Trials of Mana

Originally posted on Facebook on 5 February 2023

Trials of Mana...

A while ago I talked about playing Secret of Mana for the first time. It's a beloved classic RPG, but I personally wasn't too keen on it. There were so many small things about the game that were incredibly annoying to me. Each small annoyance may not have been a dealbreaker by itself, but all of them combined together made for a game that I just generally didn't enjoy playing. 

Trials of Mana is a follow-up game that was released in 1995, two years after Secret of Mana. However, unlike Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana was Japan-only for a long time. It was not officially translated into English until 2019, with the release of "Collection of Mana" for Nintendo Switch. 

There also exists a complete remake version of Trials of Mana released in 2020. However I decided I wanted to play the original version, via Collection of Mana.

I've heard that this game is supposedly better than Secret of Mana, and some people say that it's the best game in the Mana series as a whole. Sounds interesting! I wanted to give it a try.

And now that I've played it...

I have to say, this game really annoys me in some very fundamental ways.

Let's start with what I enjoyed about the game. The game has really nice pixel environments, and a really nice soundtrack. The story is very basic, but good enough for old RPG standards. I always like mystical fantasy fairy forest environments, and Trials of Mana is almost nothing but this kind of aesthetic. So purely on the aesthetic front, Trials of Mana is very well done.

Thankfully they toned down the "ring menu" system from the previous game. It's no longer used for EVERY SINGLE thing - now it's just for selecting items and spells during combat, where I feel it works fine as an interface. 

We now have a more normal pause menu for equipment and stats, but inexplicably, it's really bad. This is the laggiest, slowest-responding menu I've ever seen in a classic JRPG. You press a button, and it can take a full second to respond, and you have to wait a full second between each and every input. Scrolling through your inventory takes so long...

It's truly bizarre how awful this game's pause menu is, as I've never seen something like this in any other classic JRPG. The actual gameplay runs smoothly, it's just this pause menu that's so laggy for no reason. I don't get it.

The two biggest problems I had with Secret of Mana's combat have both been changed for Trials of Mana. 

Previously, I hated how the screen only scrolled when you were riiight up against the edge, and I also hated the attack-charging system, where you could spend a good 15 seconds charging a single attack, only for it to miss due to accuracy/evasion stats, and not because you didn't overlap the swordswing with the opponent properly.

Well, they fixed the screen scrolling. That's fine now thankfully. And as for the attack charging, that's been entirely replaced. You no longer hold a button to charge for a stronger hit. Instead, you can just attack normally, and every four hits you land gives you the ability to do one stronger hit if you want. And if you miss the strong hit.... it doesn't get wasted! You can just try again. Such an improvement! The regular hits have a cooldown to them, so you still can't spam sword swings, but overall I think it feels better than Secret of Mana for the most part.

However, that isn't to say the combat is good now. In fact, the combat is still really awful feeling for me, unfortunately. And it is this combat that makes me find Trials of Mana to be a frustrating, tedious game. 

Okay so here are my problems with the combat in Trials of Mana:

It still feels very loose and imprecise. You can still "miss" due to accuracy/evasion stats, and the animation for swinging your weapon only kiiinda matches with the outcome. It certainly isn't as clean and precise as something like Zelda, that's for sure. It overall feels really clumsy, and I often find myself just walking up to a foe and rapidly tapping that A button during most encounters, because actually trying to move or dodge anything is futile. 

This is especially true for enemy magic, which is impossible to dodge anyway.

The game is trying to be a sort of hybrid between turn-based RPG systems and Zelda-style action, but I feel this combination really just doesn't work. It just feels so awkward the entire time.

And this awkwardness is very much felt in regards to the animations for spells and special attacks. 

When either the player or the enemy perform any kind of spell or special attack, the entire screen pauses, and the spell animation plays. Elaborate spell animations are fine in turn-based RPGs, but in an action game like this, having the screen constantly pausing for the spells is just really annoying. And it's not just a small thing, this is a CONSTANT problem that happens throughout the entire game. The combat is just non-stop "stop and start, stop and start" with these spell animations, it gets tiresome very quickly.

And this goes for healing spells too. Most bosses have party-wide spells that target all three of your party members. So after this hits, you of course have to heal up. So that's four individual interruptions in a row - one boss spell, and then three healing spells right afterwards. And by the time you're done with your heals, the boss is already ready with its next spell. Quite literally, there is not a single moment during any boss fight where the screen isn't going to be interrupted by spell animations extremely frequently.

It's just... soo annoying and tedious and exhausting. This is made even more annoying by the fact that you can't even bring up your spell menu whenever you want - if the enemy is about to cast a spell, the spell name appears on screen, which for whatever reason prevents you from bringing up the menu at all. 

And if your AI teammates are in the middle of something, then their spell list just refuses to open. You can't queue a spell for when they're next able to move, like you can in Tales games. No, you have to unpause, wait a second, pause again, and then check again to see if they're 'ready' yet. It's just so unnecessarily fiddly. It makes it feel like your basic commands during combat just don't work. It makes you feel so clumsy. I don't feel like a clever band of heroes at all. It just feels bad, like I'm just stumbling my way through every encounter. And the constant pausing for the animations just adds to the feeling of never having control of the action.

You can't even take the time to plan your next move during all the spell animations, because the animations also hide your characters' HP numbers from the screen. Just to be annoying I suppose.

It doesn't help that the bosses have an astronomical amount of HP, and they generally don't have different phases or anything - not even the final boss! You go into a pattern of bashing the boss, the boss attacks you, you heal, then you go back to bashing. And you just repeat that until the boss dies.

It never gets more interesting than this, and the bosses can take FOREVER to die. Like I mean legitimately 30 to 40 mins of doing this bash-heal-bash-heal cycle over and over and over.

 And if you slip up and don't manage to heal in time before the next big attack, then you are in danger of dying and having to start it all over again. So not only is it pure tedium, it's stressful tedium as well. You don't get to see boss HP, so you never get a sense of progress either. Just gotta keep the monotonous cycle going until the game feels like you've done it enough to win.

It's just..... not fun! The combat in Trials of Mana is just....not....fun.

...

Well, there are a few systems in place that can help, if you know what you're doing. There's a night/day system, and a day-of-the-week system. Each day of the week has an associated element, so for example on "Undine Day", ice attacks are stronger, and on "Gnome Day", Earth attacks are stronger. The day/night system affects the strength of Light and Dark element attacks too. You can change the current day just by sleeping at an inn over and over until it's the day you want, though time also passes naturally.

This system isn't too useful for a large portion of the game, however, as you generally don't have access to every possible elemental attack at all times. So it's mostly useful for just making sure you're not fighting a boss on a day where it is more powerful than normal. 

There are also lots of usable items that you can bring into the fights that could probably counter specific boss moves, or speed up the fights in other ways. However this kind of strategy requires a lot of knowledge about the game that a first-time player isn't going to have. And your inventory space is woefully limited, so if you want to test out some of these combat items, you do have to forgo bringing some healing items. I didn't feel like it was worth it to experiment with the combat items, especially since the inventory menu is so frustrating to use.

... okay, let's talk about things other than combat I guess.

Regarding the world design... The quest progression keeps moving you rapidly between locations, especially at the start of the game. You never really get to "choose" where to explore, as the game just keeps hurriedly pushing you towards the next dungeon. It's basically just dungeon after dungeon back to back, with very little downtime in between. This would be a nice recipe for a fun, fast-paced adventure... if it wasn't for all the horribly tedious combat you need to do within these dungeons. 

For a first-time player, it feels like I never really get much of an opportunity to connect with the world. You don't get any kind of world map until much later when you can travel more freely, which is already at the halfway point of the adventure. I had a difficult time piecing together the lay of the land in this game, and all the various town names sort of melded together in my mind. So later on, when I actually do need to backtrack to a specific place, I can't remember which town is which, or which piece of the world they're in. The pace of the game never gives you much of a chance to connect with each town. 

The dungeon design in this game gets a bit repetitive, but is otherwise fine. Each dungeon has the same basic premise: It's a maze of paths with dead ends, and you just have to explore each path until you find the right way. At the dead ends, the game likes to trap you in the room until you've defeated all the enemies in the room. It's not terrible, and each dungeon feels sufficiently unique. No real problems here, aside from the fact that, if you die and need to reload, you probably won't want to intentionally pick the wrong ways again, which means you might end up underlevelled... And being underlevelled versus a boss in this game just makes the already long and boring fight take even longer.

Overall... the game is okay, but I'm not a fan. I'm glad I finally played it so I could see what it was all about, but I don't agree that it is one of the best SNES RPGs ever made. 

...I just can't stand the combat in this game.

I'm curious about the 2020 Trials of Mana remake. I wonder how the game has been revamped... Is the combat good in the new version? Maybe I'll play it in the future. But not for the moment... I need to get away from the Mana series. I'll play more Mana another time.