Recent reviews by doubleyewdee

(Comments with game's initial release)
This game is hard to recommend if you never played the original, because without nostalgia to pull you through the rough stuff there's no way it's a $40 game in terms of quality. If you played and loved the SNES game there's some fun stuff here for you, but it money is tight this will disappoint you. For what it's worth I've replayed the original all the way through roughly half a dozen times.

First, the good stuff:
* The art style, for me at least, is excellent and does a good job of being faithful to the original.
* The updated combat is a fun twist on the original, with some hiccups (see below).
* The new cutscenes when you stay at inns are cute and fun, and add depth to characters who never had much of any in the original.
* The game supports 21:9 resolution (at least 3440x1440) which isn't an advertised feature that I saw anywhere, so that's kinda cool if you have an ultrawide monitor.
* It's still Secret of Mana and so still just a very fun classic action RPG.
* The combat is easier (a plus for me, maybe not for some purists).

Now... for the rough stuff, and this is why I just can't recommend this game as released unless you really want to ignore this:
* The game crashes at an insanely unacceptable rate. In ~16 hours of total playthroughs I've seen no less than six hard crashes, combined with several incidents where my characters' animation would lock and attacks and magic no longer functioned. It's not unplayable, but it is severely frustrating and this kind of (low) quality in a retail-priced game is unacceptable.
* The companion AI is worse than it was on the SNES. This is, frankly, embarassing. If you want your companions to attack the same monster as you but also, you know, just attack visible monsters then you will find yourself out of luck. I would swing at monsters and miss and my companions would just stand there like idiots. If you switch them out to attack monsters you aren't attacking they'll do so, but then they'll ignore the one monster you hit first forever. THis is amazingly bad behavior in boss fights. The original system was simple but workable, the new one? Just bad. Also your companions will get stuck. A lot. The original had mechanisms to deal with this that appear to have been stripped from this edition.
* While the combat changes are mostly for the better there are some that just suck. The archer monsters relatively early on were annoying in the SNES version, in this version they may feel almost intolerable. They shoot extremely fast and, because they have 360 degrees of freedom to aim, are way more accurate and can cheese you mercilessly. Other monsters also feel like they are far more aggressive in spellcasting and I found myself just bailing on rooms or screens I would have cleared every time in the SNES variant because the monsters were just, to put it bluntly, cheap.
* The UI is substantially worse than the SNES version. The circle menus no longer remember your position, making magic casting / gear changing / etc more tedious than they need to be. Buying equipment no longer tells you whether said equipment is an upgrade over what you are currently wearing. The menus for each character no longer appear over the individual character, instead using a color-coded reticle to indicate who you're working with. These would feel less egregious if the original game didn't have, for 1993, a very innovative and user-friendly interface that this game, 25 years after the fact, has somehow failed to recreate despite substantially more resources available to it.
* I don't care for the remixed soundtrack. Some of the changes are actually pleasant, but several of the remixed songs have completely lost the feel of the originals and are grating and unpleasant to listen to. On the plus side you can stick with the original's broadly excellent soundtrack if you prefer.

If this game was $15 or maybe $20 a lot of my concerns would be less aggravating, but the price point as released is way too high for a game with the serious quality issues of this release. It's just not acceptable to move forward over twenty years in computing power and somehow have worse UI and worse AI in a game with the, let's be honest, insanely high hardware requirements that this game ships with. I preordered this drunkenly before I could read reviews or watch streams, and I honestly don't know that I would have picked this up at release had it not been for my friend Jack Daniels.

Beautiful, calming, and insightful. This not a conplicated game, within a couple hours of play you'll have unlocked all your abilities. But that's really not the point. The graphics are style feel evoactive of Katamari Damacy in the best possible way, from the polygonally simple models to the way animals 'move' by comically shifting to a small set of angled positions. The real joy is in what the game calls ascending or descending; you can become either incredibly large or infinitessimally small and anything in-between. You can hear what's on a rock's mind or how a tower feels about its neighbors. And there are delightful and insightful audio clips scattered throughout. You're constantly rewarded for wandering, and while the game certainly doesn't have Everything it has a very large number of things to see and explore.

Sit back, relax, enjoy the soothing music and the contemplative audio clips and just let your mind wander. You won't regret it. After playing on PS4 and now PC for quite a lot I have to say this will almost certainly be one of the best games I'll play in 2017, which has been kind of a banner game year already. If this kind of game might be your jam, though, then make time for it!