![]() It's simple, yes, but it's something new. First, you have to find someone to give you a brief tutorial in their language, and then you have to remember enough of the fundamentals to navigate your way through the conversation menus. For example, in one city you need to sell lamps to the Dudbears, a clan of stitched-together teddy bears. There are more than a few simple dungeon crawls, but there are also some surprisingly innovative concepts here and there. ![]() Puzzle-solving, character interaction, and combat all take turns playing a role. Some of the stories they tell are deadly serious, and often quite poignant, while others are like one-liners, providing a little comic relief. Some of the quests are short, requiring only a little wandering around town, while some of them are lengthy, spanning many dungeons. To use a literary analogy, Legend of Mana is more like an anthology of short stories than a single long novel. ![]() In a couple of cases, quests will connect to each other as part of a larger plotline. Once you complete a quest, you'll often be given a new Artifact or two, or at least pointed in the direction of a new adventure. Quests are everywhere, and while the progression of the game is far from linear, they lead helpfully into each other. Though Legend of Mana doesn't drive you directly into each adventure, you're not liable to spend much time wandering around without something to do. Once you've built your first land is where the questing begins. Create a land and you can travel through it, finding new items, people, and adventures. To raise the world into being, you need Artifacts, magical objects that harness the energy of Mana to transform into locales like forests, mountains, cities, and pirate ships (well, actually, there's just the one pirate ship). The realm of Fa'Diel begins as nothing but a barren plain, perhaps with a few bodies of water here and there. In the beginning (yes, this game leads one to occasional delusions of creative power), you have to build the world yourself. If this is the last hurrah of 2D on the PlayStation, and by extension perhaps one of the very last 2D games, I can't think of many better notes to go out on. Whatever can be said about what you're able to do there, though, it's an undeniably lovely place to visit. Featuring a large array of small adventures and side-quests, Legend of Mana doesn't pull you through its world so much as it lets you live there for a little while. It's a slow, meandering sort of game, without the strong, unifying central storyline that drove Secret of Mana (and more or less every other RPG out there). Though it may prove an acquired taste for many, and even more will probably be entirely discouraged, Legend of Mana grew on me immensely as I worked my way through it. Legend of Mana is very much unlike its immediate American predecessor - in fact, it's a very unusual game no matter what you compare it to.
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