Trials of Mana - Review

Over the years there have been countless games that have been released in Japan that have never seen the light of day out here and while some do get fan translations, they are rare. When Square Enix announced they were remaking one such title, my first reaction was cool, but having seen the game plenty of times, leading up to the full release, my biggest question was, would this be something I could enjoy if it was based on a game made over 20 years ago.

Trials of Mana tells six different stories, which when the game was released was crazy and as they kept that element in the remake, it means that there is a lot to discover, each time you play it through. The general underlying story though is that there is a force at work that are attempting working from one of three evils, the Dragon Lord, the Masked Mage or the Dark Majesty and depending on which main character you select, will send you down the appropriate story. The problem with the story being delivered like this is that out of nowhere you can encounter one of the characters you did not select and be given a snippet of a story, that is completely without context, which confuses, more than anything else. The other issue is that each of the big baddies are interchangeable with each other, for a while I really did not understand that they were actually different people. Regardless of that though, with a story that changes based on who your main character is, and then the two supporting characters you chose, there will be enough to draw you back in each time, though that being said, there are times when that is hard to believe.

The gameplay is a little odd, there are parts of it that are pure old school RPG, with grinding for levels to power through, dealing with random quests that matter little and so on. Looking at it from the modern point of view, there are a host of changes that are very modern, like the open combat and the free exploration. The problem is there is no smooth middle ground between the two, on one side it is all about the classic elements of the genre and the other is the new, the result is that if you get into the modern groove the old school will show up and break the momentum and vice versa. Neither part is bad on its own, the open combat is amazing, even from the early small-scale battles, to the ones against the final bosses, the combat felt incredible and that comes down to the freedom to attack.

One of the more inspired elements is the CP system, what CP stands for, I couldn’t tell you, but basically it allows you to dish out more powerful attacks, but in order to use them, you need to hit enemies. But you can’t just use basic attacks, you have to use the heavy attack and the longer you charge it up, the more CP you can earn, the more attacks you can dish out, it is a very balanced system. The attacks are obtained when you level up, not just basic levelling though, but class levelling, which is achieved by using the power of the mana stones, once you have levelled up your class, you will generally unlock new attacks. Regular levelling up does provide you with new buffs, bonuses and more, but they are not CP attacks, and if you can trigger a multi-character attack, you can deal some serious damage, but as I said, you need to level and that is done by taking down enemies. This is something very similar to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, a title I finished the day before starting Trials of Mana, in that one, any attack will grant you AP, letting you dish out attacks, the more successful your chain, the more AP you earnt, with you needing to use heavy attacks in Trials, it adds a different level of complexity to the game.

The flip side to it all though, is the old school parts, specifically grinding, there is no nice way to say it, but that part sucks and it is something you will do, not in the sense that you will have to spend hours just levelling up, but each time you come across enemies you have to fight them to keep the pace going. There was a boss fight that I got to, I was under levelled, but I kept at it, the problem was that I was not dealing much damage and while the companions in my party were eventually taken out, I stayed fighting until I succumbed to the inevitable. The issue, once I reloaded, was that I then had to run around the world, fighting countless foes in order to level up all members of the party, then head to a town in order to get some better gear, before heading back and trying again. Whilst I appreciate the need to ensure that I am levelling up, the game tends to level in blocks and with each new area, the result is that each time I went somewhere new, I was always below the enemies, the other side of that though, is that each time I had to revisit earlier areas, the enemies were so weak that fighting them seemed utterly pointless.

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In fighting that stronger boss though, I did discover two things and once I noticed it, I could not stop seeing it as I kept on fighting and the first is that the bosses are more like battles of attrition, especially if you are only a few levels lower than them. That is not to say that bosses don’t have patterns to learn or things like that, they do, but no matter how powerful you are, the bosses tend to take a lot of hits to defeat. Issue number two is that the AI is dumb, like annoyingly dumb and it wasn’t just that they would do silly things from time to time, but they would constantly do them and usually in the middle of a battle. The best examples can again, be pulled from boss fights, as they lasted longer than the fights in the world, targeting locations would appear on the ground for where an enemies attack would be landing and the AI controlled members of the team, would stay within the circle, if I took control of them to get them out of danger, the person, usually Duran in my playthrough, would instead run into danger. The concern with this, is that I would spend a lot of time giving back HP to party members or even worse, attempting to revive them, whilst also avoiding attacks myself and I eventually got to the point, where I decided if they went down, it was not worth me reviving them.

Another aspect of the game that is hard to get used to is the D level acting, be it the voices themselves, the way they deliver the lines or the script, it is bad. Now, bad acting is always going to be a thing, but when you are a company as large as Square Enix and your bread and butter is RPG’s with characters you are meant to care about, delivering this is just pathetic. Now the actors themselves might have done the best job with what they were given and I give them some credit for that, but there are more times when it behaves like a horrible dub of a Hong Kong action movie, with spoken words betraying the on screen actions or vice versa. Combine that with bad guys that sound more like they are annoyed they had to wait one person more in line than planned, rather than actual evil, nothing about the audio feels right. The games score though, it has its moments of greatness, but I changed it back to the old school soundtrack for a while and just enjoyed that more.

The other side of the presentation is the visuals and playing the game on the Switch, there are some slight issues that are easily noticed, but for the most part the visuals are solid. Characters still do that annoying thing, where hair or weapons clip through their clothes and that is annoying, but beyond that, the overall look is done very well. The locations are clean and varied, sadly the same can not be said for the folks that live in the world, in almost all instances, the shopkeepers and innkeepers are the same model, doing the same stupid dance until you talk to them. Sailors are all the same as well, just with different colour outfits on and when you combine them with voices that don’t match the type of character they are trying to be, it stands out as a clear indicator that they don’t care, they did only what was needed to pad the towns out.

Trials of Mana is an odd mix of a game, there are parts that are wonderful and new, but also parts that are old and nostalgia driven, but somehow the game is not able to make the two meet perfectly in the middle. The result is an experience that requires you to take both parts of the game and deal with them as best you can. That is not to say the game does not have its moments, as there is a fun game to enjoy, you just have to dig a little to get to it. The problem is, while you are digging for the fun, you will discover the rest of the flaws, from horrible acting, married with bad animations, to outright lazy character duplication. Ignore all the flaws and you will still have fun, but you just need to determine if that is a challenge you want to face.