Friday, July 29, 2022

Trials of Mana - review


Genre:RPG.
Developer/publisher: Square Enix.
Platform: PS4,switch,PC,mobile.
Official Site: N/A
Release date: 2020-04-25.
 
This game is a remake, its apparently pretty faithful...
Gonna be honest here, I have never played a mana game but this
was a nice game to just casually play, it is linear  and little to worry
about missing anything except maybe the cactus thingies.
Most of them are easy to spot but there are a few easy to miss!
I wish I could be completely positive about my experience with this game but I can't.
Anyway...
I got into this while waiting for xenoblade 3 to come out... I decided to continue playing this
from the demo I tried a while ago, it was easy to pick up the pace and/or understand
what's going on plus when chara's mentioned this or that also please be warned
this game is fairly straight-forward in terms of plot, there's not a whole lot of talking
and its pretty on point nor does it ever drag itself out more than needed.
Sadly it seems this game has dropped tremendously in value, I bought it for 30$
and it is now even 20ish euros. After playing I can definitely see why... it is not long
so unless you really love action rpg's most people would give up cuz certain things.
 
Pro's
- A simple, yet traditional story with some replay value.
- Good music, the ability to switch to the original bgm is nice too.
- The ability to choose your protagonist and those who tag along.
- Most of the bosses are all unique and fun in design maybe a lil frustrating too.
 
Con's
- Over two hundred chests but most contents are healing or revive items....
- Class change items shouldn't be locked behind RNG, nor be able to get duplicates of.
^^(Maybe actually put nice things in treasure chests?)^^
- Terrible AI is terrible.
 
The quick and dirty  would be that this is something to look into if you want something traditional unfortunately this games pitfalls are the god awful AI, I think its even worse than ff15!
it also has a nice class system but I found it to be such a hassle when it came to the
second class changes which involves unknown item seeds... it is never guaranteed whether
you get a light or dark class item??? so unless you want to farm and put up with stupid RNG s
 you'll probably have to take what you can get. If you can get past all this it could be a fun game.
 
I am well aware that you can't always get what you want and I already sucked it up and rolled
with classes I didn't want, so I'd like to believe i'm mentally strong enough in that regard.
Anyway bullshit RNG is still bullshit RNG no matter how you slice it. Even worse
if it is determined from the moment you get the item from the chest. REEEEEE~
Anyways I adored the characters and even made a start to the second playthrough but it seems
aside from the prologue and personal motivations most will be the same, a guide said some
of the end game will be different so that is nice. Sadly the AI is horrendously bad
and I was frustrated at watching my team mates die over and over and over again
to the stupidest things. Good news though the only difficulty specific trophy you can
just switch to before the boss itself! so no need to suffer on hard the entire game unless
you want all the challenge! you can just play on normal till then.
 
Sometimes I wonder why I put up with BS like in this game... I must've been really bored
to plow through this game but hmm I guess what was nice was nice even if somethings weren't nice.
Hah... I don't think Chawlotte's UwU speech was ever a problem... IMO there were worse things.
I wouldn't be surprised if people gave up on this game... the beginning might seem
like this is gonna be super stress-free but the AI will end up testing you.
 
For what its worth a nice, fun game but it has noticeble setbacks!
I do want to play the other mana games someday, they do have its charm
but as you can see, you must be willing to get past some setbacks.
Now for all my screeching, another good thing is despite them recycling three bosses
the main game isn't any longer than it should be. If you're still up for more there is a post-game
scenario but I am not sure why they had to split it from the main game. Maybe because
due to the extra classes making MP no longer an issue thus breaking the game.
Anyway if I had to score it this game it might get an 6.7/10 from me which translates to
 well its fine really but could be a little better? it might be even better if you want
a game with not much talking cuz there really wasn't. At the end of the day this was a classic.
 
More rambles after the jump, its more or less just my own experience
with this game and some parts may be a little ranty.