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Legend of Mana

Platform : PlayStation

Publisher : Square

Release date : 15 July 1999

Category : Role Playing

Game description

Legend of Mana is usually known as a love-or-hate title among the other Mana games, mostly for it's beat-em-up style battle system as opposed to the overworld style in previous games. However even if this idea turns you off it's still worth a look.

Legend of Mana is generally extremely open in that you can do anything in any order, and do any sort of varied quests you wish in most cases. However, completing this game 100% requires a lot of meticulous planning and order. You can also raise pets, manage a robot buddy, and forge equipment (which is an unexpectedly involved process).

The game takes place in a world that expands to include areas from mountain paths to toy graveyards as you obtain artifacts, and placement of these artifacts is one of the factors that adds into you 100% completing this game. The backgrounds and graphics in general are nothing short of beautiful, bringing the hand-drawn style in full force that we've come to know and love from Square during this period.

Battling is, as said before, akin to a beat-em-up where everything takes place on a 2D horizontal plane with 8 direction movement. You can fight by using magic and a variety of weapons with different abilities and speeds (Note that your initial equipment doesn't end up being too important of a choice and you can change anytime with very little detriment. Many do this for stat building reasons or pure preference) each with their own abilities, though a few are shared between them. Learning these abilities normally comes from using what abilities you have enough times until they're mastered, and combinations of mastered abilities will unlock others. You start with simple things like jumping and spinning to learning things like counterattacking, spear jumping, hammer spinning, dash attacks, all the hallmarks one would expect from their weapons.

LoM is a neat title, many will say it's the last "good" one in the series. It's also quite an interesting hidden gem of the PS1 library in some respects, as it's openness and replayability are qualities that only a few other games of it's type share.

2 Hacks

TitleDescriptionAuthorCategoryVersionDate
Legend of Mana - Ring Ring LandThis hack restores the option to play Ring Ring Land in PocketStation. Ring Ring Land is a Pocket...OrtewImprovement1.023 September 2017
Legend of Mana - Combat ReduxThis patch alters a few aspects of Legend of Mana's battle system in an attempt to make the game mor...MeshGearFoxImprovement1.206 July 2014

1 Translations

TitleLanguageDescriptionAuthorCategoryVersionDate
Legend of ManaSpanishMarch 4, 2021: As you may or may not know, our translation was not 100% complete. There were 3 litt...GreenGoblinFully Playable2021-03-0415 March 2018

1 Utilities

TitleDescriptionAuthorCategoryVersionLanguageDate
Legend of Mana compressorThis is my old and never released compressor for 'Legend of Mana' of PSX. Usage: COMPRESSOR comma...CUEGame Specific1.0English8 Jan 2013

1 Documents

TitleDescriptionAuthorCategoryVersionDate
First PS ASM Doc for HackingA step by step tutorial on some PSX hacking essentials including finding compressed font data, findi...SkeudAssembly1.031 Aug 2001

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