Yes, you read that right. Zippo lighters. It’s not singular, it’s plural.

Not only is it absolutely bizarre that there would be one officially licensed Zippo lighter related to Legend of Mana, there are actually two different ones.

The first of the Zippo lighters is brass. The little Rabites there should be a bit more brass colored, but they’re a bit tarnished. Nothing a bit of polishing won’t clear up. This lighter has the same etching of Rabites on each side, but only one of the sides says “Legend of Mana”. It also came in a nice little case, which rusts very easily by the way. So if you’ve got one, make sure it’s kept in a nice environment!

While I’m not exactly sure of how many of the Rabite necklaces or gold pendants were made, I have a very good idea about how many of these Zippo lighters there are.

That’s because each one is imprinted with its run number. That’s right, there are only 300 of each of them. Now that’s a rare item! I think over the years I have probably seen 5 or so of these lighters up for auction. They’re quite hard to come by.

The second Zippo is even more rare, and perhaps there is a reason for that.

Yeah, that’s a Zippo lighter encased in wood. It’s got the logo for the game carved on one side, and a Rabite on the bottom right corner of the other side (along with copyright, date, and run number along the bottom). It came in a cool little crate with a bunch of weird wood shavings inside it. This is the only one of these I’ve ever seen at auction, and I snapped it up quickly. I can’t even begin to put an estimate on these as far as their worth. Their retail prices were around 80 dollars for the brass and 120 for the wooden one, but they’re quite rare and probably priceless to the right person. I did recently find another wooden lighter has sold for around 50 dollars not too long ago, however. Someone got a good deal on that!

So that’s that. Not only is it bizarre that not one, but two Legend of Mana Zippo lighters exist, but one of them is even encased in wood. Wacky.

When Legend of Mana came out, if you reserved the game through DigiCube at any convenience store they partnered with, you would get a nice little pewter Rabite Necklace along with your game.

These necklaces are quite small by the way, I think I might choke to death if I wore one for long.

These items used to be very very common, showing up on eBay for around 10 dollars or so. These days they are a bit more rare, but still typically available at a reasonable price. I think I would pay around $15 or so for them, personally, but I also have more of them than I can remember so they’re not really on my shopping list anymore. I even found one randomly hanging near my front door. How did it get there? I have no idea, but it’s there and it’s cool.

These were so common on eBay, I even tried to buy around 60 at once from a seller back in the day. I had plans to give them out to members and visitors of this website, but alas, could not reach a deal with the seller. To be fair, I was young and stupid and I lowballed my offer to an insane degree. I don’t blame them at all for not taking part of my highway robbery scheme.

What is more interesting, are the golden Rabites.

As far as I can tell, these gold plated versions of the pewter pendants were available through a raffle that people could enter into in the Jugemu magazine. Just how many were there? I’m not actually sure. I know I have at least 3 in my collection, and I’ve seen around 3 others up for auction before. Sometimes you’ll get the nice little box it came in, but other times you won’t. I think one of mine even came with the paperwork from the raffle.

The idea with these was that you would remove your pewter Rabite, and replace it with this golden one. Then you’d be the envy of everyone. Or at least people like me.

Now, if you do happen across one of these, don’t shell out for it just because you’ve got a greed for gold. They are actually quite heavy, even compared to the Pewter, but they’re definitely not pure gold. I do not think they are worth as much as they tend to be listed for these days online. I paid $15 dollars for one of mine, and that wasn’t more than a couple years ago.

The Mana Merchandise section I made years ago has been missing a long time now, after various updates to the site and changes on the backend mixed things around. I actually don’t know if I even have those files anymore.

So I figured with Legend of Mana on the way, it might be interesting to do some posts about some Legend of Mana merchandise.

For whatever reason, when Legend of Mana was released, Square went wild with merchandising for the game. There are pieces of Legend of Mana merchandise you probably would never expect to exist, unless you’re a really hardcore Mana fan.

The first, and most obvious, piece of Merch I’d like to mention are the Rabite Plush dolls. These were released in 1999 along with Legend of Mana, but the two smaller plushies were also released alongside the World of Mana games (Dawn and Children). If they come with hanging tags, wrapped around their tails with elastic, the Legend of Mana and World of Mana logos make it obvious which batch they come from. However, you can always tell the difference between the two by checking their “tush tags”. The Legend of Mana ones have a copyright date of 1999 and only mention Square while the newer ones have no date and mention Square-Enix. These Rabites come in a normal and a “sleep” variety.

These small Rabites have become quite rare over the years, but still pop up on auction sites from time to time. Surprisingly, there still seem to be a lot of the small Legend of Mana plushies out in the world. I happen to have a handful of them for myself, maybe 2 each of the originals, and 2 each of the newer ones. How much would these go for? It was a good time when they’d go for maybe $15 each, but that time has obviously passed. I think if you hold out though, you can still get them for around $30 dollars. That is, if they even show up at auction.

What is actually very rare, however, is the cushion sized Rabite plush. This big ol’ plush sports sleeping eyes, and sadly has never found its way into my collection. The image of it here comes from the “Making of Mana” book sold around the same time. It actually details all the different Legend of Mana merchandise (well most of it…) that exists.

I’m still kicking myself for not paying $99 for one of these way back in the day (mid 2000s), because they’ve basically disappeared from existence since then. I did have the opportunity to bid on one of these bad boys back in 2014, but I lost the auction as I was driving around in the Rocky Mountains at the time and had no opportunity to up my bid. Also, it went for around 400 dollars, if I remember correctly, and had tea stains all over it. That’s how rare this thing is, people will shell out the big bucks for a ruined one. How much would I pay for one of these? Well, contact me if you want to make a deal.

So that’s that for the first post in this series. Do you have any Rabite plushies? There are quite a few new ones that were released after the Secret of Mana remake came out. I have to say, though, I really prefer the way these older plushies look compared to the new ones. Something about them feels less “corporate” to me, if that makes any sense!

I have not updated the site with my collection of Mana related things in a long time. I’ve got a lot of interesting items I could share here. This one, however, is rare enough and relevant enough at the current time to make a post for.

As you can see, it’s a Casio G-Shock watch with “Secret of Mana” printed on the band.
Yup, that’s the extent of it.

But there were only 200 of these made.

The DW-8000s are fairly uncommon watches in and of themselves, and the avid vintage G-Shock collector community still demands a decent price for them, but they’re not impossible to get your hands on. But the fact there are only 200 with “Secret of Mana” printed on them made me think I would never get my hands on the thing. But here it is.
Just like any other DW-8000 it has “Fox Fire” EL backlighting, a red buffalo skull in the background, and the text “TIME TO GET TOUGH” scrolls by when you press the light button.

When Seiken Densetsu 3 was released in Japan, there were a number of items given away as raffle prizes. 200 of these G-Shock DW-8000-1 watches were given out, making this item quite rare. It’s very interesting, though, that the watch is related to Seiken Densetsu 3, but says “Secret of Mana” on it. It makes me wonder if the plans back then were to keep going forward with the “Secret of Mana” moniker if the game came out in English. In fact, if you look next to the watch on the raffle flyer, you can see a Mana stone with “Secret of Mana” printed on it just like the watch. Seems like that might have been the case. It also makes me wonder when the name “Trials of Mana” was decided upon, because it certainly wasn’t back in 1995. Just some interesting thoughts.

The other items I have from the raffle include the playing cards and the prologue book (5,000 each). Both of those items came out in non-raffle forms though. I’ve seen many of the phone cards (1,200) for sale on auction sites, but don’t own any. I’ve decided against collecting them because phone card collectors are insane and demand incredible prices for the things. Maybe someday I’ll go after them, but I’m not that interested honestly.

Anyway, that’s just a small update on my collection.