izigame.me

I purchased this game for the original Playstation the day it came out. I had been a fan of Final Fantasy Adventure on the Gameboy and Secret of Mana on the SNES (Seiken Densetsu 1 and 2). We had played the third game via emulators and fan translations and were excited to get the latest game in one of our favorite series.
I played for about 5 hours and quit, never to return to the game until recently. When I saw Legend of Mana on Steam I thought that maybe in my youth I was too hasty to judge this game and it deserved another try.
As it turns out, Legend of Mana is just a very bad game. I'll start with what was enjoyable: The graphics and visuals are gorgeous and absolutely peak Mana series. On an OLED screen the colors are jaw dropping. The soundtrack to this game does justice to the quality of the original Secret of Mana one. The little stories and quests are interesting and fun, but you get very little direction on them (more on that later).
Now on to what doesn't work, which is just about everything:
The framerate for the game is bizarre and jerky. Character animations and movement feel like they run at about half speed for some reason. The controls are incredibly touchy and it can be very difficult to move around the screen to where you are trying to go. Clicking on people or items can take several tries and even something as simple as opening a treasure chest or talking to an NPC becomes difficult. Combine this with the very weird hitboxes of most enemies, and it's incredibly frustrating to try to control your character in combat.
Speaking of combat, it is a chore, very boring, and very frustrating. The game deviated to a more "beat em up" style of combat. You have no menu access in combat and no healing items, instead relying on the insanely boring "Crouch" command to slowly build back up HP while you hide in a corner and the bosses mostly just aimlessly spin in circles and attack nothing. You can assign special attacks to buttons, but the incredibly long execution animation for them means that most bosses will simply wander out of the way of them before they go off, or they will begin performing their own attacks (which they spam), and when they are performing any attacks of their own, they are invincible during the entire animation.
Some weapons make you move agonizingly slow, have obscene recovery animations, and don't really perform better than just the regular sword.
The game goes out of it's way to over-explain some systems in the game while giving you almost zero information on others. Their are so many weird systems that were tacked on to the game that have no factor in any of the game. There is this ridiculously convoluted crafting system to create golems that I never even used. So many items are devoted to this weird weapon/armor crafting system that is not explained at all. You can go online and read massive guides on how it works and still not understand anything about it. The best weapon drop in the game has 62 attack and is all you need to beat the game, but if you spend hours and hours and somehow collect dozens of very rare items you can craft swords that have 200+ attack power.
There is a pet system which is like a half-baked Monster Rancher, where you can go back to boss rooms and collect monster eggs (an easy but boring and frustrating process) to hatch random pets of that type. Pets will follow you around and help you in battle or give you bonus skills. But in reality pets are only there to give you more time to resurrect in battle in case one of the random boss skills one shots you (as long as your pet or other party member is alive, you will come back to life after a certain amount of time). Unless you have an item that gives experience share, if your pet picks up experience crystals from enemies, they steal that XP from your hero. You are limited to only 4 pets in your stable before you have to sell off one to make room, so collecting all of the 65 pets seems pointless. There is really only a single pet in the game worth having and it's the one that helps you get rare item drops.
Speaking of experience, the XP system in this game has to be the dumbest idea for an RPG I have ever seen in any game I have played. When you kill a monster, they explode little XP crystals everywhere DURING COMBAT. You have about 5 seconds to run around and pick them up before they disappear. If they disappear you do not get that XP, which makes using some of the weapons impossible since they lower your movement speed significantly. A lot of times enemies will drop a little bag that will give you items after the battle. If they drop a bag instead of XP, you get ZERO XP instead (because you got an item). It is very common to kill a group of enemies and get 0 xp.
I was halfway through the game before I even realized there was something of a "magic" system in the game where you could bind your musical instruments to buttons to cast spells, but they are so hilariously weak that I never even bothered using them.
Item shops in the game secretly have a "level" that determines what items are available. It is possible to put down zones in such a way that you lose access to buy certain crafting items for the entire game. None of this is ever explained in the game.
The questing system is completely unworkable without some kind of guide. The game makes you feel like you can "create the world" by putting down zones wherever you want, but if you put zones down in the "wrong" place or in the wrong order you will be completely locked out of certain quests for that playthrough. When walking through towns, there is no indication on what will start a quest and what won't. Sometimes you have to talk to certain unrelated NPCs in a very specific order to trigger events or quests, and most of the time it makes no sense. If you talk to certain NPCs at the wrong time, or pick the wrong dialogue option, it will lock quests out completely and you cannot recover them. When you are on a quest, very rarely do the NPCs ever really tell you what you are doing, where you should be going, or who to talk with. It all feels like one of those point-and-click games from the early 90s where you have to keep trying to talk to random people or use objects randomly on other objects to make something happen.
In summary: Amazing graphics and soundtrack, frustrating questing and combat and pointless systems tacked on that you will never use. There is almost nothing of a main plot or quest, just a bunch of random side-plots where you will be pulling your hair out trying to figure out which character to talk to without picking the wrong dialogue option and immediately failing a quest forever.