I should have posted this a while back, as it’s nearly a month old now, but I figure better late than never!

Over at the Archive of Mana, Babasbackside put together a write-up of one of the scenarios from Friends of Mana. This is a Mana game that very little is known about, and the only info we’ve got will be found in the Archive I linked above. It’s very interesting stuff, so check it out!

Click here to read about the Legend of the Lampflower!

This scenario involves Mark, Jennifer, and Rachel from Legend of Mana (sort of anyway!) as well as a boss from Trials of Mana. What a strange game this was, if only more of it was saved. Baba made use of the sparse details about the game and the scenario from Japanese websites, and filled in the blanks for us as well. I found it very interesting.

If anything, you should check it out just for Baba’s great art. Just look at the piece to the right here. Stylish and clean, this is great!

It’s quite rare that a new site dedicated to one of the Mana games crops up nowadays, so this is worth a shout-out, especially given the depth of detail that is available on the site for those interested in a deep-dive into Friends of Mana.

If you’ve paid attention to our site, you’d notice I just copied that line almost wholesale from Kassidy’s post about Secret of Mana: Redux.

But this time we’re talking mostly about the Japan-only Friends of Mana!

Members of The Mana Series Discord Mataxia and jquestionmark compiled a bunch of images and links related to Friends of Mana, and babasbackside did the monumental task of translating all the details.

Visit Archive of Mana to check out all the great information that has never been available to the West before now!

The Friends of Mana section is the most in-depth, but in addition to that you can find bits and pieces from other games here and there, including some Legend of Mana concept art I had been meaning to post here.

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! 😉