I have played this thing for a total of about 8 hours ('cause I've been distracted with things like Eurovision and having my knee hacked at) and have to say it's going well so far.
Controls
The button configuration and menus are well designed when it comes to doing the levels.
L - Ring Menu to select item (press Y to assign)
R - Ring Menu to select weapons (press button to assign, X or A depending)
A and X - Primary and secondary weapons, hold to do charged attack
Y - Use Item
B - Cancel menu, hold to use magic
Start - Bring up option to use Magic Rope
And in town, well, it's the basic Start for menu, use A to talk, B to cancel. So far there's only one town, that's your centre of operations, and you go out on the quests via walking or Flammie (after first mission). There's no inter-town scenarios.
As you get hit or hit others, you gain Fever meter. When the Fever meter hits it's max, you can hit SELECT to activate it. Your attack rate is faster until the meter runs down again. If you use a gem provided by the little tribble-like creatures, you get a random status ailment (HP recover, for example).
Use of screens and touch system
The main screen is the top one, as can be seen in many screenshots. The bottom screen will display stats while in the town and during levels, but in the levels will also show the following info:
- An overhead map of the level, pinpointing the Glimdrop and Glimpool (US names for the level completing items mentioned below) and live enemies.
- Information on where to find the glimdrop and stone (ie, "in a vase")
- Experience points til next level and current level.
- Equiped elemental.
The touch system is used, so far, only for the menu systems that involve equiping items and gems, dialogue options when talking to people, and if you really want, choosing weapons and items during combat, but this is pointless because you'd do it much faster with the ring system displayed in the main screen.
It's a kind of magic
Now, the magic system is rather cack. You have to talk to a gal in the town who will give you the elemental of your choice (from the start), but you can only change it here. So if you go into the desert, you have to choose before hand what elemental you'll take.
The system for casting is similar to Sword of Mana. Hold down the B button. The elemental will appear. If you walk into it, it grants either the status ailment of X Sword (ie flame, ice, etc) or other status enhancements (Shade gives invisibility, Luna recovers HP gradually, Lumina cures HP, Dryad gives immunity to status ailments), or if you let it be, it will blink and then cast it's magic in the nearby space (create a small tornado, fire flames, that sort of thing). You can press B again and the directional pad to sed the elemental in that direction until it hits something to cast it's magic there. Personally, I don't use magic at all, so that's disappointing.
An Elemental's level can be raised to 2 or 3 by equipping Gems. This will cause status aids to last longer or cure more, and attack magic to have a greater reach.
Arse-kicking shineys... I mean, weapons
You have 4 weapons to choose from, which you gain over the first 4 missions. Sword (charge makes you block 5 attacks), Flail (does a round attack, charge will cast forward to retrieve objects, pull enemies, find hidden objects, or pull towards stuff, like in Zelda), BowArrow (has enemy lock facility at medium distance, charged sends a musical note out to lull enemies into stupour) and Hammer (can break larger obstacles than the sword, launches enemies, charged does a downward motion to hammer in pegs and knock enemies off their feet). Charging only takes a second.
Also, charged attacks change when using fever. So Sword will do a charging attack, chain will do a circular long range attack, arrow will fire three powerful shots at the same time, and hammer will... Hammertime! Spin round several times with the hammer glowing to inflct serious damage, with option to move like a tornado doing so.
Two seconds while I get another beer.
With the Sword you can do a three hit attack, the third one will knock your enemy back. If it hits another enemy, they take damage too. If they bounce back against you ('cause you can create really bizarre chains of hits), you'll only get knocked disabled for a second.
Weapons are aquired randomly from enemies as you go along, and you upgrade your weapon level only in towns, or after every 4 mini-levels within a mission. You need a certain level for a certain sword (so if it's a Lvl22 Sword, and you have Lvl18, yer shagged). Same for armour (only body armour) and accessories (increase magic stats from what I can see).
So when fully equiped, you'll have:
1 Sword
1 Flail
1 Bow and Arrow
1 Hammer
1 Body Armour
1 Accessory
Harder, better, faster, stronger
Levels are obtained by killing, simple as. You don't have to level up swords in the way SoM did, just the level of your main character. Depending on who you choose certain stats are favoured (ie Tumble, who I use, has agility favoured and magic to an extent, which for me is good because I use bow a lot, and bad because I don't use magic... sucks to be me, eh).
Gems are a player's best friend
Gems... right, you can get gems too to enhance your stats, grant you more critical hits, stuff like that (there's lots, so these are just a couple of examples). You can only use a few at a time, by putting them in your gem box so they all fit (ie, you have a 2 by 2 grid, you can fit 4 1x1 gems, 2 2x1 gems, 1 2x1 gem and 2 1x1, etc etc etc). You can also go to the gem smithy and make new gems by fusing two together (it costs money, so careful). You upgrade your box at certain levels (you start with a 2x2, then move on to a 4x2 by level 2 or 3, for example).
Everything is eatable, even I'm eatable
Items... Right, remember I mentioned that you have the Y button for using items, and the L button for the item ring menu? Well, you equip an item type, as it were for the Y button, so you can quickly use that item just by pressing Y. So, if you press L, equip Candy, everytime you press Y you will use a Candy and get 30HP (which is handy at times when you need to cure yourself big time). You can use one after another with little limitation, but this opens the possibility of draining your supplies if you're too trigger happy
There are 6 items in total:
Manmaru Drop: +30HP
Pakkun Chocolate: +100HP
Faerie Walnut: +80MP
Pui Pui Grass: Recover status
Stardust Herb: Cures poison
Cup of wishes: Recover all statuses, revive secondary party member in multiplayer games.
You start off by being able to carry a max of 8 per item, but can upgrade your backpack to carry more of each (and this includes weapons and armour, but it refers to an item of each level, so you can carry 8 Lvl5 swords, 8 Lvl8, etc).
Missions and levels, a new system
Each mission is comprised of mini-levels. To complete a level, you have to find the Mana Drop (an orange stone you get either from a chest, defeating an enemy, all enemies, etc) and take it to the Mana Pool (only sometimes hidden), and press A. A swirl of magic takes you to the next level. At the end of each 4 levels you get a chance to save, upgrade weapons equipped, gems equiped, and after a multiple of 4 levels you encounter a boss, who has an impenetrable barrier. This is where the Mana Sword comes in, disabling the barrier (you don't actually have to do anything for this, it's a dialogue scene).
You can also return to a mission and replay it, as well as go to that scenario and do randomly generated levels as sidequests (like liberating an area of monsters so an NPC can go and pray at the Mana Tower). Good for levelling. This also includes doing the bosses again will the cutscenes before them (not the after ones, as far as I've seen).
The levels are as follows:
- Tower of Mana
- Lake of Stars
- Desert of Crimson Sands
- Castle of Ice
- Forest of Light
- Desolate Land
- Path of Life
Find me somebody to love...
You have no party members (that's saved for multiplayer). If you die, you return to the village. No cup of wishes (the item Cup of Wishes will just recover all status ailments and revive in multiplayer, but if the host player in multi dies, that's the end of too).
Graphics
Graphics are smooth, and the occasional cutscenes, although so far really far too few and too short, are good quality animation (to be honest, I think I've seen one in the game, which is when the Sword of Mana makes an appearance, but I'm holding out hope). Things aren't overly colourful (except the town), and have a very SNES Seiken style. Many enemies have returned from SoM and SD3 with improved sprites. Very slick.
I aren't fick!
The AI isn't brilliant. By Mission 4 or 5 you're in trouble, but it's more to do with sheer numbers (no 3 enemy limit now, it's gone up to 9, which, when you consider a Mushboom can whack you with 150hp damage in one blow, can get tough) and attack power (them werewolves and chobins combined are nasty bastids). Aside from that they're rather stupid and easy to wipe off the face of the earth.
iMana
Music is good, catchy, but I can't help but feel that having Kenji Ito back on the team wasn't the best choice... And the moment I saw his name I knew that the music for the Press Start screen would be... yes, you guessed it, Rising Sun.
Music Samples: http://kassidy.googlepages.com/children ... amples.mp3
It covers Rising Sun, the Town Theme, Mana Tower (1st mission), the Desert (3rd mission), Ice Castle (4th mission) and Glimwood (5th mission).
Handling
Playability is smooth, like I said, aside from magic. I'm not happy with that at all. But then again, it's a slight improvement on Sword of Mana.
The final verdict
Overall, I'm very happy with this game. I can see it having good replay value, and for the £15 I paid for it, although in japanese, it was worth it. I'm looking forward to actually being able to give some input on the story line when I can actually bloody understand what's going on.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them and I'll try and help out, but for now I hope that this answers a few of them for those who haven't already researched on the game or played it yet, read the walkthrough, and stuff like that. And I wanted to provide a welcome back presie for the board (well done, btw), so there you have it; my fist impressions on SquareEnix's Children of Mana.And Lordi won Eurovision! Woo!
Also a reminder that this IS being translated, it was at E3. Here a sample of a translated screenshot:
http://uk.media.ds.ign.com/media/695/69 … 83097.html
[EDITS]
Added additional aid magic information.
Added info on charged Hammer with and without Fever.
Changed Chain to Flail (such an incult me)
Added link to music samples in the post under Music.
Added info on enemy limit: further research (cover up name for addictive gaming) has revealed a limit of 6 so far.
Layout updated to make for a sectioned read
Amplified some details on items, backpacks and gembox.
Added world names
Added info on magic levels
Increased enemy limit.
