I usually don't get hung up on the smaller things when it comes to games. I also give the Mana series a lot of room to do its thing as I never experienced the supposed nirvana that 'hardcore' gamers claim was experienced on the SNES way back when. Fuck it, nostalgia only takes gaming progress so far. I played Children of Mana and 'loved' it, i've played some Dawn of Mana and 'liked' it. Can you see the trend yet?
I couldn't. I never believed a game could in but a few moments insult my intelligence so much as Heroes of Mana did when the NPC explained how exactly I was to create my army of shrooms.
See, the game starts out with you on this airship going to 'beast land' where beast men are and they are very GRRRR these days. So we get shot down or something. Its a small airship. Going by scale two of my 7 crew members can fit in it at any given time. I am then told not to worry as...the ship that could maybe hold 2 people, as an emergency backup function, can have buildings made inside of it that make units that uhh, so yeah...shit an ARMY can come out of this ship.
And its the same damn colored blobs and funny hat crap from the previous mana games. They didn't at least try to allow a human army. Im fighting ferocious beastmen with hoppity little mushrooms n shit. So anyway I have to collect resources, and instead of thinking up something new, I am supposed to rape both the tree spirit and rock spirits from the previous games for their energy with those annoying yellow rabbit monsters.
See those numbers on the left next to the tree and rock guy? That's the number of times the rabbits have raped them.Im gonna stop there, because the problem HAS to be obvious here. THEY DIDNT EVEN TRY! THEY WENT TO THEIR TRUNK OF ASSETS AND SAID HAY GUYS LETS MAKE AN RTS.
What's worse is their laziness only hassles the implementation as having buildings in MY AIRSHIP means I have to access a WHOLE OTHER SCREEN just to make mushrooms. I have to fucking go inside the airship away from the action and select the building then instead of just clicking build fuckin shrooms 6 times for 6 of them, I have to SELECT the number 6 from a menu and pretty build. WTFFF
So then when youre fighting you have to hit a cancel button to cancel away from units you've selected, and hit another button before you can even group select units. Then there's these dumb icons on the bottom left that jiggle when the unit associated with said button is hit or something. JIGGLE SOME MORE BITCHES.
All that aside the game takes place in ugly 3D with 2D ish units on the field that look like what you've seen in previous Mana games. I swear they just ripped those old assets out of their butts. The camera is controlled with the d-pad while you use the stylus to make your fuckin shrooms run at enemies. They tried to do the odin sphere thing with ranged/melee auto group select commands but those icons are tiny and ugly and I cant tell wtf most of it means. PRO TIP: ART SHOULD NOT KILL FUNCTION!
The tutorial was long and boring and completely ridiculous. Whats worse is the game cost 40 dollars. 40! 40!!!!!!!!
