#they're sooo wacky and goofy. please interact more

[ministarfruit]

day 2: please be gentle ♡

(femslashfeb prompt list)

[chacusha]

Echoes of Mana liveblogging (1/?)

Some early thoughts:

Aw yes! Got my girl! Apparently there's a stronger Angela in the pool, though. Nooo!

Anyway, I'm loving this art -- it looks sooo good!

I love seeing more interactions with Mana characters! In general, I'm impressed at how different all the characters sound, which is made apparent by these little story adventures and even the dialogue you get by building up character bonds. The character personalities really shine through. I also appreciate how they've given the MC dialogue options similar to the ones in Legend of Mana where there's like a normal option and then there's a really goofy option (really sassy, ridiculously accommodating like the bottom one here, etc.). It's just a fun feature of this series that you meet a lot of Wacky Characters and you can choose to just go along with their eccentric ways.

I also like Honeycomb and Duffle and the other original cast for this game. The character designs look really nice and Mana-ish, and the personalities and interactions are also fun anime-style stuff.

The Mana Goddess and Mana Tree in this game are pretty! I like how they're going with the orchard theme where you harvest stuff off of trees (the MC's weapon isn't so much a staff/spear as, like, a fruit-picking tool...), and the world fruit have such strange names like in Legend of Mana: Beginniberry, Verdigourd, Epicorn, Soaramame, Faerieberry.

I'm very curious about the unchosen MC. He seems so sad to be left behind? Is he going to be story-important?

OMG they did it! 😍 (Also, does this game make it canon that Hawkeye is the main character/chosen hero of Trials of Mana, I guess?! 😂 You get to see his backstory opening, he's searching for the Mana Sword, and he's got Faerie :O)

Aww these guys again. ❤ I like this event featuring Randi and Duran squaring off against each other. And the Scorpion Gang! Again, it's fun seeing Randi's agreeable and diffident personality contrasted with Duran's competitive confidence. This is the kind of content I signed up for!!

I'm currently midway through chapter 5. I have basically two 4* characters (Riesz and Sumo) that I've built up to ~3800 power, and that's too weak to clear stronger enemies quickly enough, so I'm too underleveled to finish off the remaining content. Netplay doesn't work for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so I'm just sort of waiting until I have a character I can upgrade to 4* and who will hopefully be my third strong team member. (It's probably going to be 3* Lekius because I could use a strong water character to try to take down the fire armor boss and the fact that he has a bow makes him situationally useful. I'm also going to ascend 3* Randi to fulfill the event bonus missions, but he's not Lv 50 yet...)

My favorite character so far is my 3* Julius, though. I mean, he's one of my favorite Mana characters in general, but he's also pretty fun to play as -- very strong magic that leaves him pretty vulnerable. Very glass cannon, which is fun. I also like his quotes: "A Mana Tree exists here too... Hm? No, only thinking aloud." "What are you up to? If I can be of help, let me know anytime." "Keeping an eye on me, are you? No need. I'm quite harmless." Don't worry! This man is helpful and doesn't have an ulterior motive at all! But yeah, I love that about Julius -- he seems so nice and polite.

I very much also want the Crimson Wizard -- another one of my favorite characters for maybe similar reasons. Apparently he's available for purchase with spell shards, but you need to make it all the way through the Twillwool Tower (twice...?) for those. So that might take a while.

I really like the interface here. It is very sleek and visually pleasing. And there is an impressive amount of features and stuff to do for a game that has just launched!

That said, I'm not sure how long I will stick with it. I tend to get frustrated with gachas where it's possible to invest a lot of time into a single battle and then just realize, welp, I can't actually beat this despite all my effort. That's why I stuck with Kingdom Hearts Union Cross so long, because it had the nice feature where high-level battles always had a very strict upper limit on how many turns they would last -- the challenge was always in getting your damage output high enough throughout the three turns to defeat the enemy and not about survival strategy to keep hanging on with the vain hope of winning. Already, attempting to fight a losing battle has really frustrated me, so I kind of foresee this game making me ragequit at some point.

That said, despite my complaints about the gameplay (most gacha battle mechanics just don't work for me and eventually lead me to getting frustrated), I do really like this game. It's got a lot going on and as a Mana fan, I would never have dreamed of getting a gacha game of this quality.

One thing I'm confused about, though, is why this game shares its victory music with Kingdom Hearts Union Cross! Do they share the same composer? Is it an Easter egg? Do Kingdom Hearts and the Mana series share a canon now? XD

It's very sweet that the LOM Heroine (Serafina) says that Pinzton reminds her of her home. It does!