Legend of Mana

Before everything was available online, some games were made with the express purpose of selling guides, magazines, or driving sales to phone tip lines. No game better embodies this strategy than Legend of Mana. This game is essentially unusable without a guide, and not just because of surface-level issues like convoluted dialogue decisions (à la Persona) or necessary boss tricks. Everything you do affects something else. The level of consideration required for whom you talk to, when you talk to them, and where you place each area on the map is just the beginning. No item, weapon, accessory, or armor piece comes with any description, and the crafting system is a convoluted nightmare built around a hidden "card" tempering mechanic that secretly influences a ton of backend, unseen stats. Even with a guide, you'll be pulling your hair out trying to craft a single wearable item. The winning move is usually to skip the whole system and use store-bought gear or items you can grind from enemies, which the game mercifully lets you get away with without much resistance. There's also a monster-raising feature that requires you to feed pets a specific set of foods before each level-up to shape several hidden personality traits. Mess it up, and you're simply screwed. You have to scrap them and start over. The robot companion system is similarly baffling, with an incomprehensible "logic board" mechanic that makes it do... stuff. Probably. Beyond the Escher-like systems and game mechanics, the story is just as bad. Your character is a silent protagonist who is somehow an incarnation of... Mana? Or something? Mana was fought over, the fighting destroyed the world long ago, and you're now in its rebirth phase, so it's your job to fix it, I guess? It's really just an excuse for silly-looking characters in Cirque du Soleil outfits to philosophize in poorly translated Engrish about love, friendship, and letting people make their own choices. These were fairly standard narrative tropes at the time, but you won't be invested in any of it. The disjointed, semi-non-linear area placement system makes encountering (or missing) characters feel almost random, and many of them only appear in one-off arcs before disappearing forever, turning the whole thing into a series of "well, that just happened" moments. Do I like Legend of Mana? Yes, because I grew up with it in my PS1 collection and found it fun to tinker with occasionally, never expecting to actually finish it. Would I recommend it to anyone else? Absolutely not. This game could constitute an entire college course on its backend number/color/placement/order mechanics alone. It is the epitome of the obtuse, self-indulgent nonsense that would pop up occasionally during the RPG boom in an attempt to seem clever. Only play it if you don't mind a strict, color-by-numbers playthrough guided by an extensive walkthrough.