[General Discussion] What the heck has happened with the Mana/Seiken Densetsu franchise? Where's the magic

Originally Posted by Xellos

You're talking about the people who created Frost Mission 5, and then decide not to release it outside Japan. WHY? you fucking bastards. They don't make sense anymore.

I can tell you exactly why: Front Mission 4 sold exactly six copies. Game stores couldn't give the game away. It's not unreasonable for Squeenix to not want to flush away money on a game that they cannot sell.

Actually, this is related to why the SD series has sucked so badly lately: it doesn't have to be any good. The teeming masses don't care if a game is any good, as long as it's pretty and has name recognition, and the Seiken games have both in spades. That one Matrix game crashed on the Xbox, and it still sold like hotcakes.

It's sad, but that's business. The only reason anybody makes good games at all, I'd wager, is professional work ethics. Because if all you care about is money, then all you need is a ton of graphic artists and someone who knows how to pump the teen angst market.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Conan-the-3rd

My version of how it all went down;

We got Secret of Evermore instead of Seken Dunsetsu 3.

For all the nay-saying that it wasn't the case, what we can see is that we got a poorly exicuted game with a dumbass plot (which, it has to be noted, is worse than minimal plot, as was the case with SoM) and did not get the supieror game, that being SD3. The cake, my friends, was a lie.

From there, to be curt, it all went south.

I've played both, and I found Secret of Evermore to be the superior game. Neither was as good as Secret of Mana, but Evermore was closer to the source. SD3 is where the series went downhill, and it's revered more than it deserves to be simply because of its mythical status of Never Released In The US.

Sure, SD3 was pretty and had a lot of style, but the game felt lacking, gameplay-wise. The character choices weren't a good replacement for the multiple weapons of SoM, especially since all the characters tended to be really quirky, like the werewolf guy. It's hard to put into words, but the game felt a little too stiff as compared to Evermore, which was built off the SoM engine. Square didn't learn, though, which is why Legend of Mana was even worse.

The plot was lousy to boot, if you're going to bring that point up. It's equally minimal and cliched, and continues with the series' annoying trend of having a bright, cheery world hosting a story that just makes you want to cut yourself. I at least cared about going from place to place in Evermore - in SD3 I hated moving on because it meant that once again the good guys were going to fail with more emo than you can shake a Kingdom Hearts cosplayer at.

Plus, Evermore featured pre-burnout Jeremy Soule.

There's nowhere I can't reach.