Visions of Mana - cozy action game from a classic series

I remember having to restart from the beginning of Final Fantasy Adventure because I ran out of keys in the final dungeon and I saved in a corridor that had doors that automatically lock.

They should have made a game called Mana of Mana where the only stat in the game is Mana.
 
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Never played these games but some steam friends posted screenshots and I thought the world looked pretty. Shame to hear it sucks.
 
Gog & Magog said:
:wow: that is some real youtuber-tier voice acting. I can't wait to hear more of it.
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Trials had the same problem but it turned out there was no dedicated team for hiring VAs so they either got no names, people with very little gigs, or actual employees to do voices.
X Prime said:
Is it actually bad? That's depressing if so, the promotional media were pretty good.

The best Mana game is still Secret of Evermore, I guess.
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I still laugh whenever I think of that fucking Toaster dog. Guess it's time to play through it again.
Dysnomia said:
But when I played the game on SNES I swear he was referred to as male. And I always thought of him as such.
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He was referred to male in the translations for the original game and in some of his/her other media appearences, but the Japanese versions always used gender neutral terms for Popoi. This however doesn't include the debate of the term Sprite over Fairy.
 
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Dysnomia said:
I read about that. But I don't know how correct it's really supposed to be. I've read he does use "boku" and "ore" in the Japanese version. Although that doesn't mean the speaker has to be male. But when I played the game on SNES I swear he was referred to as male. And I always thought of him as such.

The whole they/themlet nonsense is just too newtarded for me in general.
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For Sprite/Popoi, they went back and forth between masculine and "it", though I think supplemental material (the manual, maybe?) from the time said he wasn't a man or a woman. In English, things that called for genders but had ambiguity used to be referred to with masculine pronouns by default, until tranny business came along.

Look, they even alternated wildly in his introductory scene:
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Secret of Mana (U) [!]_005.png
 
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Ged! said:
I've recently been replaying Seiken Densetsu 3 (the original, not the shitty remake from a few years back) and I've been having quite a bit of fun with it. Can't say I'm really surprised to see this one get the lukewarm reception it's gotten. Square hasn't been what they used to be for decades now. It is more than a bit disappointing to see Chinese money affecting the industry in this way.
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I had been wondering what had been going on with these games! I loved the original Mana games, and the new ones seemed so divorced from the originals. The Japanese don't like change, so it didn't make sense.
 
Mike Matei's Penis said:
Nothing to bring me out of the Secret of Mana remake like the main character referring to Sprite as a "they" at the end
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I find myself using "they" about characters and even straight people if I'm super far detached from them, but somehow when used in games and media, it's just.. so fucking on the nose. A specific, concrete, deliberate action. I read through Bridget's entire bio in GG Strive and looked for that one "she" in the bio and it just magically made all interest of mine disappear. I consider myself pretty rational in real life, not throwing a fit over a troon as per online behavior, but that one context just.. Fucking hell.
 
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X Prime said:
Is it actually bad? That's depressing if so, the promotional media were pretty good.
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I actually found the Japanese trailer to be funny in retrospective, as Square-Enix tried to market the game on nostalgia while skipping out on a Nintendo system when most of the franchise history, as this trailer demonstrated, is on Nintendo systems. At least it got a Steam version but PC isn't where the Mana revival audience was cultivated.
 
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Markorian said:
I mean, I could be wrong, but from what I've been hearing, preorders were downright abysmal, so that could play into why they were shut down that early.
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I'm not surprised at all that preorders were abysmal. They haven't put out a good Mana game since the 20th century.

You know what? Here's a quick rundown on my personal experiences with the Mana series:
  • Secret of Mana, childhood game. Loved it to death. Still consider it one of the greatest games of all time.
  • Secret of Evermore, childhood game. Also loved it to death. Shocked when I got online and saw a bunch of undeserved hatred towards it. It's also one of the greatest games of all time.
  • Final Fantasy Adventure, later childhood game, bought it around when Game Boy Advance was current. Enjoyed it. Didn't know it was a Mana game going in.
  • Trials of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 3, had the fan translation for ages but never played much into it. Still on my backlog. I am well aware that it's very beloved.
  • Legend of Mana, I blind bought it and hated it. Looks to have mixed reception online.
  • Sword of Mana, blind bought it, didn't know it was a remake of the first game. Hated it, and this would be the last time I'd ever blind buy a Mana game.
  • Dawn of Mana, pirated it, laughed at it for going heavy on simple Half Life 2-style physics puzzles. It was boring, otherwise. Probably didn't make it more than a couple of hours in. I'm not surprised nobody talks about it anymore, and it never got a remake.
  • Children of Mana and Heroes of Mana on DS: "What the fuck is this? I'm not playing this crap."
  • Adventures of Mana: Second remake of the first game. Made for mobile, but also released on PSVita. The PSVita version retains the on-screen mobile buttons, despite being playable with Vita's physical controls, just to really remind us how little they care. It was unimpressive and I'd rather just play the Game Boy game again.
  • Secret of Mana remake: Only played up through Elieen's Castle. Really unremarkable. Combat didn't have the same punchy feeling of the original. It felt more like a student project than a proper remake, made by people that didn't really care about the original.
And then I went on Wiki of Mana and read about how there were a number of other mobile games, all long since shuttered. Yeah, no wonder the game flopped. There hasn't been a single game in the series that was universally well regarded since the mid 90s, and that didn't even get an official English-language release until that Switch compilation.

I even gave the demo a shot, and it wasn't... total cancer, but the characters were just anime cliches, and the combat was the same kind of floaty Kingdom Hearts nonsense Square uses for everything now. Apparently Square Enix has just settled on floaty combat with a hundred times more spectacle than substance for everything now. It's yet another sixty dollar game with a "deluxe edition" that costs twenty dollars more and adds some costumes, and you can listen to old music from old games in place of the new music from this new game. The PC version has Denuvo, and it's not even on Nintendo at all. There isn't even an olive branch of goodwill anywhere in its presentation. No wonder nobody preordered it.
 
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I always thought Harvestella started as a Mana game before they spun it off from the cancer that is the Mana brand.
 
Fuck, I need to get back to secret of mana on the wii. I might pick this up. Dunno about the current price point of $99 AUD, though.
 
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