The Mana action-RPG series has enjoyed a revival with the Collection of Mana compilation, as well as remakes of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana. Legend of Mana, the series’ fourth entry and first foray onto the original PlayStation, has been remastered for modern consoles and PC, delivering the charming, 2D action-RPG to contemporary audiences. Legend of Mana now features vastly improved visuals, arranged musical tracks, regions not included in the PlayStation release, and a wealth of improvements that make it significantly more enjoyable than the original version. It still has a handful of flaws, such as balance issues, obtuse quest progression, and frame rate problems, but this $29.99 PC game is full of nostalgic charm and stunning visuals that impress just as much now as they did more than 20 years ago.
Weave Your World
Unlike the Mana games that came before it, Legend of Mana presents its story and world in piecemeal fashion. Legend of Mana’s universe is fractured, with each zone represented by a unique artifact that you place on the grid-like world map in the order of your choosing. Entering these artifacts loads the zone, and once you’re there, you undertake quests, slay monsters, and find treasures. Each artifact has a set of values that influence the strength of the monsters, as well as the loot and gear you can obtain.
It’s a unique approach to world design that gives you the freedom to tackle quests and dungeons as you wish, but it’s a that style also lacks cohesion. Areas feel like themed stages, with no sense of continuity outside of character interactions. These stages are massive, however, and many of the game’s quests see you returning to previously explored zones to complete objectives or undertake entirely new missions.
Legend of Mana has three major story arcs that are split across various quests scattered throughout the world. In addition, there are dozens of smaller quests and optional missions that don’t further the main stories but expand upon the characters and setting. This is expected, considering how the game world is presented, but Legend of Mana is the type of game that requires a guide if you’re a completist. You’re going to miss a lot of content due to the story’s non-linear nature, expansive zones, many fail states, and optional content packed into every region. Much like the original PlayStation version, this remaster preserves the New Game Plus option upon completing the game, so you can start with all your gear, pets, and levels intact, and hunt for every bit of content you may have missed on your first playthrough.
This remaster comes with a few bonus features, one of which was exclusive to the original Japanese release. The Japanese PlayStation version featured support for the PocketStation, a PS1-era memory card peripheral similar in function and appearance to the Tamogotchi and the Pokéwalker. With a Legend of Mana save, you could play a mini-game called Ring Ring Land with your collected pets to earn rare items to transfer back into your game. In this remaster, Ring Ring Land is playable at any time from the main menu. The original release also gave you bonus gear and scenes if you had Saga Frontier 2, Chocobo Racing, or Final Fantasy VIII save data on your memory card. These are included in the remastered version by default, which is a wonderful addition that makes this release feel that much more definitive.
Brawling and Building
The combat plays similarly to earlier Mana games, with encounters taking place in real time. Legend of Mana gives you an expansive weapons list that includes swords, axes, spears, flails, and hammers. You have a light attack that deals the bulk of your damage, as well as a heavy attack that can be tacked on at the end of a light attack. Interestingly, heavy attacks can be modified with directional inputs for more varied effects. For example, double-tapping forward before a heavy attack executes a rushing strike, while a quarter-circle motion busts out an uppercut. In addition, you unlock special attacks and magical spells as you progress through the game. These all add flourish and utility to your combat repertoire. That said, Legend of Mana is an easy game, so there’s no incentive to experiment or utilize the dozens of moves available to you at any given time. You can beat the game by mashing out basic attacks.
Like the previous Mana games, Legend of Mana lets NPCs join your quest to form parties. They’re AI-controlled characters, and generally aren’t very useful. You cannot swap to control them—this would have been a nice update for this rerelease—so they serve as enemy distractions and not much else. New to the remaster is the option to turn off encounters. This alone is a massive gameplay improvement, as there was no way to escape or avoid fights in the PS1 game, which meant that fighting through previously visited areas was almost always a tedious, unchallenging slog. That’s not to say that Legend of Mana isn’t fun, as mindless action is sometimes fun in its own right. In fact, Legend of Mana is quite enjoyable, as long as you aren’t expecting it to be consistently challenging.
Besides combat, Legend of Mana offers expansive crafting systems that let you smith your own weapons and gear, collect monster eggs, garden and grow crops, build instruments to cast magic, and even build/customize a golem party member to fight alongside you. However, much as in the original release, all these systems are horrifically obtuse if you want to maximize your crafting, as there are dozens of unspoken rules about how smithing, pet-raising, and gardening work that the game simply doesn’t tell you. These systems are highly complex, and virtually impossible to use to their fullest without consulting some outside resource. Another missed opportunity: eliminating the five-pet stable limit. This may have been a hardware limitation issue back in the PS1 original, but it is unnecessarily restrictive in 2021.
A Dazzling Presentation
This remaster’s visual overhaul preserves the original game’s look and feel, while improving the graphical quality for modern televisions and gaming monitors. The vibrant, storybook-like backgrounds look fantastic, as they feature repainted and reworked assets to accommodate 16:9 displays. Text boxes and menus have been changed to take better advantage of this additional space, too. Sprites have been brightened up, but they are largely unchanged to retain the pixelated charm of the originals. Character portraits are all cleaner and much more detailed. Pre-rendered FMVs were used over backgrounds in various instances in the PS1 version, and these too have also been painted over to match the remastered visuals.
In addition, Yoko Shimomura’s wonderful score has been updated with new arrangements, and they’re excellent renditions that are faithful to the original tracks. Like Trials of Mana, Legend of Mana lets you swap in the original score whenever you want. From a presentation standpoint, the Legend of Mana remaster is a significant improvement over the original game in almost every way.
That said, the pixel art stands out jarringly against the hand-painted backgrounds. It’s a subjective nitpick to be sure, but the backgrounds of the PS1 release blended better with the sprites due the pixelation and lower resolution. These new remastered backgrounds are gorgeous, so much so that the sprites now seem out of place. I appreciate that the developers didn’t ruin the sprites by cleaning them up with ugly soft edges and hard lines as has been the case with previous 2D Square-Enix rereleases, but I wish there were a CRT filter included in the options menu to blend and complete the aesthetic.
Other changes include a new auto-save function that saves your progress after every screen transition, so you are no longer restricted to save points like in the original. There have also been a few changes to the English localization, particularly a few altered phrases, names, and words to tidy up the dialogue. Gaeus was changed to Gaia, for example. The only other changes I noticed were that two characters, Roger and Hamson, who featured Mr. Popo-like lips in the original game, are now thin-lipped and bearded, respectively. This remaster is the first time European audiences can get their hands on the game, and Legend of Mana offers a variety of language options aside from English and Japanese, including Spanish, French, and German.
Can Your PC Run Legend of Mana?
Much like the PS1 original, the remastered Legend of Mana is capped at 30-frames-per-second gameplay. Menus and UI elements run at 60fps, and the remaster boosts visual resolutions up to 4K. Loading is lightning quick, too, though that is to be expected.
Unfortunately, the PC version suffers from frame stuttering during combat, particularly when performing certain skills and actions. It is not significant, but it is definitely noticeable if you have a discerning eye. The hitching may not be a problem if you aren’t sensitive to this sort of thing, but it became glaringly apparent for me the more time I spent with the game. This does not seem to be an issue with the game’s console versions, so one can only hope that Square Enix addresses this problem with a patch in the near future.
To play Legend of Mana on PC, your rig needs at least an Intel Core i3 3240 CPU, an AMD Radeon R7 240 or Nvidia GeForce GT 730 GPU, and the Windows 10 operating system. It also needs 13GB of storage space and 4GB of RAM. As a Steam game, Legend of Mana supports Steam Achievements, keyboards, gamepads, Steam Cloud, Steam Trading Cards, and Remote Play Together. Unfortunately, it comes with the infamous Denuvo Anti-tamper software.
The Legend Comes Back to Life
The Legend of Mana remaster plays it safe, delivering a cleaned-up, definitive version of the game you remember from more than 20 years ago. It’s gorgeously preserved, and while you could argue that more could have been done, the package is still a fine one, particularly if you have a soft spot for the game. Legend of Mana was never an innovative adventure, but it was a charming one packed with immersive gameplay, a quirky cast, and beautiful visuals. If you want to experience this celebrated game, there’s no better place to start than here.
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