HAY GUYS

Syndrome · 11:13 AM

I'll try it out in a few minutes, maybe I can drop a line about it later.

EDIT: 30 minutes in, I could explain a little about it. I suspected the game would work like Luminous Arc or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, with Turn-based combat on a 2D grid. That's not the case, as Heroes of Mana feels more like an RTS. For each Stage/Chapter you have a stage, in 3D on which you can move around. You select units and move them with the stylus, and there's no grid neither a restriction on how long you can walk, since it isn't turn-based. On every stage you have the "Nightswan", which is your airship, and inside it you create different buildings to summon different units. For example, you build a certain building to summon Rabites, which harvests two types of resources in the game. Building units costs resources.

However, during the stages certain events takes place and you always get a "winning condition" which you must fulfill to complete that specific chapter. After each chapter, you find yourself inside your ship (Nightswan) on the world map. Unfortunately you can't move around freely (yet?), but you can watch some battle results, save, or proceed with the story.

The graphics are as expected, neat sprites which we have come to love from the Mana world and character artwork looking as it usually does in Mana games. The 3D-maps look great, with different altitutes, roads, trees and such in the terrain. I think it's a bit too early to throw a comment on the music, but the first few songs I heard sounded very Mana-ish. Reminded me of Secret of Mana.

Controls works wonders. One of the major disappointments in the game Luminous Arc was, if you ask me, the stylus controls. In Heroes of Mana, it just works great. You quickly get a hang of menu's and such, and moving units around couldn't have been easier.

I look forward to progressing in this game. Hopefully, it will last longer in my DS than Children of Mana~

(I haven't tried the Multiplayer functions yet)

Jam it back in, in the dark.