Over in the Legend of Mana Card Duel section, I’ve got a new page set up. On the Comics page, you’ll find a set of 5 comics by Hiroyuki Yasuda (安田ひろゆき) that were included in the Making of Mana (1999, ISBN4-7561-3148-4) publication.

The comics feature the Hero, Niccolo, and Duelle while briefly covering important points in the Rules as well as some thoughts about Deck Building. I especially love the goofy little Duelle you see to the right here. It’s fun to read these and imagine people in the past actually playing the TCG. I wonder how many people actually sat down and built decks.

Making of Mana mentions special events for the game at the 1999 Japan Game Convention held from August 27-29, and it just kills me that we’ll never know more than that about it.

My edits to the comics are not perfect, but I think I did a pretty good job on the clean up and translations.

Head over to Secret of Mana: Redux’s Locations Page if you haven’t, because there are a ton of great beta images to sift through.
I’ve attached only a handful of them here, but go on and check out the main site and see all the neat things you may have never seen! ManaRedux has collected an awesome library of magazines with pre-release information over the years, and just keeps adding more to the site!

Visions of Mana launches Summer 2024.

I didn’t have time to do anything for the site this year, so please take a look at the Rabite Christmas from last year!

Can you believe there is a new guide releasing over at GameFaqs for Legend of Mana in 2023 (almost 2024)?

I can, because Arflanyr has been working tirelessly on this thing, and it really shows!

Check the guide out here.

This is an incredibly detailed guide to playing Legend of Mana efficiently and about as perfectly as you can. Whether you are a new player or an old player, you can find a lot of use in this guide. Following this guide will help you complete every quest in one playthrough, access all the element locked features, grow plants as quickly as possible, harvest gold coins with ease, spawn rare pets, and gather up basically any end-game material you can imagine.

Not only does the guide make it easy to access all of the above, it’s also filled with cool details about forging great gear, raising strong pets, and even making some Golems! It’s really impressive!

A ton of work went into this, great job Arflanyr!

Over at Secret of Mana: Redux, you can read a retrospective about the game that released a couple months ago for the 30th anniversary of the game.

This is a big article, full of information about the creation and history of the game from various interviews that you can really only find at Secret of Mana: Redux!
Check it out, you’ll likely learn a few things!

After 15 years, we have a new mainline Mana game.

You can check out the main Japanese site here or the English news release here.

Over at Hotamine (Hotaru Mineral) there is a new Legend of Mana: the Teardrop Crystal calendar for sale.
The art inside looks really cool, a few Japanese fans have been discussing framing each month separately. January and February combine together to make a nice view of the Bejeweled City.

After its announcement back around June of 2022 during an Echoes of Mana stream, this item disappeared from the radar for the longest time. It has finally released for preorder, however. I was kind of hoping they were saving this release to pair with a big Mana announcement, but it seems that we are not so lucky.

It’s a statue of Angela! You can preorder from the North American Square Enix Store, or the Japanese Square Enix Store. It’s been popping up other places too, but I’m not about to chase down every link for it.
The U.S. Dollar is very strong against the Yen these days, so I’ve decided to source it from Japan.

If you missed it in the past (I don’t think I posted about it, but I forget), there was also a Riesz Statue released in the past (North American Square Enix Store, Japanese Square Enix Store). She can actually be found relatively cheaper on third party sites now, so if you look around you might score a deal.

I’ve got a couple of the Riesz statues, still boxed up because I don’t really know where I would display something like this. It’s pretty big at almost 10 and a half inches for Riesz, and Angela might be a bit taller it seems. The quality is really nice, not that I know much about what to look for in these statues, but I can’t help but feel these really don’t get the faces quite right. Maybe I am just too used to Nobuteru Yūki’s look for the characters. Can’t really complain though! Back in the day I would have never imagined these characters would get such nice pieces of merch. Now they have the small statues from the special edition, the Bring Arts action figures (A&D, R&H, C&K), and now these big statues. Pretty cool!