This is gonna be a long one. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this unless it's on a pretty steep discount. This is probably the most disappointing release of the year for me.

To preface this, one of my all-time favorites is Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana). I have fond memories of, like many folks, playing a fan-translated ROM on ZSNES or whatever back in the day. That game aged very well, and I'm glad it finally came out over here! You should play that! If you play the remake, use the Japanese dub.

However, this game ain't it.

First, the positive: This is a super pretty game which, at least from an aesthetic standpoint, pays a welcome homage to the classics. The way the music blends in-and-out of battle is a nice touch. Careena and Morley are fun characters.

Sadly, it only goes downhill from there.

The first thing I noticed was that it failed to bring anything original to the series. An early boss is a literal clone of an early boss from Secret of Mana. At first, I thought, "Oh, cool, a throwback boss! That's fun." However, several boss encounters in this game are essentially recycled bosses from other Mana games. This is weird.

A major character/story event is blatantly telegraphed, constantly, for hours prior to it happening. Once said event happened, I rolled my eyes so hard they nearly fell out of my head. Mana games have never really been "known for" their story, but good god, man. There are multiple cutscenes where an antagonist or other major character does a climactic thing, the party responds accordingly, and then for some reason the character in question just... goes away somehow? A major character death is followed by the killer just... going away somehow off-screen. Then the party's like "oh no, he got away" ...like, what?

Outside of the previously mentioned Careena and Morley, the other three characters have insufferable voice acting. The child character, oddly enough, was the least annoying of the three. I don't believe this is a fault of the actors but rather bad direction. Why does Palamena refuse to speak any contractions, and why does she sometimes speak in alliterative sentences and sometimes she doesn't? I can't stand it. There's a part where she acts completely out of character and that's the only time I enjoyed her. Again, not the actors, but the direction. If I have to hear Val shout "GRRRRRRIZLYYYY!!!" over the game's pretty music one more time I'm going to drink bleach.

The side quests in the game are absolute trash. They are nearly 100% MMO fetch quests. Go here, kill thing, come back. Go there, get 5 rabite steaks, come back. After about 20 hours I started to skip them entirely. The rewards are almost always nothing to write home about.

The game incorporates an active/passive ability slotting system using "ability seeds." This, if it were done with more care, could have been an interesting idea with a lot of potential for synergies. However, aside from "this gives you more crit chance" + "this lowers their defense when you crit" you won't be doing much. I would just stuff stats into most of these slots. This is just another disappointing missed opportunity.

While the job system is interesting on the surface, there isn't very much variety to it. Many jobs play very nearly identically.

The party AI is absolutely dreadful. Just... awful. Your party will not heal you unless you are nearly dead unless you explicitly set them to "only heal/full defense" mode. They try to sneakily side-step this by sometimes tossing in guest characters that you can't control, won't die, and will toss heals now and then. This just feels like a lazy band-aid solution. This came to a head on a late-game, otherwise boring mid-boss that would fire off slow-moving projectiles that sleep on contact. If the character is asleep, the boss would perform a massive lifesteal on them. However, because the AI is so braindead they would just stand there, get hit, fall asleep, and heal the boss. I got past it but only after being stuck in the fight for nearly an hour. If you Google the "Vampire" boss you'll see that I'm not alone on this one.

The environmental traversal starts quite promising. Early on, many of the environments are quite vast and open. They even give you an adorable land mount! After the first act of the game, however, you get the ability to travel by sea. This results in the game losing all of the large explorable zones. Things become extremely formulaic and boring: Zip to a town at light-speed, watch some cutscenes, do the dungeon. It's a really weird shift. It almost feels like someone else entirely took over this portion of the game halfway through development.

Speaking of environments..."Grizzly Syrup" is an absurdly stupid collectible. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to pepper the pretty environments with bright orange floating egg-shaped blobs should rethink their life choices. I feel like I'm playing freakin' Crash Bandicoot or something. The game is full of chests that contain absolute trash, so why couldn't they just put the Grizzly Syrup rewards into these chests? The rewards aren't all that crazy.

I was beginning to lose my interest in this game in the latter part of the third act. I began a very tedious dungeon with a lot of unnecessary and, again, tedious traversal mechanics. There was a pretty easy and kind of pointless mid-boss. No save point. Weird. Okay, so I continue through the dungeon. I get to what looks like the boss arena at the end of the dungeon. Still no save point? Well, I start fighting the boss, get it down to 20% HP remaining, and then it freezes in place before blinking out of existence. Boss music kept playing, health bar was on the screen... but nope! He was gone for good.

I reloaded my save and I was at the beginning of the dungeon. 45 minutes lost. I was fed up enough by that point that I uninstalled.

I can go on and on:

- Environmental traversal mechanics are a couple unique ideas iterated repeatedly with different color schemes/elemental themes.
- Controller input lag is irritating and makes using the menus frustrating.
- If you sell your weapons, they are removed from your transmogs. This means you'll have a clean armor inventory but a cluttered disaster of a weapons inventory if you want to keep all the weapon styles.
- You can't double jump or dodge in towns for some reason. This makes towns feel like a huge drag because when you're out and about you can usually double jump and dodge.
- Many cutscenes and lines of dialog are just characters repeating the same thing over and over. While I wasn't skipping story cutscenes outright, I was getting to a point where I was buttoning past things.

Frankly, I lost all interest in this game between chapter 3 and chapter 5. Boring, repetitive (the go kill/go fetch quickly becomes wearisome), music is not great, the combat is not great, dialogues are not great, characters are too flat, maps are useless, interface and inventory are extremely basic, character designs are ?%&*!#?, writing is awful, the leveling is "modern art" (in its most negative interpretation).
But it's a pretty environment (graphics are pretty good).
Apparently, early players were all fans of the series and left good reviews.
Unfortunately this doesn't exactly live up to what it promises.
Save your money, don't buy this.

I couldn't finish the game got too bored and didn't want to re-open it.

I think I made it half way maybe a bit less and can't bring myself to launch the game because I just feel so bored with it.

Encounters are easy even on the hardest difficutly.

Combat is mainly just doing the same combo and using the relic

Lots of collectibles that are meh. Some stat booster items can be obtained with honey and some skill orbs but nothing major. Best collectible are cactus' as they make the game go quicker due to leveling up

Story is very much a typical mana game. Nothing to write home about but not overly terrible. Reminds me of the original Mana games. Nothing surprising or unexpected has happened


So many invisible walls...

In short overall the game series needs improvements and the world to seem more feature rich and the world needs to be more fleshed out with actual activities besides running into a collectible and hitting weak enemies