Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 339: The Trials of Mana remake

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Earlier this year, we discussed the original 16-bit version of Trials of Mana (aka Seiken Densetsu 3). Now, Jeremy Parish, Chris Kohler, and Nadia Oxford dig into the 3D remake: What it does right, where it falls short, and pwaces it's vewy iwwitating.  Cover illustration by Shaan Khan.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Wetronauts, Twiles and Tribuations. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts, a podcast hosted by a small magic girl named Charlotte. I am not that person. I am Jeremy Parrish, but I did let her do the intro for us. So that was great.

And yes, this week we are talking about trials of manna. Last time I called it trials of but then I heard the English dub of the game and it's mana. So what do you know? How about that? And yeah, so this is kind of continuing our sort of side-long glance at the mana series. And I think this is pretty much going to wrap it up. This is going to be the end.

And so to say farewell to this franchise until they start making new games and 10 years passes, we have some mana fans out there in California. It's two regulars actually, two recurring voices on retronauts. So we'll start in California, A. Hello, it's me, Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse. Oh, snap, that's right. You've got a new title. Congratulations on that.

Yes. I haven't knew everything. Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, in case this is coming as a shock to everybody, I am now over at Digital Eclipse making collections of old video games, I know, totally off-brand for me. Yeah, it kind of sounds like we sort of ended up doing sort of the same thing independently of each other this year, which is good. It's nice. Well, yeah, I mean, you sort of went off and found this wonderful role at a game publisher, and I was like, oh, man,

I could totally do that. What? And then, you know, I ended up getting a very similar opportunity. And I was like, oh, okay, I don't hate Jeremy anymore. Good, good, wonderful. That's good. I'm not, I'm not super directly involved with the games. I'm working on a few games at Limitur Run. But for the most part, It's kind of stuff outside of the games, you know, I guess marketing in a sense, but more like I am a journalist who just happens to work at the company writing about the company's games. It's kind of weird, but I dig it, so it's good. And then meantime, we have, meanwhile, we have another familiar voice up in, up in Canada, still doing the games journalism thing, at least for now. Yes, I am Nadia Oxford, and I am with U.S. Gamer, and I'm also with the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. Please listen to us. We are very, very cool. And I am like 10 seconds away from disconnecting after that Charlotte imitation. Like, I just, my hand is hovering over the little red button.

I promise she won't be coming back. That was that was it. She's been disinvited. She's been disinvited and buried where she belongs. Yes. So this is actually, Nadia, Chris, have you been on a retronauts together before? I think we've been on a blood god together, haven't we? I think we've been on multiple blood gods. Right, but not retronauts. But not retronauts. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I'm actually like really jealous that you both get to like write about old games. I mean, I do too, but not like, not in like such a dedicated fashion. Maybe someday. Maybe someday. I'm also writing about some new ones. So, you know, it's a, you take the good or the bad.

But yes. I'm still. podcasting about old games exclusively, although actually, I guess technically this week's episode is about a new game also, but it is an old game. I don't know. Video games, man, it's just like this wibbly wobbly, timely timey-wimmy ball thing going on. But yeah, we are talking about the Trials of Manor remake. But before we talk about the remake, which came out back in March, I believe, and you probably forgot about it because it was weirdly scheduled right next of the Final Fantasy 7 remake, like a week? Yeah, they were both April.

They were both April. Oh, April? Okay. Yeah. Time has no meaning this year, but yes, like, time had even less meaning when it came to these two releases because, like, why would you remake two games from the 90s and put so much more work into one than the other and then release the kind of the both, both of the games right next to each other so that the, basically the AAA game just completely demolishes and outshines the sort of modest, you know, sustainable type game development project.

Yeah, that's a big way of putting it. It is a very, like, it is more sustainable than a lot of projects you get these days. And I don't know how it did sales-wise. Maybe we'll get into that, but I feel like it's the kind of project that needs to get a little more limelight because it's a nice middle-of-the-road RPG that is very pleasant and it probably made on a much more pleasant budget than Final Fantasy VII remake. Yeah, I don't know what the actual sales numbers on Trials of Manna were. I imagine it probably did not do extraordinarily well in the U.S. because of the timing. And I'm sure Square Inix looked at that and we're like, well, gee, the Americans said they wanted this game and then we gave it to them and they didn't care.

You know, not really looking at the bigger picture. But I do know it sold at least 130,000, 13,000, excuse me, copies like the first week in Japan. So that's not peanuts. I assume it had some legs and continued doing okay. So, you know, and that's just on console. I don't know about Steam sales because they don't ever talk about that. So my hope is that this game did well enough to merit continuation of this style of game because the remake really was just very enjoyable to play because it really did feel like,

you know, kind of a game from the PS2 era, which you don't really get a lot anymore. Like the, what is it called, like Knights of Azure or whatever by, Coe and Gust, I want to say, that feel very much like that sort of PlayStation 2 era sort of janky, but not quite, a little rough, but, you know, good, well intended, a little simplistic in places, but still, you know, with enough systems to kind of keep you playing. And this, this really, yeah, yeah, just, just a nice way to spend 30 hours as opposed to, you know, games as a service and doing all the, the, the, the, AAA, grinding and

quick time events and everything that kind of defines modern games. It's like they go down the checklist. And this Charles of Matter remake didn't really have that checklist. And it was nice. It just felt like... It was, yeah. It felt like a moment from the past,

which makes sense because it was a 25-year-old game almost. So, yes. But another thing that makes the Trials of Manor remake so enjoyable, and in a way so surprising, is that the past 20s of Manor remake so enjoyable, is that the past 20, years of manna have not been great. They've actually mostly been bad. And we're going to talk about, we're going to talk

about what happened after Legend of Manna and the many games that have come since then that have completely failed in any substantial way to recapture what made the classic mana games so great. So first, let me ask, what has your experience been with the

various mana sequels and spinoffs and remakes over the past 20 years? Well, I guess I'll first, if that's okay. I actually recently got kind of jumped on for actually the Blood God because I said I did not like Legend of Mana at all. I found it way too slow. I found it way too cumbersome. And of course, like I was coming in as a huge Mana fan. And I really love that kind of fast-paced action you get from Swigintintetsu-2 and Swigintetsu-3 and I guess even the original Final Fantasy adventure. And then I switch over to Legend of Mana and I'm like, oh, this

is really slow and not the least bit what I want from a mana game, even though it looks and sounds. Absolutely gorgeous. Still one of the best looking PlayStation games, if you ask me. Beyond that, yeah, it just kind of went downhill from there because I don't even know how many I tried after that. I do know I played and for some reason finished sort of mana for the GBA, which was another game that looked fantastic and sounded quite well as well. But it has such a weird, that's the with Monta games. They have this great start and then they come up with these weird mechanics that nobody wanted. Like with Sorda mana, it was having to switch back and forth between weapons to damage enemies. It was so dumb. Who did that? And why? They were like, oh, Vagrant

story. We liked that game. Let's do that. Exactly. And Vagrant story, I very much appreciate for what it is and its place in history and storytelling. But the whole weapon system did not work for me and it certainly did not work for sort of mana which also retold the i think the first adventures of mana story and uh it didn't work out so well either so yeah um that's my history with the mona remakes i kind of tried to give some of them a try and i gave up because it clearly was breaking my heart over and over again chris what about you um yeah well let's see i mean it was a huge secret of mana fan i mean that's really the game that like made me a square soft nut back in the day.

Saken Densesu 3 was the second game I ever imported after Final Fantasy 5 because then it was like, well, I've got to play this. A nice simple way to kind of get your feet wet with Japanese games. With the Japanese language. Yeah, exactly. Turns out it's like outrageously complicated to try to play when you don't understand. I mean, it's hard to play when you understand the text. But like, and that was sort of one of my issues with when collection of mana came out.

It's like trials of mana, you know, they released it without a manual. And it's like the manual for Saken Densetsu 3 in Japan is like 48 pages, I think, of dense text. And it's like you are supposed to have read and absorbed that entire encyclopedia before you go into the game or at least have it there as a reference. And so that was a little bit strange to not have that. And but I liked it. I mean, you know, because this is sort of what happens with Mata Games is that you get you get sucked in by, you know, always, always gorgeous graphics. you know usually an incredible soundtrack and then the gameplay itself sometimes it just really does not live up to that and in fact you know over the past 20 years probably more often than not it did not right

and so you have like it was sort of the same thing with taken densetsu three um it was not quite as it just it wasn't as immediate and fun and really engaging as secret of mana had been but it was still really good um legend of mana same kind of thing like i felt like the literal world building placing tiles, you can place tiles and sort of paint yourself into a corner, you know, and, you know, but you really have no idea without a guide where you're supposed to be putting the things. And then meanwhile, it was aesthetically incredibly beautiful. And that soundtrack is still one of my favorite, like albums, like not even, not even video game soundtrack, like, like all music. I love it to death even now. And then beyond that, I mean,

I got really excited when they announced the whole World of Mana, you know, But then I think one of the real problems was that for some strange reason, none of those games was a straightforward action role-playing game, like the roots of the series. You know, you had so many different takes on it's like, oh, well, here's a, here's a dungeon crawler, here's sort of more of an action game, here's a real-time strategy RPG, here's a mobile game, but none of those were in the genre that the franchise was actually known for in the first. place. So it was just, it was very strange. And to play trials of mana this year, yeah, by the way, I say mana. I know they say mana in the game. Yeah. I'm saying mana for 20 years. It's mana in Japanese. I can't, I can't stop. I'm sorry. No, that's fine. And to play it and to just play this beautiful, gorgeous, you know, 3D that I'm sure, you know, took a lot of effort to sort of, you know, bring that into full 3D, but to play it and to realize, oh, right, like this is what I wanted. It's like

a PlayStation 2 game, yeah, and I wish that they had done something like this on PlayStation 2 because it would be, I think, a very fondly remembered PlayStation 2 game at this point versus what they did on the PlayStation 2, which at this point is sort of almost forgotten. Yeah, I think most people forget that there was a sickened in sets four. It wasn't called that here, but there was a proper sequel, and it was very exciting when we first saw it, and then when we played it and said, oh, well, okay, that happened. Yeah, I don't even think I looked at that one. I was just set up by that point. Yeah, so Legend of Manah came out in 2000. We talked about that in a

previous episode, but it's not so much an action RPG as a world building sim where everything you'd place on the world map as you build the world affects the outcome and the nature of the places

you create, and then you fight through them kind of like a brawler game with like attacking left to right, but no no movement up and, no attacks up and down. Sounds like tails a little bit. Teals of Fantasia. Yeah, kind of, except that it doesn't have the separate

combat. It's all on the screen, but you are locked into the screen once it starts. It's a strange game. And there's all kinds of superfluous systems that you can get into if you want to. I know people who swear by like the Golem system and stuff, but you don't need to do those things. It just feels like

a lot of systems in search of a game. Right. That's a good way. Describing a lot of the mona games over the past 20 years, just a system in search of a game. And it feels like, Secret of Mona got it so well, like perfectly well the first time, you know, bugs aside and rushed stuff aside. It was just a good, simple action RPG that expanded a little bit upon Zelda, but was still very simple in its own way.

Right. So after Legend of Manna, there was kind of a three-year gap between that and the next game, which was a remake of, as you mentioned before, the original Final Fantasy Adventure, which was Sort of Manor for Game Boy Advance. And again, yes, that looked beautiful. It had the same sort of legend of manna, precious moments kind of character design and everything looked very sort of pastel. And it was lovely. And it added a lot of systems and stuff to the game. But I don't know that it really improved on it.

It just feels like it overcomplicated things a lot. And I remember at the time it came out, my roommate at the time, Nick Marigos, who I think, went on to work at Atlas and now works at Nintendo. and does a lot of localization. His big complaint was, you know, not a big complaint, but he kind of summed up the flaws of the game and the fact that there is a guy in here whose name is Dark Lord.

And he's the bad guy, but the whole game, they treat it very ambiguously like, this Dark Lord guy, is he so bad, really? Maybe he's actually a pretty nice guy. Like, you're supposed to wonder, is this villain named Dark Lord actually that evil?

It's kind of like the military's sotting with the Decepticons and all the Transformers movies. They don't seem so bad. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, it's a very slow-paced and just kind of tedious game. It feels like it has a little bit of Kingdom Hearts disease where it's very ponderous and very full of itself. And it really doesn't need to be. Yeah, that's a good way putting it. Secret Amana works best when it's simple, I believe.

Right. Yeah, I mean, that was also the sort of the thing with, let us not forget, sort of mana on the Game Boy Advance, which had a sort of similar like, oh, we're going to remake the first game with, you know, graphics that sort of look like secret of mana or this sort of browny brown style, you know. Yeah, that's what we were just talking about. Oh, sorry, I thought we were still talking about a different... Still talking about legends. It can apply in so many different games. But no, I mean, we're on the same page here. Like, yeah, definitely sort of man, a swing and a miss. And I think they went too far in the other direction from

the next game. This was when they announced their World of Manna Initiative, which, you know, I think they announced at the same time as the compilation of Final Fantasy 7. They were like, hey, remember that one game you liked? Well, we're going to do a whole lot of stuff around it that isn't the game that you liked. Please enjoy. Please look forward to it. Everything. It was also, oh, this was 2006 when, yeah. So this was also the same time that they announced Fabula Nova Crystallus. Hey, you know, this new Final Fantasy game that's coming out in like five years. there's actually going to be like four of them. So look forward to that.

We're building a whole franchise around this game that's not going to be out for a long time. Polymorphic content, Jeremy. Yep. The future. There were a lot of cards and not very many horses. And yeah, so the next game that came out was Children of Manna for Nintendo DS.

And it was actually okay, but it's, there's nothing to it. It is a DS-based loot crawler. You go into randomized dungeons and just kill stuff looking for loot. I don't know that there's any real purpose to the loot. I played it for, you know, a few hours and was like

yeah, this is, this is mana-ish, but what am I doing? Like, there's no real end to my means, so why should I keep playing, so I stop playing? Which is a shame, because I feel like with a little more focus, it could have been pretty good. Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe a lot of these

newer mona games, because they were just lacking focus period. They did not know what they were doing or what they wanted to be, so they were like that kind of kid who runs around and does everything at once. Yeah, so then the next part of the World of Manna Initiative was the actual Manna sequel, Saken Dinsets 4, or Dawn of Manna, which when it came out in the U.S., and it was probably the most beautiful mana game, just absolutely stunning to look at.

Everything was 3D, lush, just great character designs, a beautiful world. I remember just, you know, seeing screenshots and advanced videos of it and thinking, Wow. That's going to be amazing. I played it at Tokyo Game Show for like, it was one of those demos where, you know, the lady ushers you in and lets you play for about two minutes. And then it's like, well, there's no one else here, but you need to leave now because you've had your lot of time. So I barely got to play any of it at TGS. But I thought, well, you know, this could be pretty good. But then the actual game came out. And it turned out that it was not actually pretty good. It is more of an action game. I think Chris, you mentioned this earlier, more of an action game. not really much RPG there. And it was just obsessed with havoc physics. This was two years after Half-Life II. Oh, they don't havoc. Yeah, I had to go back and I kind of read my old review of this to remind myself, like, what my issues were.

And yeah, you, yeah, it was all about the havoc physics to the point that you couldn't just go and beat up enemies. You had to panic the enemies first by causing some physics-style reaction to happen in one of the levels. And, you know, like by causing some rock to fall off a cliff or something like that, and the enemies would become panicked, and then you could attack them. And it was so all about those elements and so in love with the idea of doing this sort of like real-time physics stuff, that it, again, it just sort of like lost the plot and lost the fun. And, you know, I will say in Square Inix's defense, they were one of the first Japanese, big Japanese developers to kind of look to these Western developers.

developed middleware solutions, and to say, you know, we don't have to do all the background work ourselves, all the middleware, all the engine development ourselves. We don't have to reinvent the wheel every damn time we make a game. We can, we can, we can license these things. And, you know, they pretty quickly, you know, once the next gen launched, went into licensing Unreal Engine for things like Last Remnant. And, you know, so they were kind of forward thinking in that that sense but yeah it's important to remember that like at that time but a lot of uh japanese developers the whole idea was that you'd start making a new game and the first thing you would do is you would create the engine you know from scratch all yourself um and then all and then you

would not share it with your co-workers because because it was it was just for your team and the other teams didn't even get that work yeah and then you'd start the new game and and yeah we got into the PlayStation 2 era and that became uh absolutely untenable so yeah it was weird. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was weird enough to note to merit a lot of note at the time. Like, sinking n.Situ4 is using havoc physics. That's, that's, that's weird. Yeah, I mean, we really didn't see many Japanese studios licensing, uh, external technologies of any kind, aside from like video codex until the HD generation launched later that year, really. Um, so, you know, you got into Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 and you started seeing like capcom license engines for dead rising. And that's of thing. And again, you know, Last Remnant, Square Nix would license Unreal. But bear in mind, you know, Donna Manna came out the same year as Final Fantasy 12 finally launched because they spent like six years trying to get that game together. You know, there were some leadership problems and development difficulties, change of teams, but a lot of that had to do with the fact

that they, you know, built the whole game from the ground up. And then they did it again for Final Fantasy 13, and that game took forever to launch because, you know, they created their own engine and it wasn't really suited to do things that people wanted HD games to do. So you can make some beautiful rocks, some beautiful corridors, but not so good with towns. So, so I will, I will say, you know, at least the mana team, Koichi Ishii and everyone was trying to think outside the box and say, like, how can we, you know, enhance our game by looking outside of our company, by not just, you know, building everything internally. But I think once they licensed the tech, they weren't really sure what to do with it.

And so we ended up with Donna Mana. Yeah, that's, back then with the havoc engine, everyone was kind of obsessed with throwing things around, weren't they? There were so many rag dolls in video games back then. It was like, it was like going to, you know, a little girl's toy box. and like, wow, just dolls everywhere. Ragdolls everywhere. This kid really loves her some raggedy Ann. And I think Sonic 06,

Cursed Its Soul, was actually also a havoc engine which you had like silver throwing stuff around. Exact same thing as the gravity gun. They should have applied ragtime physics or rag doll physics to the princess kiss at the end. Their lips collide and they flop in opposite directions. Yeah, that would be great. Much better than what we ended up with.

So also part of the world of the world of mano was a set of mobile games. I'm not sure exactly which ones fell under. world of manna and which ones just kind of came along later. But there were friends of mana, circle of mana, and rise of mana. And because these are mobile games, I admit that I don't care about them at all. But Chris, I'm wondering if you, you know, having kind of kept your eye on Japan and having been a little more aware of mobile games and things that were happening, especially, you know, with franchises that you had a connection to, you know, a personal fondness for. Did you pay any attention at all to these games?

No. Friends of Mana and Circle of Mana only, again, only came out in Japan and then for, well, I mean, I'm sure they were on iOS or whatever, but it was really, really difficult to jump through those hoops to play those games, so I didn't actually end up playing them. No, I think Friends of Manna was old enough that it was just like, you know, Java phones. Yeah. This was like 2006, 2007. And remember, you didn't really get iPhone gaming until end of 2008, 2009? Yes, okay, I'm looking now. Yes, Friends of Mana was Japanese feature phones, was Galapagos phones, yep.

And then I think Circle may have been on iOS, but, you know, yeah, I mean, I did play Rise of Mana because that actually did come out here. And again, came with a, or, you know, there was a great soundtrack CD that you could probably still buy, which is the only thing that, you know, you can actually still go and do because all these games have since been discontinued. But a lot of it is just, I mean, if you look at. If you go to Wikipedia and you read up on Square Annex's mobile games, there's hundreds of them that they have released in the last decade. I mean, that seems to be their mobile business strategy, which is, you know, you just crank out game after game after game in search of the one that just sort of hits and, you know, generates a whole lot of money from Wales, basically.

And so to play to play Rise of Mana and not be a spender, you know, it's clear, I mean, Rise of Mana is just absolutely. one of those you know like this is this is here to get you to spend money um game and if you're not a spender it's like well okay i don't and it you know it's um compu gotcha also too right i mean it's a gotcha game and it's also about collecting the sets and it's about combining the gotcha and it's like you start doing that and i'm just sort of like okay i'm i'm good i'm out you either you either spend the money or you become because a lot of it is um the 98% of people right that don't spend the money it's about feeling like you are making – it's like the sort of point of pride of I'm making progress in this game without spending any money, but I'm spending tons of time to be able to advance

and to do it. And for me, that's like, yeah, that's not what I'm looking for out of video games, like, just in general. Did either of you play the Secret Amana port to the iOS? Because that's an interesting case right there where they took the graphic. and kind of upgraded them with the more modern mana style and had a retranslation too, which was really, I really appreciate it. That was back in 2010 or something like that.

It was a long time ago, but it's actually a version of Secret of Mono that I really like, and I really wish that it had wound up on collection of mana as well. I did not try that one. I'm just really averse to playing a console game with virtual controls. So having done that a few times, it just never really clicks for me. So I think I probably puttered around with it and got up to the point where the goblins throw you in the pot and said, yeah, you know, I'm good. I'm done. I'm done. No, I liked it quite a bit.

And even though I'm also not really huge fan of mobile control schemes, I think at the time I was doing like a lot of mobile game reviews. So I just stuck with it. And I found I actually really enjoyed myself with that game. Yeah, I mean, I certainly, you know, I find myself in the situation where just because Mana games aren't coming out that I'm enjoying, you know, as much as the older ones, I'm still playing the older ones a lot because when it's like, I mean, man, I've played through Secret of Mana a lot. It's like when I got a Super Famicom in Japan when I was living there like 20 years ago and I

got the Japanese copy of Sagan and Setsu 2 for the first time. I played it then. You know, I played it on Wii Virtual Console. I played it, I think, on Wii U. I'm pretty sure I may have played it on the S&S Classic. Like, generally, anytime they re-release it is a good time for me. I'm usually there. It's like, yeah, I'm going to jump in and play it again.

And it's great, especially now that I'm like so. And even Secret of Mana, I mean, that's the thing with the Mana series is that, like, you have to, like, every game has something wrong with it, that you just sort of have to, you know, it's like, what is your level of being able to excuse it? Because Secret of Mana, like, I tell people about it. It's like, oh, yeah, you should totally play Secret of Mana. just like remember when you are able to raise your magic levels you just have to spend an hour or two just like on a screen near a town to go out and just like waste all of your magic and then like go back in and save and get it back because like the most efficient way to play secret of mana right is to like you know raise your magic levels right outside of a town and just do that you know and like that's the ice fields for me oh yeah yep yep but you can't it's like you can't explain that away it's just a busted design.

So you just have to say, but the rest of it is so good that, you know, it's okay. Yeah, it's an old RPG. You're going to grind at some point. It just happens. This week on the Super Nintendo ads, Blake J. Harris and Jonah Toulis, co-directors of console wars. Is Nintendo the villain? It's definitely a David Goliath story.

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VHS oddities, confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters, we watch movies and beat them up. Thank you. All right. were the mobile games. There was one

final mana game that was kind of the classic franchise. It was led by the original director Koichi Ishii, and that was kind of the end of the era, and that was Heroes of Manna, which was a Nintendo DS game.

It was a prequel to Trials of Manna took place 100 years before and kind of set the storyline for Trials of Manna. I remember when it was first announced, apparently the press folder that they sent out, had some screenshots of trials of mana in it. And people were like, whoa, are they putting trials of mana as a bonus game in this DS game? Are we finally going to get

trials of mana in the U.S.? And the answer was, no, those screenshots were just there to say, hey, here's what this is the prequel to. Very disappointing. But I remember this was a real-time strategy game. It was almost exactly the same game as Final Fantasy 12 Revenant Wings, even though it was made by completely different teams. And from what I've been able to glean, there was no overlap and, you know, create overlap. It was just two groups independently coming up with exactly the same game design. So that's kind of weird. But what I remember most of this is that Koichi Ishii went around on a press tour with this and he was so checked out. I have never interviewed someone who gave less of a shit about him.

his game than Ishi did with this project and like two months later he left Square Inix and went off to I think he's with Grezo now but he did a few different things you know just kind of did stuff but he was basically out the door and I don't know if he was pushed I don't know if this was like I've got to go you know get trotted out to talk about this manna game that I want nothing to do with this isn't my vision for the series I don't care. I really don't know what the story was there, but I was just like, man, this dude, does he just not like me or what? Like, I ask questions and he's just like, uh. Those are the worst interviews, the ones that make you, make your stomach sink because you know

you're not getting anywhere. Yeah, but it turns out it wasn't just me and he was just kind of like that. And he was not the right person to have on that tour to talk about that game. Because he, he was literally not there anymore. Wow. Anyway, so that's, that's my big takeaway way from Heroes of Mana is that it was a game that the series franchise creator couldn't bring himself to hype up. It was, so in other words,

it was that bad. It wasn't bad. Well, if you want to play the next, I mean, the next big Koitiishi game was, I mean, of course, he was at Greta, and they did a bunch of stuff, but the Ever Oasis. Yeah. He likes that game. It had problems, like like Mona games, basically, but

it had a really great, cute foundation. I would have like to see more of it. Yeah, it had It had charm. I enjoyed what I played of it. I couldn't bring myself to play all the way through it. But, you know, I played like 10 or 12 hours, and that was plenty. And I was like, okay, this is kind of mana-ish. And that was kind of simultaneous with the, you know, came out, I guess, between Adventure of Manna and the Secret of Manor remake and felt more on point than either one of those, in my opinion. So, you know, until the trials of Manor remake, that was kind of the closest thing we had to a follow-up, a modern follow. up to Secret of Manna. But yeah, Heroes of Manna just wasn't it. Especially for those of us in America who had never played Trials of Manna and therefore had no connection to things like, you know, the Thief Tribe and so on and so forth. It's like, here are characters who are important because they are related to the ones

that are from this game that you loved after playing in 1995, but we didn't. So kind of hard to connect. It really was. And not see what are like real hardcore, like most of us. probably were, and played it either in Japanese or played the fan translation back in the day. Yeah, you know, I tried playing trials of mana through emulation back when it was first localized, and I was like, man, I don't think I'm getting this game. So I never really stuck with it. And then I'd revisited it with fan translations and so on and so forth over the years.

I even played it. Like I bought a cartridge that had a fan translation on it. Oh, cool. Played it on Super NES hardware. It was still like, I don't know. And then collection of mana came out, and I realized, I just don't really like this game. That's how it is, I see. It's, I kind of agree with Kohler saying that basically it is not the first game. It didn't click me the way the first game was. And I guess that's one thing we'll get into is how much the battle system for the 3D remake was improved over the original.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think this is a case where you can easily skip the original game and just go straight to the remake. I think so. Some people say I'm on crack, but I think it's true. I can't agree with that. Well, I'm going to come to the defense of the original tribal sabana here a little. I mean, you know, I totally understand it is definitely, it sort of overcomplicates itself.

The battle system is not as strong, probably as secret of monas. But I really just love the look of it so much. I mean, you know, I mean, this is a real technical masterpiece on Super NES, which maybe kind of gets a little bit muted nowadays because you would play this and you don't necessarily realize what a huge accomplishment it was to have like six playable characters

and you pick an arbitrary three of them to go through the game with and to have a day-night cycle on a super NES game where the pallets, you know, change from day to night and, you know, the sort of open-endiness of a lot of it, the fact that you just go to whatever, you know, place you want to go

to fight the eight big big guys and yeah i mean i i played through it in collection of mana and really had a good time uh although again like you need a fact or you need you need you need a guide to kind of shepherd you through it the first time because it's it's pretty dense yeah if you want a character who multi heals uh you better know what you're doing when it comes time to change your class oh yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's i mean and not only that but it's just like yeah you well that's that's sort of going back to like, you need the manual. Like, do you want to, you want to be able to heal yourself? Because, like, you should probably pick Charlotte.

I mean, you know, that's the thing. It's like, so Charlotte, Jeremy, as you've alluded, right, which we'll talk about, you know, is written in English, but this ridiculous, childish accent. She's got a real wisp. Yeah. But she is super useful to have in your party. And if you're going through this game, either one, I would. say either game the first time, you know, you'd want to have her in your party annoying as the

writing is. It's the game's biggest curse by far. Right, right. Because she can heal from the beginning, and you kind of want that. And you have to make an informed choice as to what you want your party composition to be. And again, like playing the 16-bit game, if you don't have the manual there, or if you just sort of start playing the game and you're just picking characters based on who looks cool, you can make the game exceedingly difficult for yourself. Yes, you can. By doing that.

But at least you can still grind. Like, you can always grind. There's always time for grinding. And honestly, I mean, it's so pleasant for me, you know, because of the wonderful music. You know, pick a spot with great music. Pick a spot with funny enemies and grind. And you can kind of like smooth over maybe a little bit,

of the difficulty problems there. Yeah, so for me, my, I think my problem stems from the fact that it is such a technical achievement for the Super NES. I kind of talked about this a little bit on our previous episode, so I won't get too much into it, but I just feel like they tried too hard, and they kind of overdid it to the point where the Super NES really struggles to keep up. So you have huge loading times, you have a lot of downtime, where you're just like, I feel like I'm not in control of the game. It takes like two seconds to load up and swap between

menus when you're trying to, you know, adjust your character load out and things like that. And that really adds up. But it just even, even the way the world is broken into tiny like single screens, there's not really a lot of that sort of free roaming that you had in Secret of Manas. So it's basically just like you move from screen to screen to screen. And they, they kind of repeat a lot of the screens, I guess, to save space. So to me, I find it really disorienting. It's hard to kind of keep track of where I am, just because it's like, well, I've already been through this little corner screen where there's like a little puddle of water up in the left corner and the trees kind of bend around this way. But I did that a couple screens back. Am I going in circles?

No, it's just the same exact screen that they had to save some storage space. So we got a repeated screen. And I don't know. And I don't think there's a mess. unless you'd use one of those little things are flinging in the air and you can see where you are. Yeah, and that's very vague. It's like, well, how does this all line up exactly? So, you know, I'm not, I'm not disparaging what an accomplishment it was and just how incredibly ambitious it was.

I just don't feel like it all clicked. But I will say that I do appreciate the ambition of this game more so than the remakes that came more recently, basically after Koichi Ishi left Square Inix, we went almost a decade without a new manna game. Well, actually, more than a decade without a new mana game. Actually, we haven't had a new mana game. But before we got a notable mana game, how's that?

Right. And that was Adventure of Manna, which launched in 2016, nine years after Heroes of Manna. Yeah. I think, I mean, it really goes to show you, you know, within Square Inix, you know, it really, like, as long as Ishi, the sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, guy, the head of the Mata series was there. There were just Mata game, Mata game after Mata game. But they're very, it's just seems like within that company, it's like if the person

is still there, then you get tons of games in that series. And if people leave, it's just the series shuts down unless there's a huge call to revive it. So if you look at, say, like, I think we talked about it even on the show before, it's like Chrono Trigger, you know, the people who made Chrono Trigger are not there anymore. So they don't feel like they need to make any chrono games at all, despite how. how much the fans want them. It just doesn't matter.

You know, mana for a long time, there was nothing in the mana series. And to your point, there's been no truly new mana game since industry remakes. Meanwhile, Hitoshi Kawazu is still at Square Enix,

which means that every six months, there's a brand new saga game. And I will say Scarlet Grace is great. To the 15 saga fans, like they will get other games, like all of every saga game you could ever want. It's so out of whack. with um it's it's like that's but that seems to be how games get made versus not get made and that's

that's just it yeah i was just going to say that as soon as kawazu leaves square inix or retires you know we're going to go from like two saga games a year to like negative saga games they're actually going to start taking them away they're going to be like okay this one is getting deleted from history we're extracting memories and not even not even you can't re-download it they're going to come to your house that's right i'm sorry we're deleting your uh your PlayStation 4 hard drive. Yeah, I mean, we saw the exact same thing at Capcom when KG Inafune left Capcom, and we went from like, hey, there's three Mega Man games in the works to, well, so you get bad

art Mega Man in Tekken versus Capcom. There you go. Yeah, that was really well-timed. That was a fantastic joke. Good ones, guys. Yep. But if you're you know, at least the remakes, it seems like there is some reconsideration of this, at least

for the Mana series, of like, oh, right, people actually really like the series. Maybe we can make them even if Ishii is not here anymore. Yeah, and you can definitely see progression through the remakes. Adventure of Manna is, it is literally the Game Boy game with polygons over top of the sprites. Like the AI, the level designs, the weapon behavior, you know, the magic system, systems, everything is a literal one-to-one copy. And I can't remember if you can do like the, you know, the Halo Master Chief Collection thing where you press a button and you switch between the original graphics and the new graphics.

I don't think you can do that. No, you can't do that. You should be able to do that because literally it is. It is the exact same game. And it feels so weird after playing Sort of Mano where they took the same game and we're just like, here is all this incredible artwork. and a new story and new combat systems and we've redesigned the world

and maps are different. It's practically a new game. It just kind of happens to be on top of the general framework work of the original to, hey, here is a system where it's exactly the game that you played before. You've got to do the little figure eight thing. The AI companions are going to walk around

and just kind of mindlessly attack things without any real, you know, paying any real heed to what you're doing. it's it's just so weird so literal has some great concept art though I can't remember the name of the artist Hassan or Hakkan or something like that but he drew this fantastic picture I still love of the hero riding in the mine cart

and you have Watts at the bottom just kind of supposed to be minding the switches instead he's like kind of eating candy and the hero is literally about to plow right into a rock and the suggestion is that Watts was supposed to trigger the switch and he didn't he's eating candy and he's about to kill this poor hero about to face plant right into a rock.

Yeah, so Adventure of Manna kind of super bare bones with kind of very clunky I think it started out on mobile, right? And then they put it on Vita. Yeah, I had it on mobile and then it went to PSP.

Oh, no, it was a PSP or Vita? Oh, I'm sorry, you're right, with Vita. Vita means life. I know, well, everyone forgets about Vita. Even Sony forgot about Vita after like six months. Ouch. So yeah, that was like I said, super literal.

Then there was the secret of remake about three years ago and that was less literal but it was kind of kind of missed the mark a little bit like they they took the game and the world and they put everything in polygons but it just i don't know it felt off to me and i reviewed it for polygon and kind of criticized yeah i kind of criticized uh the way of plays and how like you know just combat and combos didn't feel quite right and people got angry at me, but I, you know, I'm someone who's played Secret of Manna a lot. And the thing I remember most is, um, I went to a Toronto event for, for Square Enix and I went to preview the game. And I played it. And I was like, um, their mouths don't

move when they talk with the portraits, which they don't. And I said, is that going to be fixed? And I heard, oh yeah, yeah, they're going to fix that. And they never fixed it. And I was so mad about the stupid portraits more than anything else. But I, I see where you coming from. I think I liked Manas remake more than most people, but I could recognize that, yeah, it had some major problems that, thankfully, most of them were fixed over for Tras of Manor remake. Yeah, I mean, they tried, you know, to put a little more into the Secret of Manor remake. Like, they actually made an effort. They treated it like an actual game release as opposed to like, hey, it's Adventures of Manna.

You can download it from the Vita store if you still on the Vita. Yeah, exactly. Whereas this actually, like, you know, they sent it out for review. and publications were actually like, oh, we should review this. So there was some weight given to it, but it still didn't feel quite like what I expected and what I really wanted.

So when they announced the Trials of Manna Remake, and also, by the way, here comes collection of mana, I was like, yeah, I don't think, I really don't care about this. Like, this is going to be another clunky, literal, polygonal overhaul of an old game. and it's going to lose the charm of the original. And I just don't care.

And I was very, very happy and very surprised to have been proven completely wrong when I sat down to actually play through the entire game. Yeah, me too. I came at it kind of warily. But I think when I saw like the previews for the game, I kind of realized right there, this looks a little better than what we had before with Secret of Mana. At least their mouths are moving in the cinema cutscenes. Yeah. Well, I mean, the first previews that they showed, you could see that it was actually. sort of like a fully 3D camera was behind the character.

They redesigned the battle system. You could see that they, it's like these battles took place and there was sort of like battle bonuses and it's like, oh, okay, well, they're actually, it's not, it's not this literal one to one, which is a problem, the secret of mana, you know, that's true. Yeah. Had as well, it is actually sort of designed to work in a 3D world. So I allowed myself, you know, because this always has. happens you see the first screenshots of the mana game you get really excited about it it's a sonic cycle yeah

yeah it is i actually made a i actually made a mona cycle um image uh meme for a video game message for it like 10 years ago because it was the same thing um you know get all excited and they get let down oh another another game was coming out so i got myself i let myself get excited again and i'm very i'm so happy to say that you know finally after all of this that you know it really absolutely was that and it was it was just it was so much fun yeah it's weird because um part of my disinterest was the fact that bob played the demo last year at packs and was like yeah this seems really bad and i was like well that's that's what i expected so then when i actually played it i was like wait a minute this is uh this is actually not bad this i i heard i wonder what bob played because

like what part of it i heard the switch version the switch well cat told me before like before the game came out. She said, wow, I heard it's really bad. I'm like, oh, I didn't know that because I guess maybe she just heard of him Bob or someone else or several people who, I think the switch version of the demo was not that great, but I don't know if that was general consensus or just Bob himself or what the story was. Are we sure that Bob went to Pax? I was there. I saw him. Somewhere else. I don't know. Yeah. He got me into the Final Fantasy 7 demo theater, so I know he was there. Oh, hey. Nice move. Yeah, right? But yeah, like,

I don't know. I went into the game with zero expectations and maybe that's why I like it so much because I just expected like, well, this is going to be garbage. And then it wasn't. It was actually, you know, really thoughtfully overhauled. They really put some effort into it. They gave it to a developer, a studio called X-E-E-N, which I can't, is X-E-E-N. Spirit of Wonder is their slogan. But I can't find a lot of information about them. Like I checked their official website. They have a weird history. They've worked on stuff like Sonic Racing Games. They developed the Samurai Showdown game from last year they're kind of all over the place

but they've never produced like big name games so it's just kind of like well we've got this B class game let's give it to Zine and they they did good work here so I was yeah I was happy with it

like the graphics look nice everything's very colorful the music sounds great and they gave you the option to play the original version of the soundtrack or like the remastered soundtrack It's just a really well-put-together remake that is not just, you know, remastered graphics.

It is a proper remake with new content, you know, massively overhauled visuals, full voice acting, which is not necessarily great in this case. But it's the real deal. I feel like the voice acting kind of goes different ways for me. I actually did like the voice that gave Kevin, the wolf boy. I think that actually suited him well. We won't talk about Charlotte. We all know what we think of Charlotte. But yeah, I know.

I think Hawkeye was good too. But otherwise, it really could be hit or miss. But generally, the voices were okay. I think I remember switching over to the Japanese for Charlotte and it was even worse. And I said there is no winning. There is no winning. I'm going to say, I feel like having, again, having played through trials of mana in the collection of mana prior to this, I feel like at least having Charlotte speak these lines

like adds a sort of context to it it's like okay she's doing baby talk it's like I can deal with this not having the dialogue read and having to actually read just the text based Charlotte dialogue with Ws

in place of all the R's was actually was very very difficult yeah it kind of reminds me of the um some of the dragon quest remakes when they they before they toned down the accents like Dragon Quest four on DS, where they were just like, whoa, guys, tone it down. You need to dial it back about three levels.

This is way too much. What are these Scots people saying? I don't even understand. Just go easy on us here. The Scotsman, the Scots castle was crazy. I mean, I'm sure it's accurate dialect. It's just really hard to parse if you're not familiar with that particular dialect. Yes, you have to be careful with dialogue.

Charlotte's not difficult to understand. It's just kind of. emotionally draining, I would say. Exactly. It feels extremely draining to read that kind of dialogue. But yeah, yeah, definitely. It would be if she was a minor character that appeared once or twice during the game, I could see, you know, it would be sort of funny since she is a key character that, again,

I highly recommend you put into your party and you have to listen to her for 30 hours. It does get a little. Yeah, I mean, she's a, if she were like a villain and at some point you got to, you know, destroy her, then that'd be very satisfying. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, like the prospect of making her my main character and following her story through to its completion, it just sends, you know, deuce chills down my soul.

I just, I can't do it. I have never been able to do it. I always choose Kevin. He's always my guy. Which means I have to stick to Charlotte too, but at least Kevin's the main. Well, I'm a fan of Reese. I really like her as, you know, a character. And as a design also, like, she's just very kind of stoic, um, kind of, she kind of feels like the prototype for, you know, Lineth from Valkyri profile in some senses. And her voice is very just kind of like, oh, it's, it's a lady reading lines of dialogue. Well, okay, sure. She at least, you know, isn't grading. Just kind of humdrum.

Yeah, exactly. She's tolerable. So your favorite character you said is Hawkeye? No, my favorite character is Kevin. Oh, Kevin. It's super cool. He can turn to a werewolf at night. That's just, I think that's a really awesome mechanic. And it was going back to what Kohler said earlier about what a technical marvel the game was.

That was a big thing on the S&ES being able to have this character who at nighttime would switch forms entirely. And his stats would change and his appearance would change. And he'd changed like a little howl. I just thought that was so amazing. Yeah, and then luckily in the remake, I think in the original game, you really have to worry a whole lot about strategy. and, you know, what day is it before I go attack this monster and, you know, what are my exact compositions? Do I have the eye to the claw items, you know, because you can use the claws to, you know, do elemental damage, whatever, and kind of worry about all of that stuff? Fortunately, in the remake, it's all there, but you don't actually have to worry about it so much.

And I'm guessing you can probably, I actually stuck with the exact same group of characters to do a more direct one-to-one comparison with the original. I said Kevin, Charlotte, and Angela, just stuck with them. Although I feel like you could, you probably could just sort of arbitrarily pick your characters in the remake because it's a lot more generous with, I mean, I had 99 candies like really, really quickly.

So even if you can't heal, you can get healing items and things like that. And so it's a little bit more lenient in that way. It also seems to be more easier to just grind in the remake. That's kind of how I play these games anyway. I just see, okay, well, I'm going to grind as long as I feel like I'm getting a good reward for my time invested. And so when I started playing the remake, I realized that, yeah, if I just spend a few minutes here just killing these guys over and over again, I'm going to level up pretty fast. So I'm going to do it because it's giving me, I feel a good reward for my time investment on grinding.

So I'm going to do it. So I, like, I did the first class change, like, very, very early, very, very early. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would able to do that. But then I still, even with the, oh, yeah, the other thing with the class change is that you cannot, I think, in the remake, like you can't cheese it by reloading your save file. I'm pretty sure having experimented with it a little bit that when you get the item change seed, it has. already determined what class change item it's going to be and so I think I even with one of my characters I think I even just decided to go with a different class than I was going to go with for the third class because I had tried so many question mark seeds and had never gotten the

the third item that I needed for my character and eventually I was just like, F it, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna make, I think it was Kevin and I'm like, all right, I'll go dark light or dark dark or whatever it was I was I was gonna do with, with Kevin, yeah. Well, the, I don't know if they were in the original game,

but in the remake, there are options, there are items that you can get that are very rare that will allow you to change your class. They'll like let you kind of reset basically. So you do, you do have the option of resetting. You can reset, but then you have to go get more question mark seeds, I think, to get to the next class anyway. Also, I do not care. I was just sort of like, I want to move on with the game.

It's like, I want to do it. I want to get the right classes that I want, but also it was just sort of like, okay, all right, hold up. I'm super over-leveled. I'm going to beat the game. I'll just make this character, this class. It's fine. But in the, but in the super Nintendo game, literally you just get the item, plant it. Oh, it's not what you want. Reset the game, do it again. until you get the item that you want. But with this, that never worked. It was always the same item. I did enjoy that.

I mean, again, the stuff that they added in this case was like, it was additive. It did not overcomplicate things, right? So you could level up the planter in the inns. And so you had this incentive to go out and find seeds, which were pretty plentiful, and you always want to go back and plant those seeds because you want to level up because then the items that you're going to get are going to be better. So that was like always fun to come back to town after a, dungeon and have like 10 seeds that you're going to be planting and what items am I going to get.

There seems to be, I may be wrong on this, but it seems to be like there's more and better equipment and weapons that you can get like really strong. Like at some point I think I planted a seed and got a really good flail for, you know, Charlotte that was like so good that for, you know, hours I never needed another weapon or it might have been her ultimate weapon, I think, I'm not sure. You know, it was just like, yeah, yeah, out of the planter. And so that was like super fun to start getting like, oh, like, look at this, this cool item that I got. So that was that, that all seemed to be implemented very well, you know, to my tastes.

Yeah, I would have to say the biggest improvement of this game. I mean, I love the new graphics and it just looks good. But combat is just so much more enjoyable because in the original you basically had the attack button and you had the special button. And that was kind of it. And here you have like light and strong attacks and you have special attacks and you have different spells you can use with, you know, button presses, like kind of the combo button approach. So it becomes more like, Natty, I think earlier you mentioned, you know, someone from Yos Gamer. I think earlier you mentioned the Tails series. And this really kind of reminds me of that kind of as a hybrid of a modern East game like East 7, East 8.

Yeah, I think I mentioned it, like saying it was, it reminded me a little bit of ease eight, and it does a little bit, has that really enjoyable, fast-paced combat, and that's what kind of brought to mind. Yeah, and, you know, I played through the game without realizing that there is a lock-on targeting feature. I was just, like, combing enemies and lining up and, you know, attacking them and just kind of playing through that way. And I thought it was really, like, fluid and intuitive. And I was like, wow, it's actually really nice to have a 3D combat system where you don't have to have a 3D lock on. And it works really well. And then after I finished the game, the people who were kind of advising me were like, oh, yeah, there is a lock on. And I said, oh, well, you know, it's good without it.

How is that? I think I actually didn't use the lock on. I felt like you used the lock on would sometimes lock me on to things I didn't want to locked on to at that point? I think that was the case. Yeah. Yeah, I found it easier, like, not easier, because I didn't compare, but I found it perfectly easy to just kind of nudge the camera stick to make sure that the enemy I wanted to wail on was in the center of my targeting. And I very rarely found myself, you know, mistargeting. Like, I was pretty much always doing these like combo attacks where I'd do, like with Reese, I would do like, you know,

light, light and then a dash attack or something with her spear. And it was always very effective and very satisfying. And, you know, when you switch over to someone like Angela, who has mostly, you know, she's a physical attacker, but her real strength is her spells, it's really easy to fire off a bunch of different spells. And one thing I really, really thought worked better about this remake is that when you cast spells and when enemies target you with spells, you're not locked into it like you are in the Super NES game. Like, that was the most frustrating thing is that when an enemy decides. it's going to attack you in the Super NES game, and that's it, you're going to get hit. There's no way to avoid it.

There's no way around it. And it tends to like lock up the game and basically no inputs are accepted for several seconds while it plays out this mandatory thing, which is really frustrating, especially in boss battles, where you're trying to like get away from an area of effect attack or something. And you just can't because the game basically says,

nope, you're going to be hit no matter what. This is your destiny. This game is very much not like that. that. And I was really, like, I could immediately tell the difference when I defeated the first boss without taking a single hit because I was able to evade everything. And, you know, I was playing, like, I guess, normal difficulty. And you cannot do that in the Super NES game. It is not possible to get through that battle without taking a hit. You're just going to get piled on. But here the whole point is evasion. It's, you know, don't get so caught up in doing combos that you

make yourself vulnerable and you know that the evasion becomes more important and more challenging the more you play into the game to the point where you get to like the final boss and you really have to be on top of things and you're constantly evading also like the the solo battle that angela has i don't know if you played that but you you basically have to anticipate where the enemy is going to target and try to avoid that area of effect but there's a rhythm to it and as long as you manage to kind of stay on top of it and are paying attention, you know, you can deliver sort of reprisal attacks while avoiding their big spells and their big splashy skills because it does give you that little zone of impact warning, you know, like the little red circle on the ground.

So you say, well, I just need to stay out of there. And as long, like I said, as long as you don't get so carried away with just like standing in place, smashing into a combo where you're going to get locked into place by your animations, it's, you know, it just maintains a fast pace and you can avoid taking too much damage in most battles. And it's just a, it's a much more satisfying way to play, in my opinion. Yeah, it is. I really appreciate it being able to dodge, if nothing else, because in the original game, when things get really chaotic and you think you're doing okay, and just kind of in the middle of the fray and there's all these bouncing numbers, and you think, oh, well, okay, I'm hanging in there. And then the you're about to die alarm goes off

incessantly. And you're like, how do that happen? I have. no idea how that even happened. But things are definitely a lot more under control in the Charles Romana remake. Chris, as someone who finds a lot of satisfaction in the original games combat, what were your thoughts on the basically complete overhaul for the remake? Oh, I love it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was just so, it was just always constantly fun throughout the whole entire thing. You, I mean, you know, the original combat I felt was, you know, fine. It served its purpose. I could understand the issues with it.

But with this, it was like, oh, sweet, a new battle. I can't wait to get into this battle and mess some people up. It was it was always, always, always a good time, you know, jumping up into the air, doing air combos. It was just, you know, and it's simple, but it's really what it needs to be because you need that moment-to-moment battle action to be great in an action RPG. And if it's not, then, you know, you're not going to have a good time. And so they clearly spent the time reimagining what needed to be reimagined, the combat, and then did not worry about reimagining the rest of it because the rest of it was fine and did not need to be reimagined and simply needed to be, you know, recreated in 3D.

Yeah, they did a really good job determining what needed to be fixed and what didn't. For sure. Yeah, I think they could have been able to make the story a little bit, just there were some really rough transitions where things were were kept exactly as they had been on Super NES, there were places like when you're on the island and that turtle comes along and all of a sudden you're like rescued by the turtle, that's just like, whoa, what just happened here? If I had not played... If I hadn't played the original Super NES game, I would have been completely bewildered

because there's no context for it. It's just like you're standing there and then all of a sudden you're on a turtle. And it's like, wait, what, what? But there's a, no, there's a village of tomato people there and they tell you all about the turtle and how it might help you. They do. but, I mean, it's still very, like, how it plays out in the game is very, very abrupt. The tomato people.

I just feel like they could have, they, yes, the tomato people tell you stuff. I talked to all the tomato people. I'm just saying that the way certain sequences and transitions like that play out in the remake, they could have done a little more. Like, throw in like five seconds of cutscene or something. It would have helped. Yeah, that's fair. And the stuff they did add, I don't think it was that. effectively done.

Like, there is a post-game, I'm going to spoil a little bit here. There's a post-game, like a new game plus, once you beat the final boss, and an entire, like, kind of small extra chapter. And basically, that is all about finding the fourth character class. And the text in that is so prosaic.

Like, you find books that are like, well, now it is time for you to learn the, fourth class. Like it's, there's no, there's no, it just, it's completely fourth wall breaking. They don't, they didn't even try to like make it work within the lore. It's basically just like, yeah, I don't know. It's like tutorial text, but, you know, as an ancient tomb that you find in the library, which is kind of goofy. And then, you know, the actual environments that you fight through are basically just recycled from the rest of the game. It's just like a four or five hour long combat slog to go fight a bonus boss, which, you know, the combat is great.

So it's kind of hard to complain. And, you know, there's a real Dragon Quest 11 vibe to a lot of the game. And I think that works in its favor. Like, it just kind of has that feel and that look, even though it's a completely different kind of game. So, you know, it was very engrossing in that respect. But I did kind of feel like, well, I already fought through this castle with a different color palette. Oh, yeah. And I fought through this field of rocks.

Okay. Yeah. All right. We're not seeing anything new here. It's just recycled content. But I guess that's kind of how Square Inix does its remakes, ever since, like, Final Fantasy 1 and 2, Dawn of Souls. Wow. But it's nice to have, if you finish the game and you really want to keep playing, it opens up and it says, okay, you know, you can go here to go back to the final boss battle whenever you want.

Or we've added this bonus, you know, essentially dungeon to hack through. We're in a few more quests. And it does just give you the, it gives you something to do. if you just don't want to stop playing and you want to jump back in, you want to keep leveling your characters and you're just having a good time. So, you know, I played through the whole thing

because I just didn't want to stop playing. And I was like, oh, there's more. Okay, I'll go through this. You know, it's a dungeon slog, but I'll do it. I'll go through it for sure. Well, they also give you a proper new game plus where you carry over all your stats

and skills and levels and stuff into, you know, like you can play basically all six character stories and just get stronger every time so that you don't have to fart around and, you know, spend a lot of time grinding through enemies at the beginning, you're basically just going to steamroll everything. Yeah.

That's great. I like that. That's very satisfying. That's really fantastic. That is not something the original game had. No, definitely not. And if you want to see, like, the stories from all the characters' perspective, that's something you're going to need.

I'm trying to think, is there anything else worth saying about the Trials of Manor remake? I liked the sort of just hiding of random items and chests and things like that throughout the towns. I really, I enjoyed me searching for little cactus. I thought that was really fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it really rewarded, you know, they built these big 3D environments. And so they're like, oh, okay, well, we've got to put some stuff in it. So let's drop some items. Let's put some chests in. Let's give you a list of how many chests did you find. And then you really, you want to go find little cactus because the bonuses that you get from

finding him are substantial. You get big experience bonuses, stuff like that. good stuff. Yes, and those are cumulative as you play New Game Plus. So you carry over all the little cactus stamps you've collected so far so that each time you play, you're carrying all those bonuses in addition to your other skills into the game and you can eventually, you know, max out your little cactus stamp rally. That's great. And you mentioned the big 3D environments, and that is also one of the, like for me, aside from combat, the other most important change here is that instead of having the entire world broken up into like a single screen

or two screens that scroll and that's it, like you have actually pretty substantial you know, multi-pathway areas. You have some big open fields. You have, you know, mountain paths. You have kind of big spaces in castles and dungeons. You know, there's like the desert fortress

where there's all kinds of doors that sort of crisscross the space. It just feels, you know, like they put a lot of thought into translating pretty accurately the spaces from the Super Nies game into proper 3D environments. So they're contiguous and you're not really just like constantly feeling like you're going from one little isolated space to another. It all just flows together.

It definitely doesn't feel nearly as claustrophobic as the first game did. Yeah, it just makes for a much more satisfying, much more convincing world. And yeah, it's a great change that really makes a big difference to how it plays. is there anything you would change about the remake like things that you wish they had done better you know besides uh charlotte um going back besides charlotte going back to like the story and the presentation of said story there are definitely times where they completely overlooked what have what should have been done like i remember one scene that kind of stands out to me is um i think i had hawkeye in my team or hawkeye was like in the area and they come across nico you know his little cat friend and And the townspeople are, I think, is supposed to be beating up, Nico, except they're saying, you know, take that, take that, and they're not moving. Yeah. So that kind of thing happened on occasion.

And I know that one thing I got passed around a lot that made fun of the game was, I think it was the ghost ship, where the haunted character uses reverb to, like, indicate, ooh, I'm a ghost, I'm haunted, I'm scary. And I think it's supposed to be played up as a joke, but giving how, like, you know, things get passed around on social media saying, oh my God, like how bad this is. And there was really no defense for it other than, well, I think it's supposed to be a joke that I can understand if people took it the wrong way. But that kind of thing just made the game seem a lot cheaper

than it actually was. I don't remember that. I don't think I saw that being passed around. Yeah, it was going around. It was a bit of a shame because I was trying to say, you know, no, guys, this game's actually really good. And everyone's saying, oh, look how cheap it looked. Look how, you know, what a cash in.

And that's really disappointing. Hmm. Again, releasing this like the week before Final Fantasy 7 remake came out, or was it the week after? In any case, like, it was in the shadow somewhere. Yeah, like within, within a week of the Final Fantasy 7 remake was just not, like, they really should have rescheduled this when Final Fantasy 7 got bumped, because you just can't compare the two. They are made with, you know, their games on two or three, you know, multiple different levels of production quality. I mean, Final Fantasy 7 remake took years and multiple companies to

make. It was a disastrous project. Whereas this was like, they put together the final, the Secret of Mata remake and we're like, what if we did this but actually put some effort into it? Let's try that. And, you know, three years later, two years later, we had a full, proper remake of the game. It wasn't anywhere near as tortured or laborious or expensive as Final Fantasy 7. So this is obviously not a game for Square Annex to pin its futures on, but I do feel like trials of mana, you know, HD is not. Not Trials HD, that's a different game.

Trials of Manna is a good foundation for them to continue exploring the manna concept and maybe actually give us a new game. I would be into that. Yeah, I would absolutely be into that. I really think that the gaming space and the RPG space can really use more of those kind of totally legit, totally enjoyable B-tier games that are just fun to plow through for an hour, or sorry, 30 hours or so. And you don't think about, you know, DLC, you don't think about patches. You don't think about this, this, and that.

It's just a good, fun, solid action RPG. Yeah, I feel like Ease and Yakuza have kind of the lock on that. But maybe we could get one that doesn't start with a Y. Today's genre is brought to you by the letter Y. Exactly. Chris, what about you? Yeah, I mean, I really hope that this is the proof of concept that illustrates that. illustrates that a straightforward action role-playing game in the mana series is something that

can still work and be a whole lot of fun and is where the series should go. So I hope that this, I mean, essentially, if you haven't played trials of mana, and let's be honest, I mean, like outside of Japan, like very, very few people have, even with collection of mana, it's not like a ton of people, you know, millions people started playing it. So for a lot of people, was a, you know, a new mana game, right? Because they haven't played the original. But, I mean, a truly brand new mona game. Just use the engine.

The engine's great. I don't need it to me. I'm fine with the, like, it looks like an HDPS2 game. Because, well, first of all, I wanted on Switch, you know? I mean, that was the fact that I was able to play. I mean, really, I actually played Final Fantasy 7 remake and this, you know, all in the month of April. And I was able, you know, with Final Fantasy 7 remake. like monopolizing the family television was a tough thing to do.

You know, so this being on Switch, and I played most of it just handheld, that's really, like, like I want it low spec, I want it on the Nintendo Switch. I think that's the home for projects like this. So I agree. Let's do that. You know, I would love to see just use the engine, just make an all-new Monagame with this style. I think that this really illustrates what this series has been craving for

20 years and it wasn't, I'm not going to say it wasn't hard to make this because I'm sure it was a difficult journey to like put this game together and finally nail it. But, you know, ultimately the answer to what should we do with the mana series was what people were saying you should do. And it's just make an action RPG again. Like just, it wasn't, it wasn't a complicated conundrum. No, it was a very simple, straightforward idea, even if the game development itself, Of course, game development is never easy, but the idea is, why did we fall in love with Mon in the first place? Because it's a good, solid action RPG series. End of story. All right. Well, personally, I would like to see, yes, more like this, please, and do something new.

And don't lose sight of what makes this game good. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just give us more of this, but that's not, you know, 25 years old. That would be great. But yeah. Okay. So trials of manner. that's probably the last time we're going to talk about the Manna series on Retronauts for a long time. They've got to make a new game for us and then we've got to wait 10 years until we can talk about it. So we hope

you have enjoyed this sort of mini-series that we've done over the past few years talking about the Manna games. And yeah, Chris, Nadia, thank you both for joining for this conversation and wrapping things up with a look at a very good remake. Oh, thank you

for having me. I'm always up for talking about mana, even though this will be the last time for a while, or so you say, yep, invite me any time to talk about Mata. What are you insinuating? No one can. Once you love Monna, you can never stop talking about it. Ah. All right. Well, that's true. There is hypocrisy involved. But what can I say? So let's wrap up now. And of course, as usual, if you could both let everyone know where we can find you on the internet and pimp and promote your projects.

You both kind of mentioned at the beginning, but let's do the social media feeds and subscriptions and so on and so forth. So, Nadia. I can be found as the second half of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast alongside Cat Bailey. You can find our feed at USgamer.net. And I

am found on Twitter at Nadia Oxford. That's all on word. It's nice and simple, even though my thoughts are usually not very nice and simple. Chris? I am on Twitter, as always, at Koboon Heat, K-O-B-U-N.

N-H-E-A-T. And I, wow, I finally find myself in the position where I have to say that I can't actually tell you anything at all about what I'm working on. But we hope to surprise and delight you with video games in the future. So please look forward to it. All right. And as for myself, you can find me on social media also. Twitter is GameSpite. And on YouTube doing my YouTube thing every week, every Wednesday.

and, of course, here on Retronauts. And Retronauts, as always, is community supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Your subscription feeds the children known as Jeremy and Bob. Just a few bucks a month. We'll get you early access to shows with higher bit rate quality and no advertisements or promotions. Or you can pay a little extra, I think, five bucks a month.

And that gets you exclusive week, sorry, biweekly episodes plus exclusive weekly columns by Diamond Fight. and occasionally some other stuff in there as well. So thanks, everyone, for listening. Thanks again, Chris and Nadia. And I think we're calling it a day now. Okay, bye-bye. So long, everyone.

Eh. Eh. Thank you.