Legend of Mana

System: Playstation
Release Date: 2000
Published By: Square
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

At a certain point in playing Legend of Mana, you'll get totally engrossed in it. Then, a little while later, you'll start to get bored. Then you'll run into the abrupt and pointless ending and be left thinking "what the hell was all that about, then?" Yeah, it's one of those games.

Those games are not necessarily bad; if they were, this would be an upbeat little review wherein I heap all manner of insults upon it. The trouble is, the game isn't bad. It just has ambition greater than its ability. The game gives you tons of choices to make - what weapon to specialise in, where in the world the game will take place, how the various zones are positioned relative to one another. It gives you tons of quests to go on, each of which advances various storylines and may reward you with new sidekicks or new areas to explore or perhaps boring bits of metal out of which you have to craft new weapons. I wish somebody would tell game designers that isn't fun. It's fun when, like in Kingdom Hearts, you have a totally optional crafting system wherewith you can make some neat things, but which can be safely ignored. It's not fun when the only way to get decent equipment is to make it out of random bits monsters drop - and especially not when those are the only things the monsters drop. I've said it before and I'll say it again: finding a magic sword is way more fun than finding a lump of metal you can fashion into a magic sword.

Long crafting digression aside, the main trouble the game suffers from is lack of direction. It gives you lots of stuff to do, but no real sense of meaning to any of it; it's rather like you're wandering around having adventures just because, hey, you have to do something. This problem is heavily worsened by the game's refusal to allow you to fail; since nothing you do can actually go wrong, there are no real consequences involved in any of the choices you have to make. Whether you complete this quest or that, choose to go with one NPC or another, you'll ultimately end up in the same place. Truly, this is the most linear freeform game I've ever played.

The endgame quest sequence begins (minor spoiler) once you've completed one of the three major quest "arcs." But there's a pitfall here, as well; two of them are intricate and difficult, as well as very long, but the third is short and simple and basically doesn't involve itself with the rest of the game at all. So I basically guarantee that if you aren't prepared in advance, you'll complete the game via the dragon cycle. Not that that ultimately makes any difference, mind; remember, three seperate paths, exactly the same destination.

I think this game was the victim of draconian budget and deadline enforcement. It seems like there were some really good ideas here, and some high production values - the visuals are stunning, and the sound is nice (if a bit melancholy). But it seems as though there wasn't enough time to get the job done properly, and they threw on this bizarre, nihilistic and totally unsatisfactory endgame just to get the thing shipped. Pity. Still, not a bad game, and worth checking out just to see what could have been.

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