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TRIALS OF MANA - Demo out 3/18, Game out 4/24! https://www.gematsu.com/2020/03/trials-of-mana-demo-launches-march-18-final-trailer-and-pre-launch-gameplay This is a thread for all games in the Mana series, but right now we're all hyper-focused on the new Trials of Mana remake.      What Is Trials of Mana? Okay, so back in the 90's there was a sequel to Secret of Mana released only in Japan known as Seiken Densetsu 3. Thanks to a very popular and widespread fan translation rom, many English speakers were able to play this game back in the 90's and 2000's (more on SD3 below). However, Square shocked us all by releasing the COLLECTION OF MANA for the Switch in June of 2019, which featured a fully translated port of the original Japan-only game. THEN, they really turned up the hype by announcing that, in 2020, we'd be getting a fully re-imagined 3D remake of SD3, which they have now named TRIALS OF MANA for worldwide audiences. The thing is, unlike the Secret of Mana 3D remake that came out a few years ago, this one looks really, really good; with a perfect mix of staying faithful to the source material as well as innovating all of the things that needed innovating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddzGPQJpAU ---------- The Mana Collection FINAL FANTASY ADVENTURE  I never played this one but it looks an awful lot like a Final Fantasy game to me! SECRET OF MANA  A game that defined my youth. An absolutely killer immersive soundtrack, fun combat, a decent story, and tons of fun settings make this one of my favorite all-time games. Plus co-op! SEIKEN DENSETSU 3 or as it's now being called... TRIALS OF MANA  Let's just call this one SD3 for short. SD3 was made widely available across the internet in the form of an exceptionally done JPN to ENG fan translation ROM by a guy named Neill Corlett. Little nerds like me in the late 90's and early 00's who had played Secret of Mana and had to have more would eventually stumble upon and download this ROM. When I first played it I was disappointed it wasn't more like Secret of Mana. But after giving it some time, it became even more of a favorite than SoM in just about every way. TONS of great new tracks (the snare drum patch takes some getting used to but the rest of the percussion is electric) and a MUCH improved story, allowing you to play as one of six protagonists and choose an additional 2 as your allies. Depending on who you chose, the overall political story would change significantly to account for your band of heroes and their choices. The game also featured a really fun class leveling system that allows each character to either level up Light or Dark, allowing for tons of class combinations and teams between your three characters. And now, WOAH! It's getting a remake! ——————— OTHER MANA GAMES LEGEND OF MANA - Released on PS1 in 1999. Another stellar soundtrack and beautiful art & animations, but the gameplay was repetitive and the story was paper-thin. Worth a play but somewhat forgettable. The following writeups were contributed by forums user Phantasium. SWORD OF MANA - A remake of the first game with some sprite designs similar to Trials/SD3. While I liked it at the time the main thing I think it screws up over the original is how bloated it is, there’s a ton of pointless dialog that doesn’t make the original game’s story any more interesting or complete, it just wastes your time. It’s also really really easy. CHILDREN OF MANA - The first in Square’s… well, failed World of Mana project, it’s almost like they were going for something closer to a diablo game with getting loot from enemies and the repetitive nature of dungeons, except there’s not really a lot of loot or a fun gameplay loop going on. Also pretends to have the physics engine of it’s console counterpart, which ends up being really annoying when you’re getting comboed by… barrels in the environment. DAWN OF MANA - This is a game where you have to scare monsters to attack them by flinging physics objects their way, where it’s split into discrete areas you can’t go back to, and where your level resets every time you go to the next stage. It uses the havok physics engine judiciously, and has a stage where you fight a wizard in a crumbling tower. Most people didn’t like it because it plays like a slower and janky version of Kingdom Hearts, but it looked so good that Koichi Ishii named it Seiken Densetsu 4. HEROES OF MANA - An RTS of all things that I’ve never mustered up the interest to play past the tutorial, it’s just not what I come to this series for. Maybe it’s a good game, but I don’t hear anybody talk about the FFXII spinoff that plays similarly and came out around the same time, either. SECRET OF MANA REMAKE - 3D remake of Secret of Mana that came out in 2017 with added voice acting and updated game play. MOBILE GAMES (JPN ONLY) Friend, Circle, Rise Heck if I know, they never came out over here and never will thanks to the realities of the phone market. ——————— WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL MANA TEAM NOW? Phantasium posted:**The Legacy of Mana** Discuss the Seiken Densetsu aka Mana Series here, especially the new Trials of Mana!! timp fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Mar 17, 2020 |
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Jun 11, 2019 22:52
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I guess the next time I try to start writing the OP of a thread I should let somebody know, huh. *deletes google doc*
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Jun 11, 2019 22:57
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Phantasium posted:I guess the next time I try to start writing the OP of a thread I should let somebody know, huh. I was just so excited I had to make one! But feel free to post your thoughts, I know the OP could definitely use some more work (currently trying to figure out how to bypass imgur being a piece of poo poo, for instance)
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Jun 11, 2019 22:58
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Third game in a classic JRPG series... US players are most familiar with the second game in the series which came out on the SNES... Never came out stateside, but dedicated US fans made an exceptionally good fan translation... Announcing
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Jun 11, 2019 23:08
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Oh god I'm chronically indecisive, how the hell do people manage to pick a party for SD3?
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Jun 11, 2019 23:18
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YggiDee posted:Oh god I'm chronically indecisive, how the hell do people manage to pick a party for SD3? Just pick whoever you think is cute or cool. Then realize your mistakes 10 hours into the game when you make them all go Dark
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Jun 11, 2019 23:21
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YggiDee posted:Oh god I'm chronically indecisive, how the hell do people manage to pick a party for SD3? Just play the game with every possible party combination.
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Jun 11, 2019 23:36
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I just replayed SD3 not too long ago and took Hawk, Lise, and Duran. But I wouldn’t want to take Angela, Carlie, & Kevin for the Mana Collection playthrough cause then I’ll probably be playing as Hawk, Lise, and Duran again for the remake! At any rate, here’s how I’d rate the characters in terms of how much I like them overall: Kevin, Duran, Hawk, Carlie, Lise, Angela.
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Jun 11, 2019 23:42
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I saw a lot of people talking about multiplayer in the Switch thread - is that the main draw of the series or are they fun single-player games?
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Jun 11, 2019 23:44
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Multiplayer is more a nice bonus sort of like how Tales games always have co-op as an option. You can play them single-player just fine
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Jun 11, 2019 23:48
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Your Computer posted:I saw a lot of people talking about multiplayer in the Switch thread - is that the main draw of the series or are they fun single-player games? I played them all single player first and it wasn't until adulthood I managed to find someone else to play with couch co-op. imo the games totally stand alone as single player experience, and the co-op element is a really fun addition to that experience. e: totally on the same page with my buddy up there!
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Jun 11, 2019 23:48
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I played Hawk when I first played SD3 way back when. Don't remember who my party members were (Duran maybe?). Looking forward to getting into this again once I get home. May give Secret of Mana another try. It's a game I keep bouncing off for some reason.
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Jun 11, 2019 23:49
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timp posted:I was just so excited I had to make one! But feel free to post your thoughts, I know the OP could definitely use some more work (currently trying to figure out how to bypass imgur being a piece of poo poo, for instance) I mean I get you, the only way I could start to focus my joy for this was to just write something for it, and I just wanted a thread to post in anyway because I love these games and it's not like I was actually getting anywhere since I was still at work. So now you can have these rambling unfocused thoughts as to where old mana people have gone that I started writing when the trademarks started being filed **The Legacy of Mana** A lot of the original teams that worked on these games have split off to the four winds. In 2000 Shinichi Kameoka, Kouji Tsuda and a few other Mana artists left Square to found their own company Brownie Brown. BB did work predominantly for Nintendo systems as a second party but still came back to work on Sword of Mana with Square on the GBA. They’re probably best known for working on Mother 3. Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret and Trials (I’m still getting used to that name) left to found his own company, which ended up making Koudelka and started the Shadow Hearts series. Sometime after the World of Mana project which involved Dawn, Children, and Heroes of Mana (the latter of which was still helped along by Brownie Brown), Koichi Ishii left Square to found Grezzo, which is probably best known for the 3DS remakes of the N64 Zelda games, though they’ve also co-developed Legend of Legacy and Alliance Allive with FuRyu. Early 2013 Brownie Brown underwent a restructuring to reflect the fact that they were mostly working on Nintendo games, and renamed themselves to 1-Up Studio and have mostly helped co-develop the Mario titles created since then, including 3D Land, World, and Odyssey. At the same time of their restructuring Kameoka once again left to found a new company simply named Brownies, which didn’t publish a game so far as I could see until Egglia: Legend of the Redcap in 2017, a mobile game that plays like a turn-based Legend of Mana. They’re currently working on the Doraemon Story of Seasons game and are hiring for a traditional RPG. As far as current development within Square concerning the Mana series, most of it comes out of their old mobile division. Masaru Oyamada, who was thanked in the Final Fantasy III remake and Heroes of Mana, was the head of the mobile versions of Final Fantasy Adventure (which I think came out on dumbphones) and also the original mobile port of Secret of Mana, which supposedly used some extra assets from the original SNES CD version which was canceled for obvious reasons. His team also created Rise of Mana which was a Japan only mobile game which was intended to be ported to Vita but ran into issues due to being developed in Unity at a time when Unity on Vita wasn’t working terribly well. Oyamada has since spearheaded the efforts to revive the Mana series with an incredibly faithful remake of Final Fantasy Adventure named Adventures of Mana for mobile/Vita, and the more divisive Secret of Mana remake on PS4/Vita. This morning they announced a remake of Seiken Densetsu 3 which has finally been localized as Trials of Mana, unlike the other two remakes this seems more like a big budget affair, and that it’ll play differently. The Collection of Mana also finally hit today, and was developed by M2. Still unknown afaik as to what outfit handled the translation, or if it was an internal project by Nintendo. Also here's a quote I did in another thread that links to an interview with the producer of the remake from famitsu. Phantasium posted:By the way, if you can read Japanese or stand google translate, famitsu already has an interview with the Trials of Mana staff (producer is still the guy from Rise/the remakes).
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Jun 11, 2019 23:50
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Hellioning posted:Just play the game with every possible party combination. I started trying to math that out before I realized 1) I'm not great at math 2) if you're counting every possible class configuration that's well into the thousands 3) Kevin/Riez/Hawkeye this should have been a no-brainer for me anyway.
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Jun 11, 2019 23:52
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I like pairing up the two characters for a route so you get the complete story, but it's fun to do offbeat combinations too. For those who are new to Trials, Duran/Angela, Kevin/Charlotte, and Hawkeye/Lise are the pairs.
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Jun 11, 2019 23:55
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So excited about this I bought as soon as it went up on the eShop. I loved SoM on the SNES and bought a repro cart of a translated SD3 for about $50. I'm going to start with the gameboy game since I never played that one. Maybe it would be a good idea if we had a, "What you should know before playing..." for some of these?
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Jun 11, 2019 23:57
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Please put Secret of Mana + in the OP, thank you.
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Jun 12, 2019 00:01
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YggiDee posted:I started trying to math that out before I realized 1) I'm not great at math 2) if you're counting every possible class configuration that's well into the thousands 3) Kevin/Riez/Hawkeye this should have been a no-brainer for me anyway. Yes, that is the point. You managed to find the best combination anyway. I wonder if the classes will have different outfits this time, or if they're just recolors.
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Jun 12, 2019 00:19
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Hellioning posted:Yes, that is the point. Hope they have different outfits so a team of dark/dark Hawk/Duran/Kevin is all skulls all the time
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Jun 12, 2019 00:33
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Riesz' would be fine if you changed her model to match her menu art, but the other characters seem closer like palette swaps between classes.
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Jun 12, 2019 00:43
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Nuts, I didn’t see any mention of any kind of physical release so I just bought it digitally. Oh well. Unless it has a really nice box I’ll see no reason to double dip and I have it available now instead of later.
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Jun 12, 2019 01:04
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With a new official translation is someone going to march in and edit all the fan wikis? How often does something like that even come up? Already the guy I knew as Deathjester is named Goremand. Oh god are all the spells and special attack names different. This is going to kill me.
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Jun 12, 2019 01:39
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I am extremely stoked about Trials of Mana. That took me completely by surprise. Will it still have co-op? I would love to play it with my wife or son.
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Jun 12, 2019 01:44
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It's me, I'm the guy who picked Duran/Angela/Charlotte in my first playthrough eons ago cause it reminded me of the Secret of Mana party. I'm not the only one I'm sure.
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Jun 12, 2019 01:46
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Hawkeye/Angela/Duran 4 lyphe And I think they were all dark/light for the incredible versatility
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Jun 12, 2019 02:05
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Kevin/Charlotte/Riesz, all of which are going dark/dark.
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Jun 12, 2019 02:19
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It's wild to me that a Japanese SNES game I played on the PC as a kid using a fan translation is now being remade eons later to work on a console I can play both on my TV and anywhere. Also makes me realize I'm old and will die soon.
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Jun 12, 2019 02:20
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YggiDee posted:With a new official translation is someone going to march in and edit all the fan wikis? How often does something like that even come up? Thanks to the Castlevania Collection there was a new in 2019 translation for Kid Dracula, a previously not officially released in the west game. Granted it probably has maybe ten lines of dialog total. But also there are still people calling old Tales characters by their fan translation names from the same time period, and it's not like there aren't still a ton of people calling the FFVII character Aeris. You'll just have to get used to their being multiple names for these things; it'll always be a little weird.
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Jun 12, 2019 02:21
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They did a find/replace L, R -> W with Charlotte.
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Jun 12, 2019 02:39
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Super Jay Mann posted:It's me, I'm the guy who picked Duran/Angela/Charlotte in my first playthrough eons ago cause it reminded me of the Secret of Mana party.  Though I didn't finish that playthough because all the pros over at GameFAQs told me it was a bad party so I restarted with Kevin & some other people I forget and beat the game the first time with him
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Jun 12, 2019 02:55
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Against my better judgement I went ahead and bought the collection. This is now the 3rd time I've paid money for Secret of Mana.  But I've been thinking about this Trials of Mana port all day! Can't wait to dip in and see exactly how similar it is to the fan translation. Like I said before I just replayed it about a year ago so it's still pretty fresh in my mind. I'll try to trip report on some of the differences as I play.
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Jun 12, 2019 03:34
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I imagine that this collection is exciting for people who have nostalgia for the series. But what I want to know is if they're cool games (for attractive people) in 2019 if you never played them back in the day. I am an old man who had a Game Boy and SNES, but I never tried them.
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Jun 12, 2019 03:35
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For anyone new to Trials, the lets play is informative about certain mechanics the game will never explain to you, like how half your stats are useless! https://lparchive.org/Seiken-Densetsu-3-(by-ddegenha)/Update%2061/
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Jun 12, 2019 03:40
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I cannot abide the disrespect in this thread for Legend of Mana, which is the best game in the series. Okay, it may be completely insane, and it may have some subsystems that make no sense (crafting is so in-depth that literally no sane human will ever figure out how to make anything useful), but it's just full of whimsical charm and I can't help but love it.
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Jun 12, 2019 03:43
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for people new to SD3/Trials: most of the game is similar no matter what your party is, but the very beginning and the last dungeon are determined by your main character. the difficulty of the last dungeon varies (slightly) depending on your path hawk and lise share a story. it's about witches and demons. their final dungeon is considered the hardest but hawk and lise are characters that routinely break the game across their knee so you should be fine angela and duran share a story. it's about knights, sorcerers, and dragons. this is the middle-difficulty path but any party with angela is extremely strong so you're probably fine kevin and charlotte share a story. It's about werewolves and clowns. this is easy by default because you're not going to lose with kevin or charlotte in the party i feel like I'm doing duran a disservice but he is kind of the odd man out since his shields don't function (unless that was fixed) and he's strictly outclassed by kevin otherwise. any party composition is fine though - just keep in mind that your main character is the one that really matters. it's kinda nice to pair the characters that share a story together because they will both get relevant dialogue sometimes, but it's nothing huge especially for kevin and charlotte who aren't the most articulate folks anyway
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Jun 12, 2019 04:06
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Yeah, I'm very interested to find out if that bug was fixed.
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Jun 12, 2019 04:06
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Does Kevin still talk like a caveman?
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Jun 12, 2019 04:10
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Is Trials confirmed to be Switch exclusive?
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Jun 12, 2019 04:12
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Using Angela was irritating because spells took forever and were hard capped at 999 damage for enemies with tens of thousands of HP.
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Jun 12, 2019 04:14
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Squats posted:Does Kevin still talk like a caveman? Nope!
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Jun 12, 2019 04:18
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