Happy 32nd anniversary to the Seiken Densetsu series!

A set of Mana Series tracks will release as DLC for Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. Fun fact, this game was made by indies zero who just happen to be the same company behind Legend of Mana Card Duel.

The @ManaGame Pack Vol.1 launches for Theatrhythm Final Bar Line on June 28th with songs from Final Fantasy Adventure and Trials of Mana:

– Nuclear Fusion
– Battle 2
– In Search of the Sword of Mana
– Swivel
– Powell
– Meridian Child
– Sacrifice Part Three pic.twitter.com/QxyEBg5EoJ

— FINAL FANTASY (@FinalFantasy) June 26, 2023

In other news, there will also be a special exhibit of the late Hiroo Isono‘s artwork in Japan. Five of the original arts for the Mana Series will be shown off, awesome! That should be two artworks from Secret of Mana (characters before the tree and the night time image), two artworks from Trials of Mana (characters on the road to the tree and the world map), and one from Dawn of Mana (character before the tree). If you are wondering why the Children of Mana artwork is not included, that is because it was actually done by Nao Ikeda, who masterfully imitated the stipple style art.

#聖剣伝説2 や #聖剣伝説4 のパッケージビジュアルなどをご担当された磯野宏夫氏の企画展『磯野宏夫展　－生命(いのち)輝く森－』が7月1日(土)～8月20日(日)の期間、稲沢市荻須記念美術館にて開催されます。
シリーズの原画5点も展示されますので、この機会に是非お立ち寄りください！#聖剣伝説 pic.twitter.com/R7ouTIoMbG

— 聖剣伝説 -公式- (@Seiken_PR) June 28, 2023

Oh no! Sandra left a secret message, and we have to decode it to figure out what is going on!

Luckily, Li’l Cactus here has the key!

Hey, that’s not a key! That’s the silver pendant from the World of Mana campaign that Children of Mana and Dawn of Mana released under. 
The Mana Sword looks absolutely tarnished, though! It practically turned back into the Rusty Sword at this point.
Take better care of your stuff, Li’l Cactus!

Oh, you have a nice clean one too. That’s cool I guess.
But what does this have to do with Sandra’s note?

Oh, I see! According to the Art of Mana book, the Mana Sword is inscribed with text in the Fa’Diel language. It apparently says “There is love in Mana. There is Mana in love.” very interesting!
Let us take a closer look at that lettering.

Looks like it actually says “Love is in Mana, Mana is in Love”!
We can clearly see the letters A, I, and N repeated a few times within half the phrase. From there, we can make a few assumptions and the letters seem to fall into place nicely.
Say, I wonder if the letters match anything in Sandra’s letter?

We’re getting somewhere! Using what Boyd said, we know she was talking about the Flame of Hope and she must have signed her name, Sandra. Things start to fall into place again!

We’ve got it! How cool is it that they are still using that alphabet over 15 years later?
Keep your eyes open for more text in the anime (Li’l Cactus appears to be using it in the first episode, and Reverend Nouvelle’s book has a lot)!

Here are all the letters we know so far, for your convenience!

And here is Sandra’s note rewritten, just for good measure. Special thanks to Sevon for lending a steady hand for the writing in this post, my chickenscratch would have left us all wondering what was going on.

EDIT:

Mataxia over on The Mana Series Discord reminded me that this was covered in one of the older books! I probably saw this a long time ago, but forgot about it as I don’t have the book on hand anymore. Thanks Mataxia for the image!

Long time Seikens forum member, Kimiko, had a lot of luck figuring out Li’l Cactus’s diary from episode 1 in the comments below!

TODAY I HEARD A
STORY ABOUT TWO
LITTLE SORCERERS
TRYING TO BECOME
THE RULERS OF

Kimiko also found that Nouvelle’s book title appears to just be part of the common “Lorem Ipsum” filler text. I kind of expected that, but it’s good to have confirmation! Thanks Kimiko!

Today’s track comes from Children of Mana. Enjoy!

Rut of the Crystal – Takayuki Aihara – Children of Mana
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Speaking of crystal ruts, I imagine that’s what Kassidy was in while working on finishing up the Children of Mana Gems Section! That’s a lot of gems and fusions to list out! Go check it out and see what Gems you can fuse and where you can find those last few that might be evading you, just click on the colored gems and get to it!

A word of warning though, some of the gems require anywhere from 5 to 20 to even 99 multiplayer games to be played… so they might be pretty tough to get.

Hello my name is Sheexy.

Do you remember the Merchandise section?

Chances are you probably don’t, considering the last time I updated it was two years ago. But I’ve decided to fix that. I’ve just finished up the Children of Mana Merchandise section where you can read about the various bits and bobs you can find for sale related to the game. I’ve also updated the Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 sections slightly.

The Merchandise section is a really good way for you to see what is out there, I’ve got pictures of most of the merchandise’s insides and outsides so you can see what you’re actually getting.

If you’ve got any questions about merchandise from games that I haven’t finished putting online yet feel free to Contact Me about it and I’ll try to help you out.

Well I never got the Children of Mana Commercials up last week, so I’m going to put them all up now along with the Mana Music Monday for this week. I’m gonna be really busy this week and won’t have time to mess with these later.
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The music for this week is the Children of Mana track The Ruined Ground by Takayuki Aihara. I think it’s a really good ruined Temple of Mana arrangement. I could maybe listen to it forever, it’s so serene and mysterious.
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This week, I bring you not only the Music Monday, but another batch of updates which are related to the pieces below. I’ve chosen these two by Hiroki Kikuta, because in spite their overall simplicity, they greatly enhance the emotional connection to the story.

Expired

I don’t know about you guys, but when I go to watch a film in the cinema, I stay right ’til the end of the credits while everyone else starts packing out like rats from a sinking ship, and there are several reasons I do this. Read the rest of this entry »

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Peaceful Underground Lake – Masaharu Iwata

So I figured we need some Children of Mana music, we haven’t seen any of that except for the one track that made it into the annoying music poll. Speaking of polls, there’s a new one running, don’t forget to vote! This track is the one you find yourself listening to when you’re running around Star Lake in Topple. Here’s a tip for leveling up there:

Once you get to a high enough level (pretty much near the end of the game) you can head to Star Lake and find some secret Metal Crabs hiding there. A good place to look for them would be near a bunch of gold treasure chests, you probably need to work your way through some of those annoying vines that grab you too, so push some enemies into it and then kill them so they’ll take the vines down with them.
When you get near the treasures run around a bit and a purple Metal Crab will pop up. Be careful around this guy, even when you’re at level 99 with some nice armor he can still do some good damage. If you kill him you’ll get a whopping 1000 experience points, which is usually enough to push you through 2 or 3 levels.

This is only a small update, but it’s something that has been nagging at me for a while. I have expanded the Items section to include in-game detailed descriptions of the recovery items (gives some backstory as to how Gumdrops are made, for example), and I have also added a whole new section with all the Key Items obtainable in the game, their descriptions, and when in the game you get them.

This will constitute the penultimate update to the Children of Mana section, with only the Gems section remaining to be fully formatted, after which the section will be considered (barring the possible and very occasional fix here and there) complete.

Next up in line is to get the Dawn of Mana section fleshed out a bit more, and then I’ll be looking at concentrating more on launching Heroes of Mana. Friends of Mana is very much on the back-burner.

For today’s THIRD update (because it appears I’m on a roll, may as well take advantage of it), I’ve completed (at last) the equipment lists (weapons, armours, accessories) for Children of Mana in all their lovely goodness, fixed a few errors, and can now officially say that they are all there (including those that were deleted from the final product of the game, but are still accessible in the code).

This update was brought to you by the letter C and the punctuation mark the parenthesis.

Today is a busy day for updates all round, so I shall detain you no longer.

First off, you can now click on the link for Friends of Mana over in the menu on your right because, that’s right, the Friends of Mana section is now open for business. While only currently bringing you a detailed overview of the game (which as far as I can tell is the most detailed one available to date in English), hopefully at some point we will be able to expand on some of the finer details of this game, though not necessarily as a high priority since, let’s face it, unless you’re in Japan you’re not going to play the game anyway.

Secondly, I decided to go through all the old games in the series and write-up an introductory overview page for them in the same manner that I had done for Dawn (not the review, that was done by Duran, and a great job too) and Children of Mana. So you can now find a bit of history and brief description of FFA, SoM, SD3, SwoM and CoM (revamped). Legend of Mana will also join the ranks at some point, need to work out a few things for that first (since right now that game is covered by qLoM).

And keep filling out those Polls that Wai has put in place! 😉