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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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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:38 |
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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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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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Spring Break My Heart posted:Is Trials confirmed to be Switch exclusive? The remake is coming out on PS4, PC, and Switch. The original is on the Collection of Mana which is Switch only.
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Jun 12, 2019 04:36
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Also is it just me, or does everyone else also always change the stereo option to wide?
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Jun 12, 2019 04:46
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Rirse posted:Man I wish the Adventure of Mana release was ported off the Vita. I still got a Vita and it was fun there, but it a shame it just stuck there. Surprised they didn't put it out on the PS4/Steam with the Secret of Mana remake. I mean you can technically buy it on your phone if you want to see what hell is like. But it only barely got ported off of mobile because that team only then managed to have decent enough tools to port stuff to it from Unity. Gulping Again posted:and then it didn't actually matter because if you did the glitch to refight the mantis ant you just straight up have the Mana Sword and it just does way too much damage to be legal You don't need any of that poo poo anyway, just because you can abuse the Lunar buff until you can casually crit 999s everywhere. timp posted:I put a bit more effort into the OP, but if anybody wants to talk about any of the games released from 2000 or later, feel free and I can add descriptions. Here's the writeups I was doing on them... 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. Phone Games Friend, Circle, Rise Heck if I know, they never came out over here and never will thanks to the realities of the phone market. quote:But when it came time to summarize the game in two sentences or so, well...I stand by my writeup. I'd just say it's one of the most open-ended JRPGs that have been made thanks to it's loose quest design, and think its weird beat-em-up MMO battle system is loving cool even if a little undercooked.
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Jun 12, 2019 14:33
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Great audio and visuals, poor gameplay and story. Also how bullshit was it that you literally got locked out of a couple quests if you didn't know to plant one location next to another one?
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Cipher Pol 9 posted:Also I heard the Secret of Mana remake was kind of bad? Did anyone play it? I'd call it divisive but I can't recall many other people that liked it other than, uh, me. A lot of people don't like the graphical style, but that was the reality of a team that cut their teeth on mobile development and was slowly getting better at what they do. Adventures of Mana worked in that style because it was a remake of a game boy game and even those minuscule graphics were an improvement, and they were able to get new versions of the music from Kenji Ito and a more polished translation to spice it up. Secret on the other hand already had good graphics and good music that Hiroki Kikuta only had to touch up a little, so they made the default soundtrack remixes of every song split between 8 different composers (including Kikuta himself and Yuzo Koshiro) and because of that they're not very uniform. There's some real bangers but there's also a town theme that just randomly has dubstep now. There were lots of little details missing that fans couldn't help but notice, like the cannon travel animation going to a world map is gone, despite the fact that there's a world map coded in the game for Flammie travel. Grass is now a flat texture on the ground instead of something you can cut, tiny details like the pin-up models missing from the spellbooks, and zombies no longer moonwalk while casting spells. The final dungeon is no longer 3 large screens and is instead a bunch of load screens between each individual room. Not anything individually really wrong but kind of annoying when put together. The gameplay touch ups took a lot of nuance out of the playstyle. Since your AI companions are no longer idiots, they will queue up behind you and take swings in time with when attacks will register, so you can just dogpile the gently caress out of enemies with basic attacks. This also meant that charge attacks were kind of made worthless since it was just faster to wail on monsters, and you had less AI routines to give your party members because they were just simply competent (only 3 options for them in the remake instead of a grid). Spells and items and weapon switching were able to be bound on two shortcuts, which helped highlight how you could avoid using spells outside of one good offensive spell and the one healing spell. At least the game doesn't pause when they're cast now! It made a simple game already even more simple. And the worst is at launch it was buggy as poo poo! It was lucky they added autosaves after every screen transition because the game had a really obvious memory leak that would cause it to crash after about an hour of play. There's also an NPC if you got too close to you'd get trapped in his hitbox, too bad it's a guy that fully heals you and saves your game, huh? This stuff has since been fixed but it's easy to see why that would have piled up with the rest of it. I uh, still Platinumed it.
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Jun 12, 2019 15:00
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Adventures of Mana was faithful to the point of having the same exploit as the game boy game to get the ultimate equipment in the final dungeon.
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Jun 12, 2019 15:18
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I imagine a lot of the translation stuff is just making it more consistent with where the later games ended up. I know you fight Benevodons in Children of Mana. I imagine most of the mechanical stuff hasn't changed, but I'm not necessarily as familiar with this game as the others, I could never get myself to play games emulated as often as I do the original versions and only have beaten Trials once. God that name still feels weird.
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Jun 12, 2019 16:30
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I still kinda don't understand your question. The Collection is just the original game boy and SNES games (except translated in Trials case). The remake of Trials of Mana that's coming in 2020 looks and is going to play completely differently. The trailer showed someone doing air combos.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:21
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Just redo Chrono Cross like they seem to be doing FFVIII. Slightly better textures and better performance is all I'd want.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:35
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Adventures of Mana is basically the same game with a facelift though? Like the world map is exactly the same.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:54
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timp posted:English dub was just confirmed as well! That's not really surprising, despite what people see of the effort of Secret of Mana, that game made a point to give literally every character in the game voiced dialog, even going so far as to have at least one area with a guard on each side with the same dialog, but different voice acting/actors for each line.
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Jun 12, 2019 19:07
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Things I noticed: You can stock up to two specials (probably upgradeable), and they don't go away after the battle is over (though they also take more to build up, it seems). I don't like having to pick them up in the environment though. An objective marker. You can charge your normal attack in addition to that, like in Secret. Also two different attack buttons, and different chains have different properties (they mentioned knockbacks). In the air one button was comboing and the other was a helmsplitter. Ring menu still pauses all actions, though I noticed you could set up to four shortcuts. Areas in the environment that change to a fixed camera to make certain bits look like the original. Lots of minor items hidden in the environment. Moti innkeepers are gone? There's an ring that shows up around battles once they start that you have to run through to escape like a Tales game. Dodge roll. Toggleable run on pushing down the control stick. Boss health bar. Heh, the tells remind me of Legend of Mana.
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Jun 12, 2019 20:02
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Ya'll are nuts.
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Jun 12, 2019 21:28
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Not a single god damned chocobo in the final fantasy series has been as cool as Chocobot.
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Jun 14, 2019 01:51
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You see people caring in certain places, it's just easy to see how this series became super niche after the World of Mana project killed it until of all things a mobile development team took over more than ten years later. I know Tomato (fan translator of Mother 3) has been getting interested in it just from a translation standpoint. timp posted:Question for the thread: Does anybody feel like SD3 is similar at all to Octopath Traveler? I still haven't played that one but visually it seems pretty similar...do the similarities end there? I have a friend who got really into Octopath; do you think I could convince him to try some co-op SD3 with me? Would he even enjoy it? (he's not a big RPG fan in general but he says Octopath Traveler just really resonated with him for some reason) Octopath is comprehensible SaGa and nothing like SD3, really. Other than it being sprite-based.
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Jun 14, 2019 15:45
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Spudd posted:Would Secret of Evermore count as a game of this series? I grew up with Secret of Mana but I was terrible at playing it and eventually my brother got SoE and it played a lot like it but was a lot more fun and easier for my dumb western rear end. I only ask because I always assumed it was made by the same team with how it played and the ui. It was made by a completely western team, the only game made by Square USA and also where Jeremy Soule (Elder Scrolls composer) got his start in the business, but also I don't think anybody cares if you talk about it here, it's a cool game.
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Jun 14, 2019 17:06
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I still have not actually beaten Evermore now that I think about it, kept losing savefiles for one reason or another.
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Jun 14, 2019 17:59
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jadebullet posted:Has there been any talk at all about Legend of Mana getting a remake? I've been playing through it for about a month now and it's quite enjoyable. The only problem is the graphics are a bit muddy on HD. https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2019/06/11/decades-in-the-making quote:10. The producers want to remake the entire series eventually, so there may be something for Legend of Mana if Trials of Mana sells well. They also want to eventually make new Mana games that channel the series' origins better.
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Jun 14, 2019 19:04
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Secret of Mana has it so you can miss attacks, and also enemies can block them, but the original version of the game gives you no feedback on misses, and enemy guards only make a little noise.
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Jun 16, 2019 02:38
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Dawn of Mana and Children of Mana are both supposed to be origin stories (one is the sequel to the other, I don't remember how that goes offhand).Spudd posted:Okay so I'm gonna replay Secret of Mana (and finish it this time) should I be waiting for my meter to fully recharge before attacking again and should I exclusively be using charge attacks? Yes. No.
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Jun 16, 2019 09:26
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lezard_valeth posted:
I know you're taking it back but it's a cool fight because it activates havok physics on the tower you were just climbing as part of the stage and both you and the boss' attacks can make it crumble, it's a fun idea. Ultimately most of the bosses in that game are just "find environment object, chuck it at the boss" though.
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Jun 16, 2019 09:32
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Shoenin posted:How well/much did the SoM Remake sell? Did they give numbers for it? I don't think you're going to get numbers for stuff like this. Presumably these remakes have been doing better and better since they keep being given more platforms and more budget. Adventures of Mana was just a phone game, to start.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:22
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The AI in Secret of Mana was never good, that's just bad memories. Like yeah you can shuffle it around but they're always going to amble around stupidly vaguely in the direction of enemies and also get caught on literally every bit of the environment.
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Jun 20, 2019 15:06
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May be of limited interest for this thread, but the fighting game with Riesz in it came out on Steam today. https://gematsu.com/2019/06/million-arthur-arcana-blood-for-pc-now-available
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Jun 20, 2019 17:24
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Here's another interview about the Trials of Mana remake in Japanese: https://dengekionline.com/articles/3602/ Not many highlights, but: -They're adding more to the interlocking character system, it sounds like. -The character designer is HACCAN. I think that's the same person that worked on the last two remakes so no surprise. -Hiroki Kikuta is supervising the music arrangements, but you can also use the original soundtrack if you want. There was also a blog post from Shinichi Kameoka talking about working on Secret of Mana. https://www.siliconera.com/2019/06/20/secret-of-mana-character-designer-shinichi-kameoka-reminiscences-about-the-games-release/
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Jun 21, 2019 14:48
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No new characters for the Trials remake, multiple endings still in. https://www.siliconera.com/2019/06/27/there-will-be-multiple-trials-of-mana-remake-endings-but-only-the-same-six-characters/ I don't think either of those is surprising but I remember people asking.
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Jun 27, 2019 19:50
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Really? The main thing I'd say about the remake is that they sped everything up to the point where combat is completely brainless. Totally agree about things being more threatening in the original, there was a small stink made at launch about the first time you go into the witch's forest being harder because the Chobin Hoods could now attack diagonally but outside of that everything melts because of synergistic party AI and the actual turns coming faster and spell pausing not happening. Which just made it feel faster, to me.
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Jul 18, 2019 15:01
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Alxprit posted:I'm also the one stan that exists for Sword of Mana. That game is good, fight me. In a vacuum yeah, but it's this weird FFA remake made out things that look like they're from Legend of Mana and ends up feeling worse than both. Also the need to elaborate more dialog out of an incredibly simple game boy game that just makes it wordy without being any more complex.
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Jul 19, 2019 22:50
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Taear posted:It's one of those things where I really don't remember enemies being totally unhittable while they're recovering from a hit and somehow that ruins trying to play for me. The timings of attacks all feel "off", I dunno. Everything in the original goes off of turns, basically, after you hit an enemy that wasn't being attacked, they immediately take damage, but they won't take damage again until their "turn" is up, so in that way you can have a party member attack after that and it will remember being attacked and display the damage after the next turn, but you can only stack one attack at time in that way, if you try to hit again that turn it'll just whiff. You can also miss and have stuff deflected but the original game has no miss indicator and only a small deflect animation/sound effect. Most common enemies will sit in a damage animation while you wait for the next damage turn and can basically be stunlocked, but bosses will take advantage of being damaged for counters or spells. The remake basically makes the turns come faster so stuff can be hit faster, but you still have to wait.
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Jul 21, 2019 04:20
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If you have any interest into a deep dive of the translations of games from this series then Tomato of Mother 3 translation fame has started his video series for Final Fantasy Adventure where he follows along for every piece of dialog to see what was changed or cut, with scans taken from manuals and japanese guides to provide information that's missing in game and hard to come by. Apparently the keys in that game are weird alchemically fused snakes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4XBYW9khCE He says in the video that he eventually wants to do Secret and Trials and in fact wanted to do Trials first but due to technical hurdles with that he's starting with FFA.
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Jul 21, 2019 19:58
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You just need to own them once for it to count, make sure to look up the equipment that is only available via drops in areas you can't go back to, I know there's a bunch of stuff at the Pure Lands and maybe one or two in areas somewhat before that. Level 9 sword counts, if you have everything else at level 9 going into the final battle and the sword at 8, the trophy will pop when you cast both mana magics on Randi and the sword's model actually changes (and of course goes back when the magic wears off).
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Jul 23, 2019 01:30
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Blackbelt Bobman posted:I just hope that the overalls you start with count since you can’t buy them again after you get kicked out of Potos. pretty sure that's fine because i didn't buy them there, either.
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Jul 23, 2019 01:59
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Get rid of spell levels and make them all useful at all times, introduce some kind of cooldown on spells depending on type that keeps you from spamming them, make a custom ring that the ring menu opens to first that you can place shortcuts to, I dunno. The real answer is probably to have a completely different combat system but I think if you wanted to keep it those three things would go a long way to making the menu-ing less invasive. Shortcuts too, obviously, but I feel like the remake didn't give you enough of them. I basically just had the cure spell and one offensive spell equipped that would be useful just because I mostly only used them so they were leveled up.
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Jul 23, 2019 20:08
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I think you just push the shoulder button you want it assigned to when you have it highlighted in the menu? It's definitely not something it has to tell you about before you can use it.
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Jul 27, 2019 03:32
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https://twitter.com/RPGSite/status/1155561098730491904
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Jul 28, 2019 21:35
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sorry, did you say AMIGOS
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Jul 31, 2019 00:08
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I had a single one and I can't recall how I ever got it, I know no one at school had the game, and I can't imagine my brother bought it... could you share between save files? It was funny because it's hard to get just the one but... i think you could summon them? But it would have just the one come out and do like 1 hp of damage or something farcical like that.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:12
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:38 |
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I feel like I gained 30 levels trying to farm the Pure Land stuff. I don't know how that compares to the original game because without a chievo or something I just never cared about them unless I happened to get them while going through the area.
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Aug 5, 2019 14:45
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