Anyone as obsessed with LoM as I am?

[bastian]

Brownie brown did an amazing job at SD3....i say they should have stuck around for everything else

Um...I don't think they DID SD3...

And LoM wasn't plotless...it just had many plots. Have you ever been doing a quest in a game and HATED it? But you had to complete the quest in order to advance in the game? Well with LoM you can choose which quests to do,and which ones NOT to do...except for main ones. I think it's way more fun than CoM..because CoM is a redundant piece of crap that I'm having to force myself to play.

No, it was definitely plotless. What was the point of the whole game? All I know is I kept playing chapter after chapter of overly-cutesy teapots and such needing to be led here or there for some stupid reason or other . . . and then I had to kill the Mana Goddess. Huh? What WAS the point of all of that?

I need a game like SoM where I know I have to go collect eight spirits or some such and know who the villain is at the end and so on. LoM had none of that. Just a series of unconnected Disney-esque gibberish with no backbone.

[manaman]

I can see some truth to both of your points.

[Lucemia]

I don't think that it's plotless. I think that the plot itself, overall, is that the main character who is an enigma is supposed to get involved in the world and shaping it until the Mana Tree comes back and when it does you're supposed to defeat the Mana Goddess to destroy the evil that the tree brings. At least that's what I remember of it(my memory is blotched about this).

In order to truly understand the plot of Legend of Mana you have to go through the quests and read the History book(which reveals a bit of who the main character is).

Legend of Mana is basically supposed to be about the world itself which what I really like about it. I like being able to get involved with many different thing in an RPG whereas others it's usually more just about the main characters than anything.

But that's me. I like the freedom that Legend of Mana has in it's awesome world.

[manaman]

I think that the plot itself, overall, is that the main character who is an enigma is supposed to get involved in the world and shaping it. . . .

Very well put, dude.

[Magus_Melchior]

@bastian: LoM was following the tradition of Choose Your Own Adventure books, which had 130 ways to die and 5 happy endings (or, at least, that was my experience -_-; ). In order to claim that LoM has no plot, you have to somehow dismiss the 3 coherent primary storylines and the multitude of miniature stories that the game offers. Just because you can take events in more-or-less the order you choose doesn't mean that the game is lacking a story.
I do understand your points, just so you know-- LoM, as I recall, didn't do that well in Japan or here in the US for exactly the reasons you stated.

@manaman: I hear you, but I was just pointing out the other main feature of the OS X dock-- the Ring Menu is more similar to the Litestep Wharf in practice, since the menu items are either hard-coded or automated-- forced inserts don't exist.

A ring menu in a windowed GUI, incidentally, is probably a good way to implement a context menu that minimizes some of the Fitt's Law issues found in regular text menus-- right-click, and all the choices are equidistant from the pointer. The individual items in this menu wouldn't be accessed by spinning the menu as you would in Mana series games, but by simply moving the pointer. Of course, this wouldn't be good for unsteady hands with more than 6 or 8 items (smaller targets)...
Another possibility is having the menu travel with the pointer and spinning it using the scroll wheel. Then your finger has to be fairly steady, but most scroll wheels are accurate.

[manaman]

Whoa! That was intense.

[bastian]

But at least Choose Your Own Adventures have a clear plot. I've read many of them. You know from the outset what your goal is. The first time I played LoM I simply stopped because I got annoyed with not having any clear objective in sight. I just kept meeting all these wacky characters (which, frankly, clearly defines the line beween "Seiken Densetsu" and "World of Mana" to me) and . . . what? What was I supposed to do? So I stopped.

Then last year I decided after my buddy and I played SD3 that we should give LoM a go. We bought a PS2, bought the game (I had long since gotten rid of my old one) and FORCED ourselves through the game. It was like a job. We didn't enjoy it one bit. Even the final battle we were like: "What was THAT? That's it?" Definately NOT Mana as far as we were concerned.

NOT our cup of Teapo.

[Lucemia]

That's too bad.