Neue Rezensionen von devvi

Buggy and horribly optimized. Bugs are mostly visual and aren't game breaking. With time most likely will be patched. Otherwise the game itself is absolutely fantastic!

As someone who played the ♥♥♥♥ out of Seiken 3, 16 years ago back when the fan-translation was out, I feel like I had to write this review, since this game is very important to me and a considerable large part to my childhood. Let me start off by saying this game is a decently solid experience, and seems to hit nearly all the right notes as a long time Mana Series fan. It seems this game was made mostly for old fans for people who played the original game, since it seems to be intentionally retain its authenticity as a remake. However I believe it draws in newcomers to the series with gorgeous art and honestly beating out a certain game that attempted to do dynamic story progression. So if you're an old time Mana fan, Someone who played Seiken 3 or someone who played Octopath Traveler and was severely disappointed with the lack of character development and dynamic storytelling, then this game is probably for you.

Let me start off by saying this game is extremely faithful to the original game, for the most part. The majority of the overall plot as well as a large majority of the original script was kept intact. In my experience it sometimes came off as dated and even outright lazy at times (I'm looking at you Kevin....). A lot of the events in most the characters main story come off as awkward, as the original game did as well but this is especially amplified in 100% voice acted cutscenes. If you find yourself busting out laughing or cringing really hard, you'll know what i mean. I feel like this could've been a positive change for the remake had they rewrote the script a bit more but its not too bad. Some of the game events have been changed, losing quite a bit of the comedic flavour Seiken 3 had. For example, there were various scenes where if you had Charlie and Kevin on the same party, they would often interact very comedically, with Kevin either knocking her out of the way to talk to a priest or holding back an angry loli with a flail from bludgeoning an old man to death for giving them the run around for seemingly no reason. In Trials these scenes which i was looking so forward to seeing in the remake was changed to a small shove (if even that) and a scolding gesture, which was disappointing. The overall plot is more or less the same, which can be a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. Unfortunately this means plotholes and questionable character motivations are still a thing in this game. However the flavour of the game never was the character motivations in the first place. It was always the journey and interactions between the cast you chose at the beginning of the game. This was something I was hoping to get from Octopath Traveler a few years back but was tragically disappointed and ultimately dropped the game.

The original game took a top down cooldown based action RPG approach with a rather wonky levelling and stat system that didn't really make a lot of sense, hell some stats didn't even work properly due to a bug that prevented crit and evade procs. In the remake all of this is reworked in someways bad and in MANY ways good. Starting off with the bad, the game drops the cooldown based gameplay on your melee attacks for a full on action JRPG battle system, meaning no cooldowns and spacing enemies is more or less an actual viable strategy now that your movespeed isn't impaired. The battle system retains it simplicity and remains fun to play. This is however, partially ruined by the addition of the dodge/roll button, essentially letting you pretty much never take damage for the most part (Ben & Bill and Zehnoa will still ♥♥♥♥ you up in this game, thankfully this hilarious difficulty spike was kept intact). In Seiken 3, spells casted by both party members and enemies did not have an AOE, they would just do damage and were unavoidable. In Trials however, thanks to the dodge button you can essentially dodge every single spell with little to no issue. It's broken. Now for the good. This game reworks how stats work completely. In the old game, you had your attributes in each stat that you could increase every time you levelled up....that's it. In this game however, when you level up not only does it increase effectiveness of each attribute, but when you put points into an attribute it comes with a learned skill/perk system that unlocks essentially passives that buff your characters in varies ways. For example, there's a passive that increases the amount of meter you get for your special attacks every time you finish a battle. This leads to a lot of variety in building your characters in a certain way, especially since some of these passive can be shared and equipped across your entire team, giving you a reason to invest points into otherwise completely unrelated stats to a certain characters playstyle. Battles essentially work as they did in Seiken 3, where as you enter the aggro range of a group of enemies, you beat them up and move on. In the remake this is more or less kept the same but enemies have less aggro range and now there's a small arena indicator where the fights actually take place, where if you run against the borders of said arena it lets you run from a battle. This is a huge quality of life change compared to slowly strafing away from the enemy who, nine times out of ten have double your movement speed, just to leave the whole area to skip a fight and I'm glad they added it. The remake now as a system in place that lets you set items and spells on a quick cast menu. (Which is especially important for Mage characters like Charlie and Angela who usually chain AOE's together.) There are 3 quick cast options allowing 4 slots for each. One for Special Attacks, one for items, and one for spells. It can't be understated how much of a quality of life change this is and how annoying it was to open the mention and scroll through the item ring just to use an item or spell in Seiken 3.

You've probably heard this in other reviews but I'm here to tell you its all true. As someone who can typically play either sub or dub when it comes to JRPG and appreciate English voice actors and their work when done right and can recognize a good dub when I hear one (I.E Persona 4, Persona 5, Dragon Quest VIII, Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Nier), I can confidently say this. Besides Chaos Wars, THIS IS THE WORST ENGLISH VOICE ACTING I HAVE EVER HEARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. My jaw absolutely dropped to the floor when I booted up the demo and played through Charlie's story and heard her voice. I have never closed a game so fast and switched to sub that quickly. It's THAT BAD. For context, Charlie in the original game had a LISP speech impediment. In this game however, (and the Switch port) she now speaks in uwu for some god forsaken reason. This problem isn't only unique to Charlie either, it's EVERYONE. Kevin and his lazily done caveman-like dialect, Duran and his lack of emotion, Riesz and her awkward pauses. Everyone has ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ voice acting. I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to listen to that monstrosity of voice work. If you play this game, do yourself a favour and switch to sub, TRUST ME. The Japanese voice acting is fairly decent this however comes at the cost of missing out on a lot of banter between the cast after a battle if you don't speak or understand Japanese since this isn't subbed, which was extremely infuriating for my playthrough of the game.

The music in this game isn't particularly hit or miss, as most of the soundtrack is really nice. Some songs are actually BETTER than Seiken 3's soundtrack, while some just lose all its flavour thanks to the lack of SNES soundfonts. (A lot of the bass and kicks are non-existent in the remake. See "Different Road" in both games and you'll see what i mean.)

Overall this game is honestly, a good game, but not without quite noticeable flaws.If you're still on the fence about getting this game, I'd definitely recommend picking this up.