The Mana Series

[Wolf Kanno]

Has it really been eighteen months since I last played this? Well not exactly, I did forget one more update before I shelved this game for awhile. The demo for the 3D remake reminded me that I was playing this, so I'm back to finish this up.

Update Time!

The team heads over to Kevin's Jungle bungalow, which took a little while to figure out because the Turtle is a really weird transportation vehicle that is very reminiscent to the faux 3D travel of using Chocobos in VI, which is a nice way to say its more disorienting than spectacle. Probably the reason why Chrono Trigger dropped using it that way. We hit up the town of Sultan and stock up on some wares before heading towards Kevin's hometown to find the Mana Spirit Luna. The party encounters Deathjester whom Kevin has some choice words for considering he started him on his quest. He gets his ass handed to him for his trouble cause as Duran could have told him from personal experience, Wizards are cheating bastards. Just when the party steps into help. Luger smurfing shows up. He's the other major henchmen for the Beastmen and the guy who really wants be the next leader of the tribe. He's been a background character and general pain in the ass within the story proper, so I'm itching to throw down with him using my souped up party in their Dark Classes. Turns out this was a bad idea as Luger transforms into a werewolf like Kevin does and has access to all of his class skills/ and by all of his classes, I do mean all of them. So now I'm dealing with a speedy powerhouse who can use Luna magic to make himself even beefier. Not helping things here is the fact that my team has no debuff or even any effective buff magic to counter this. So this quickly turned into a bloodbath, but my heavy hitting team also meant this fight went really quickly as well cause even though I had to revive Angela and Kevin a few times, at least Luger didn't last much longer himself. With him down, Deathjester does his best Kefka impression and snarks at the party before fleeing for his life. Though Luger is dying, Kevin shows off that "weak human side" of his and asks the Mana Spirit Luna to restore him. They bring him back as a baby so he can have a second chance at life, and hopefully not grow up into an asshole again. Course, seeing how the Beastmen all seem to be assholes, I hope they reincarnated Luger into a different nationality. With the seventh Mana Spirit on our team, we head to Diorre to find the final spirit Dryad, who always seems to be the last Mana Spirit.

Diorre has us encounter good old Charlotte again, we need to find the hidden village of the Elves within the Lamplight Forest, and she knows the way, but since everyone in this game seems to be extremely temperamental, she storms off before she can guide you to the village. Thankfully there is an easy trick to finding the path that she does explain which is that certain flowers will glow red at night time and following them will eventually lead you to the Hidden Elf Village. This forest is a maze otherwise, which is something this game seems to be really fond of. Apparently the Forest of Seasons, the desert region, the bloody moon, and the Pure Lands were not enough in the previous game. Once we get to the village we meet up with Charlotte again and we learn more about her tragic backstory about how her Elven grandfather was so pissy about his only beloved child hooked up with a human and then banished them blah blah, they of course dies blah blah blah. I must say, this game really has it out for Charlotte, which I imagine is due to the lisp.

He lets us go after Dryad who has been abosrbed by an evil plant monster. This boss turned out to be a bit tougher than I thought they would be, but its partly due to me not realizing that the boss is actually weak to Slyphid's power (Wind) and not Salamandos (Fire). So go figure. But this is the price you pay for playing Team Dark with a Warrior, Black Mage, and Monk. With the boss slain, the party has to give Dryad a bit of a pep talk to get her to join the team. She considers herself to be the weakest of the Mana Spirits, which is complete bulltrout for anyone who played the previous game and know how OP she can be if you take the time to level her up. With Dryand now on the team, I have all eight spirits and can finally enter the Mana Sanctuary to meet the Mana Goddess and get the Mana sword. Wow that is a mouthful of Mana. The hard part for me is trying to get back to Diorre, especially since this was the point I took time off and forgot that I was going to stick around the area to level up and grind enough Gold for some much needed equipment upgrades. Instead, I wander aimlessly for awhile using my vague memory of my first trip through the woods. I finally find the beach and summon my Turtle Ride and head for the Mana Sanctuary.

Did I mention the gateway to the Mana Sanctuary is on an island called the Island of Oblivion. That's not ominous... Anyway, the Fairy tries her best to use the Mana Spirits combined power to open the doorway to the sanctuary but fails the first time. The party urges for her try once more and the second attempt works, but only because she senses that all of the energy from the Mana Stones have been released meaning we don't have much time before the God Beasts all wake up. The sanctuary is open, but its in the sky, which the team can't reach, but it looks like all of the villains were counting on the party to get this far and all three groups of antagonist rush the damn place, which is a really amusing scene because while the Altesians have a wicked cool airship to reach the place, the beastmen use giant condor like monsters to carry them there, while the Thieves group use a boat that was outsourced to the old man from Up. So in addition to my party now needing to find a means to fly, so we can reach the sanctuary and stop the God Beasts from being resurrected, we may also need to fight through a Mexican stand-off between the three factions.

We head to Rietz's home to seek the help of the Father of the Winged Ones. My long gap from playing this makes me lost again and even when I get there, I ended up wandering through the Cave of Winds again instead of heading right where the castle entrance was. I eventually make my way to the peak, which I'm slightly disappointed because I got there at night and the muted color palette doesn't do this scene justice compared to the day time screenshots I've seen of this scene. We meet Flammie, the daughter of the Father of the Winged Ones, whom the Fairy convinces to give us a lift to the Sanctuary. the game then has her auto-pilot us there, which is a bit jarring because the game has these awkward mini-maps for traversing the world map that are both helpful and distracting at the same time.

The Sanctuary is damn bloodbath when I get there. The place is littered with the bodies of soldiers from all the factions, but the only enemies I encounter ae upgraded Rabites who do a decent job of wrecking my ass since I failed to grind the ext money needed for upgrades. We reach the Mana Tree and find the Sword sheathed into its roots. Duran grabs the sword and the Goddess appears who reveals that Mana is dying and that we'll need to deal with the God Beasts, but before that, we seemed to have lost the Fairy during our travels as well. Duran doesn't seem interested in this and asks about all that power he was promised but the Goddess simply fades away with her warning about the fairy and leaving behind the Flammie Drum. Retracing our steps, the party encounters Deathjester, who reveals that his true master was slain by an unknown master behind the scenes of one of the other factions. We then encounter Bijieu from Hawkey's story who is royally pissed that she can't bring back her master with the Mana Sword and chose to kill her comrade and herself instead. Pretty extreme. Finally we encounter the Darkshine Knight and the Crimson Wizard who are revealed to be the ones who kidnapped the Fairy, they tell the party to meet them at their headquarters in Alena's home country. So now its off to Altena for our showdown with the big bads. I am a little sad that the Mana Sword is not a usable weapon in this game.