisions.  For one, though it wasn't really in the original, standard SD charge ups would've been nice.  I found it really drab having only one sword 'special' move that was pretty lame from beginning to end (resulting in me almost never using it).  And their way to 'encourage' the use of other weapons was just poor all around.  Weapon switching in the secret of mana games is generally a bit of a slowdown, something one hopes not to have to do regularly in the pitch of battle as it really ruins the flow.  This game requires you to do that by having enemy immunities to weapons, thus completely ruining the fast paced effect of the battle system.  Having dozens upon dozens of 'door blocks' which have the same requirements didn't help making dungeon crawling that fun either (Especially since they restore making you have to repeat it if you want to walk back the same way).  The magic system, while clever, is handicapped by the association with weapons.  Instead of easily being a ranged or short move, they simply have the exact same attack range and trajectory of the weapon you are wielding.  How does this cause a problem?  If I walk up to one of those door blocks, I have to first switch my magic to the appropriate spell, then switch my weapon to something long ranged because the magic will not go far enough with a short ranged weapon to trigger it.  Then after that I change it back...until encountering yet another instance of it.  This is even more of a pain with, and they are there, enemies who are immune to everything but one or two spell types requiring doing this kind of stuff in the middle of battle and slowing down the flow terribly.  It's a somewhat fun system when these elements aren't brought into play, but the game brings them up quite a bit and really drags down what should be stellar battle system by doing so.

So, even though this game had it's fun points, looking over it I'm left saying it's nothing better than a mediocre showing.  The art is largely ripped from previously drawn stuff and a lot of the stuff, while creative, is just mediocrely implemented.  If you are looking to see how they did it, take a chance on it.  Design wise it has some nifty ideas.  If you are looking for a great Secret of Mana type game, go grab Seiken Denestsu 3.  You'll have twice the fun, easily.