Take Kingdom Hearts, a game morons everywhere love despite its bullshit camera and relatively boring whack whack bullshit combat. Now take away the stupid bend-over antics for the disney license and the fan-service shit, and what do you fucking have? Dawn of Mana.
The critics bashing Dawn of Mana are just reinforcing the idea that Kingdom Hearts got the scores it did because goofy was saying shit and donald didnt have his pants on. You know all that bitching about the camera and targeting in Dawn of Mana reviews? Its the SAME FUCKING THING AS KINGDOM HEARTS. If people could tollerate two fucking games of that I think they can suffer a game with a story that isn't so fucking prancy emo bullshit OMG I HAVE AMNESIA.
The only thing I can say that really dings the game, is that it gives the players a lot of skills that Kingdom Hearts never did. Youre saying "but maf more is better!". Well imagine having to bounce shit around and aim shit while you bounce it in tight quarters with a Kingdom Hearts camera.
Thankfully MOST of this is mitigated by the auto-targeting of your vine-sword-whatsit. There's also the manual targeting which thankfully is split between object targeting and enemy targeting. I generally use enemy targeting but the game really wants you to use objects and other enemies and the vine whip to put the hurt on the bad guys. It takes a few minutes to practice with the vine whip and realize its limitations before you can use it effectively in combat, but once you have it down its a great defensive and offensive tool. The slingshot feature sucks until you get spirit powers for it, which is almost right away. My favorite so far is the earth spirit slingshot shot because it hits the target it creates a gravity field that pulls in all objects and enemies which brings MAJOR pain. You also have a weird spirit that follows you around and casts various magic spells.
The game looks fantastic, the ps2 is being maxed the fuck out this year. The VA is well above average and the music is typical Mana music. I could go on about production values but any Square/Enix title on PS2 this year is obviously going to be stunning.
In short this is probably a B-/C+ game that will no doubt cause me the same fucking camera frustration the first Kingdom Hearts did but hey, at least Donald isn't showing me his dingaling.
