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!

Here is a bit of a neat one, check out this mineral store in Tokyo:

The owner of the store became interested in minerals due to the Jumi arc of Legend of Mana. At the age of 7, they fell in love with the Bejeweled city and made it their life goal to seek out beautiful gems in the real world.

Now they run “Hotaru Mineral” or “Firefly Mineral”. Of note, Florina in Legend of Mana is actually called “Princess/Guardian Hotaru” where Hotaru means both Flourite and Firefly.

So this fan of the game in Japan created their own mineral shop: you can visit it here. Now, this place has a collaboration with the Legend of Mana: The Teardrop Crystal anime. You can read about that here (it’s in Japanese).

As part of this collaboration, they have a very special pendant, using Flourite (that’s Florina’s core), which you can purchase! Check it out here!

I’ve added a new page in the Legend of Mana section that goes over Secrets in the game. You probably know about all of this stuff though.
What you might find more interesting are the unused graphics I managed to find in the game files, some of which are connected to cut quests!

See what I found out about these locations in the Unused section of the page. There are also some other neat finds, at least I think so!

In this final video from 2011, I open two more Legend of Mana Card Duel Starter Decks in a vain attempt to complete out my collection. After that plan falls through, I show off a small assortment of cards I obtained through auctions and count up how many of each type of card there are. The video ends with a tally of all the cards I was still missing. You can watch the other videos for an explanation of the cards and to see another ten Starter Decks opened.

Again, you can read details about the card game, including the translated rule book and fully translated cards, here.

A special thanks to Sevon (Twitter, pixiv) for the awesome “Card Master Sheexy” art included in the video!

I also put together a Videos page where you can find all of these in one place.