Thursday, March 15, 2012

TEXT PLAY: Legend of Mana (PlayStation; 2000): Issue #00: Choose Your Own Adventure


Here's a strange bird for you.

This game here, Legend of Mana, let me tell you, this game comes from one really weird series. If I know my history right, this is part of a series that initially came out on the Game Boy in the 1990s and was marketed as a Final Fantasy title, Final Fantasy Adventure, I think it was. I owned a Game Boy at the time and this is one of the games I tried on it. I never really got into FFA, or handheld gaming in general, for that matter.

I did get more into a later game in the series, Secret of Mana, for the Super Nintendo. I think I already mentioned someplace that I was considering doing a text play of that sometime in the future, but, as with all the things I do on this blog, there's no set schedule for that.

But the game at hand here is Legend of Mana. From what I understand here, the series this game is a part of a series better known as Seiken Densetsu, at least in Japan. The games span across several systems and is hard to follow, sequel-wise. The series itself is an anthology sort of thing, like the Final Fantasy series. It's the numbering of the games and the order of release that's got me confused. Legend is the fourth game released in the series, but a game called Seiken Densetsu 4 was released after this one. It's confusing, and I'm not really enough of a fan of the series to follow it well enough to do a decent job of explaining it.

Legend of Mana, or LoM for short, is pretty much what I'd call a Choose Your Own Adventure story, which is where I got the title for this prologue. In a sense, it's the ultimate sandbox game. There's an overarching story with quite a few intertwining threads, plots, subplots, and such, and a ton of things to do along the way. Beyond that, though, there's no set structure to the world, and no clear indication of where one is to go next after a quest is completed. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It makes the game more interesting, to be honest.

Ultimately, though, that's what's usually wound up getting me in the end. I've tried to play this game several times, and in all cases, I've come to a point where I'm just baffled as to what exactly I need to do to finish a quest and move on with the game. If I had to guess, I'd say I've made it maybe halfway through this game before I got confused to the point that I felt I had to quit because of how lost I was. I'm not anticipating this time to be any different, but maybe it will be if I know there are people reading along with my adventures.

As far as the adventuring itself goes, there will be plenty of that to be had, as I've said before. There are some things that will need to be set up or explained, but I'll do that as I go along, for the most part. There'll be plenty of time for that, I'm sure.

One thing I will set up in advance, though, is that this is probably the only game I've ever owned where I know the world has an actual name to it. They call the place we'll be playing in Fa'Diel. That's memorable because I don't recall any of the other games, or at least the RPGs I own, giving official names to the worlds they take place in.

There's also some basic setup stuff that I should explain, but I'll get into that in the first “real” issue, #01: SPAAAACCCCEEEEE!!!

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