Finished the Legend of Mana HD Remaster. It was great, head and shoulders above the Secret of Mana and Trial of Mana remakes. So charming, lovely, wholesome and fun. Quite short unfortunately, only 45 hours to beat, but this is the kind of game you want to replay a few times to experience all its content.
The gameplay's pretty good, however it's just too damn easy on the first playthrough. There's NG+ with higher difficulties, but come on, it would've been so nice to be able to change difficulty the first time you play the game. I didn't even try to trivialize the game and still ended up doing so.
You start off with a few basic abilities such as Jump, Defend, Crouch etc and you unlock new abilities by combining available ones. For example you can use Crouch and Jump for a number of battles and eventually you'll unlock High Jump and so on. You can also add an attack to most abilities and for example do a backflip attack or a jump attack and that kind of stuff. Abilities are nice and neat, but they pale in comparison to Special Techniques. These Special Techniques aren't always guaranteed to hit as some of them have a rather low range and a pretty long charge time, but if they do connect then they can one shot bosses at times. Every weapon type has its own special techniques, somewhere around 15 to 18 or so per weapon and you unlock them by, you guessed it, combining Abilities and using them in combat. If you want to unlock every Special Technique for every weapon then you're in for quite a lot of fighting. You also have magic abilities, but I didn't really use them that much, though the way magic works is pretty neat. You play various musical instruments to attract the attention of elementals and receive magical coins from them. You then use those magical coins to create new and more powerful musical instruments with random magic abilities.
Boss fights are quite numerous and some of them are quite a spectacle. Sadly, quite a few fights get reused and since the game is so easy the first time you play it, you'll only have a hard time with a handful of them at most. It's really quite ridiculous how quickly you can wipe out some of the more grandiose bosses. Seriously, some bosses that are at the end of lengthy quest chains can be brought low with just ONE special technique.
There's also some surprisingly complex crafting in this game. Throughout your travels you'll come across all sorts of materials that you can use to craft weapons and armor and then augment and strengthen them. You can increase the elemental levels of equipment, add new abilities and effects to it, but you have to be careful while upgrading because some components might lower the item's attributes and so on. I haven't done that much blacksmithing, just doubled the damage on a weapon from a secret encounter, but from what I've read, you can raise your weapon damage to 999 or more. My only issue with it is that the animation for upgrading equipment is a tad lengthy and you can't skip it, so if you do decide to go nuclear with upgrades, you'll likely end up spending quite a few hours just looking at the same animation over and over. You can also create your own golems to aid you in combat. Didn't really spend that much time with it, I just made one golem that acted as a healing item dispenser. It's some pretty complex stuff if you decide to create the perfect golem, but I didn't really see the point on the first playthrough since it's so easy.
There's some light farming elements to this game in the form of the orchard behind your house. You give the magic tree seeds and it'll grow you all sorts of cute fruits and vegetables shaped like animals and objects. You can use the produce from the orchard in crafting or use it to capture pets and then feed them at your monster corral. All the produce has its own stats and personality attributes, so you can come up with a special diet to turn your favorite pets into aggressive bulldozers of death or whatever else you desire. There's also some mini-game where you can send your pets to acquire items, but I didn't bother with it at all. One attempt at playing it was enough for me to drop it for good. Didn't care for it one bit.
Now the game's map is pretty great. You choose where to start your adventure and then you obtain various artifacts from quests and exploration. Those artifacts are used to create new locations and pretty much everyone's journey throughout the game will be different as you get quite a few of them early on. Each zone also has its own mana levels that increase with new adjacent additions to the map. Those mana levels influence monster levels, NPC and pet spawns, quest availability and so on. You're really encouraged to explore a lot as all sorts of new quests, encounters and NPCs to interact with appear with each new zone that gets unlocked.
Anyway, the game's cast is absolutely amazing. It's all so lovely, superb and fun. The character designs are perfect. Simply perfect. Just about every NPC in this game is a bundle of laughs and joy. Had only one issue with the character design, but I'll get to that later.
Graphics are solid. Beautiful backgrounds and tubular sprites. Read that quite a few people had issues with the sprites not being touched up at all, but I didn't find that to be an issue. They're well done, crisp and clear and don't really clash with the backgrounds, what more do you want?
The soundtrack is just so beautiful. It's leagues above Secret and Trials. I didn't have any issues with it like the other games. No tracks made me feel as if I'd go insane after listening to them for more than a few minutes and I didn't feel the need to switch back to the original soundtrack.
Alright, the story... I love it and it just works... provided you're autistic or follow a guide. There are quite a few lengthy character arcs that all have grand finales and you can do them all in whatever order you want. There are also quite a good deal of normal quests that are a lot of fun. Also the tone and just overall feel of some of these quests is quite surreal, and that's a good thing, obviously. So why do you have to be autistic or follow a guide? Well it's due to the map system and how easy it is to miss or lock yourself out of quests. If you want to get as many quests done as you can without following a guide then get ready to revisit each and every single map after every single quest. That's what I did between every quest and I still missed a good deal of them, though thankfully none of the character arcs. I understand that this can easily turn some people off, being locked out of a lot content for not revisiting areas constantly and many might just say nuts to it and use a guide, but I think it's great. It honestly feels like an adventure. You don't know what people, what monsters, what riches, what wonders await you out there. Haven't had this feeling of wanderlust while playing a game in quite a while.
So, yea, now this is a fucking game. An exquisite ride. A REAL adventure. Definitely going to play this again on NG+ on the higher difficulties to, hopefully, experience all the content I missed the first time.
Right, now I mentioned an issue with the character design and it's about the hero. At first I thought he was a flat musclegirl due to the hair and the attire. Seriously, see for yourself, I can't be the only one who thought this, right?
I mean now that I know the truth, it's obvious, but the first time I saw this I unironically believed that it was a muscled up lass with an attitude.
Oh and one last thing, Sierra the beast girl? Just realized while playing this that she's the character from those Sindoll kemono doujins. That's pretty cool, especially that one doujin where she fucks her brother after discovering his secret stash of brother & sister incest porn books.
