Trials of Mana

Trials of Mana is a pretty easy recommend and frankly a great point of entry for anyone looking to get into this franchise. Mana does have an overarching "timeline" to some extent that's foreign to its sister series like Final Fantasy and Saga, but the only one with relevant plot beats to Trials is Heroes of Mana (good luck playing that without an emulator) and it doesn't appear that you'll be missing too much if you don't. My first Mana game was Children of Mana on the DS. I've since played other games in the franchise and I don't recall any of them being anything less than passable (I'm excluding the mobile games because I didn't play them and I know what SquEnix does with their mobile games). If you've played other games in the franchise, you'll probably get a twinge of something adjacent to nostalgia and a slight smirk when certain frequent features pop up. I certainly did, but I don't think it was anything you'll miss out on if this is your first game. That said, I played the whole game on Hard for my first playthrough and this was a breeze. Trials doesn't exactly play like other games in the Mana series, and it sure as heck doesn't resemble the SNES remake all too mechanically. I'll definitely be coming back for another playthrough, as Trials has the distinct strength of 6 playable characters and only letting you use 3 per playthrough. You'll be getting different bosses, major zones, certain abilities, and even the final boss is different depending on your primary character (or so I've been told). That said, unless this is just gonna be your forever game, there are definitely more efficient parties than others. My first playthrough was Angela, Reisz, and Kevin. There are apparently special pairings that give you more content if they appear in your party and I managed to pick none of the pairings. So if I was looking to "see all of the content" in the game, I'll have a minimum of 4 playthroughs at this point. Again, that's frankly a strength especially since I got it on sale. But you'll probably want to make your choices more carefully than me. So let me help with that! Angela is friggin' broken, and it's a fun broken. I went down her dark path (oh yeah, the class system in this game is pretty simple but plenty of fun) and she was melting even bosses by the time I got to the secret super boss that unlocks NG+. If she has a weakness, I didn't experience it. If you told me this game was a teeth grinder and I just made it easy picking Angela, I'd believe you. If you want to play with her, Duran is apparently her unique pair. Kevin joins Jon Talbain as a werewolf kungfu master with an utterly milquetoast name. Two isn't a lot, but given the cross pollination of Japanese video games it probably isn't all that weird. That said, he's tons of fun. He has a late game ability where he enchants basic attacks to restore MP, so this dude just kept feeding the WMDs that were Angela's magic spells. I mostly played as Angela, but swapped to him on occasion. If you're anything like me and know who Jon Talbain is, you'll probably love Kevin. He's paired with Charlotte, who has a voice you'll either love or hate. So keep that in mind. Reisz was in my party, but I didn't play as her much. She's got a lot of cool support abilities, and some of those abilities were just regenerating health at the end of fights. I definitely didn't regret including her, but she didn't really stand out to me in comparison to the valley girl that summoned meteors or the martial arts werewolf. Though I hope to be proven wrong. She's paired with Hawkeye, and he has caught my interest. So my party now includes Reisz and him for NG+. On the subject of NG+, the developers clearly want you to play it. Acquiring it unlocks 2 new difficulties and an ability that boosts your EXP gains by 300%. Sure, if you're like me and handicapped your ability to experience most of the story you'll want to play again anyway, but the prospect of creating different builds in a third of the time as the first playthrough is viscerally interesting to me. You by default carry over any general equippable abilities you unlocked in your previous playthroughs, keep your items and money, and there's apparently some additional content made available in NG+ (though I could just be misunderstanding the NG+ blurb from when you start). You can choose to retain character levels from previous playthroughs or start at level 1. Considering you also get a 300% EXP boost, I elected to go with the fresh start. I can't imagine I'm shooting myself in the foot with that. I do have some complaints, but they're fairly minor. Trials has some aerial combat, but it doesn't commit like it should. So it's pretty underwhelming. Your air combo is never going to be longer than how it started at the beginning of the game, which sucks if you like aerial combos like me. Getting the class upgrade items could be a slog, but you can avoid it with a mod. If those are my biggest complaints though, I'd say this game is stellar. Now for some of the less fun, but still relevant stuff. I played this game about half and half between my beefy, 4080 desktop computer and my Steam Deck. I have no complaints with the performance from either experience. Though I will also tell you to check out some mods like I did. There's a mod that prevents texture pop-in you can grab off Nexus, and I literally had that installed before I even booted the game up for the first time. As far as I can tell, it worked. I had no issues with texture, frame stuttering, or performance whatsoever. There's actually a lot of mods for this game, and I had about a dozen the entire time I was playing. Most of them are just costume changes, and you can probably put 2 and 2 together and guess what most of those costumes are. A lot of them are things you definitely don't want mom or your kids walking in on if you've got them installed, but there's other stuff like palette swaps and some memes of all things. As for localization, I have no idea how Trials escaped the culture war crap in comparison to SquEnix's other releases from around the same time as this. I don't speak Japanese and I didn't beat the SNES version, so I can't say for certain nothing was changed. But any indication of localizer meddling has eluded me (if there's any at all). I didn't find any obnoxious pop culture references, characters like Angela and some NPCs clearly didn't get hit with the modesty stick, and the whole "beast men are oppressed by humans" trope is present but I didn't feel like I was beat over the head with it. Trials of Mana is a worthy successor to one of the SNES's hidden gems and one of SquEnix's less appreciated franchises. I'm glad it made it's way to PC and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Given Visions of Mana's developers got canned after the game released, I imagine it will be some time before the next Mana game. While I hate to hear that people lost their jobs when they made what was apparently a good and financially successful game, it's at least a good indicator that SquEnix is gonna be leaving the Mana series alone for some time. I haven't played Visions or FF16, but I hear a lot of good about one and some serious division over the other. A dead series probably isn't getting bad sequels, and I'd rather Mana go out on a high note with this and Visions than "evolve" as Final Fantasy has. Trials goes on sale fairly regularly for $20. I think I paid $25 when I picked it up, and that was money well spent.