The updates have been pretty slow over at the Smash Bros DOJO lately. From dull to slightly neat, there hasn’t been much to fawn over for weeks now. Today’s update though? Magic.

Solid Kirby FTW!

Okay, Okay, I know I missed a day. But this post totally counts for yesterday, becuase it’s mostly about why I didn’t manage to make a post in those 24 hours. Other reasons are that I only got off work at 11:10 and had to do some shopping immediately afterward. So I wouldn’t have made it in time anyway. Ha.

So it seems people just won’t shup up about Mass Effect. Before the game came out it was all hype, and now that it’s released it’s mostly nitpicking and disappointment. But me, I never cared about it at all. Until yesterday, when I stayed up playing until 7:00 AM. Yeah. The Tall One really wanted to rent it, despite “not having time for an RPG”. I think he just didn’t want to commit to Eternal Sonata. But anyhow, Mass Effect.

So he played it for a week and whatnot, and I picked it up for an hour on Tuesday, got frustrated with the shitty combat, and didn’t even finish the introductory mission. But damned if I’m going to have a game sitting there with zero achievements! So I picked it up late Thursday night and hunkered down, finally sort of getting the hang of ah, ah, ah, ah, staying alive. And then the game became fun! Once the lame intro mission is over, you’re pretty much handed the world galaxy on a silver platter, and it’s yours to do with as you please. Sure, you’ve gotta tie up some stuff before the space travel starts, but the Citadel is so big and full of things to do that a sequence of events that should only take about half an hour lasted me well into six. It’s so wonderful!

And it only gets better once you can fly about the galaxy on a whim. It’s a little intimidating at first, seeing as you’ve got a ton of destinations to choose from, but once you realize that you can only land on about a third of the planets you’ll see, the overwhelming “where the fuck do I start!?” feeling starts to dissipate. The open-endedness of the game is really nice, and the fact that it’s really just a well-disguised collect-a-thon bodes well for my opinion.

As I stated before though, the combat is pretty terrible. The aiming is clunky, and the game doesn’t tell you half of what you can do. I didn’t even realize there was a melee attack until my brother pointed out that it’s one of the best ways to deal with close-quarters combat. And then there’s the ally characters. Basically all they do is stand in front of you, absorbing all your fire. Yes, they act as nice meat shields for a little while, but if they would just get out of my way, I could spare them the pains of death by actually dealing with our foes! Oh well. Most of the other combat-related issues get better as weapon skills increase, so I’ll just skip those minor inconveniences.

Other thoughts? Not much. Most of the achievements are nice and easy to earn, but require quite a bit of time. Sadly, I picked the game up only a day before it was due back, so we’ll have to rent it again, but I’m almost ready to consider buying it. I don’t know how gung-ho I would be about multiple playthroughs, but considering that I went from not liking it at all to playing it all night long two days in a row, I’d say it’s probably worth splitting with the brother unit. I still really want Eternal Sonata though. I seem to have an affinity for games with charcters named after musical terminology.

I mentioned in my most recent article that I’d like to see Secret of Evermore on the Virtual Console sometime in the near future, but the chances of that happening are pretty slim. The main fact of the matter is that it didn’t go over too well. It’s funny, because people both like it and dislike it at the same time. For the amount of venom people lay on it, they’ll just as fast turn around and say it’s not as bad as others say. Kind of a weird situation. The sad thing about it all is that it’s the first step towards the downfall of the Mana series, even though it’s not actually a legitimate entry into the series.

Secret of Mana made the series popular, and gamers everywhere seem to agree that the Japan-only sequel Seiken Densetsu 3 is pretty spectacular too, but after that things got sidetracked into badness. Legend of Mana was full of unnecessary crap, Sword of Mana is a lackluster remake of the first Seiken Densetsu, and Dawn of Mana is just crammed with bad ideas. Even Children of Mana, while fun to a point, was a meh-tastic dungeon crawler. Heroes of Mana, on the other hand, seemed at first like a sort of retribution of the Mana name. Before it was released it had a lot of promise surrounding it, and God knows I was actually excited about it.

Ideally, RTS games should be great on the DS. The screen may be a bit smaller than the computer monitors that RTS players are used to, but the interface sure works a lot better than controllers do. Heroes of Mana isn’t the first RTS game on the DS, but it’s the only one so far that’s grabbed my attention. As great as it should be, it’s merely okay. Though declaring a Mana game “okay” is actually a compliment to the series these days.

Blah blah blah, Heroes is your basic RTS game. You’ve got different units, collecting resources, building structures, and killing armies. The best thing is that you’re commanding the totally lovable Mana series monsters! Isn’t that wonderful? No, not really. After the ideas behind it, the game lacks a lot of other things. The first issue is the main characters. You’ve got six initial leader characters, and they’re all pretty dull. Even the ones that join up later on don’t have much depth to them. While it’s essentially a prequel to Seiken Densetsu 3, the only interesting thing about the story and its characters is that they offer a bit of background on Seiken 3. Otherwise, it’s almost painfully boring and clichéd. Not to say that it’s really bad, but it certainly won’t motivate you to play.

Controlling the leaders in battle is a pain too. Actually, controlling everything in battle is a pain. Units are very slow, and they’re incredibly dumb. If you’re moving more than one unit at a time, they will scatter all over the place, because their paths seemingly cannot cross any of the same panels, and on the off chance that they do, the two units will start weaving back and forth like when you’re walking towards someone and you both juke the same way, and then you move the other way, and it goes on forever until someone just stops so the other person can go around. Only the units in the game don’t figure it out so easily. Combat is exactly the same way, because you’ll have the enemy targeted and the enemy will have you targeted, and the two units will dance in a circle forever, because neither one will be smart enough to stop and wait for an opportunity to attack. Such is the issue with making the game grid-based.

Using magic is almost as bad, because your most useful characters just get weapon enchantment spells, which can only be cast while the character is standing still or walking. Most of the time, when you want to use the spells, your character will be in the midst of a battle, and you’ll have to try to stop him from attacking for a second so you can tap the “enchant” button. The basic idea of the last two paragraphs is that controlling units is a pain in the ass, mostly due to the fact that whoever programmed the AI was feeling like a dick that day.

Gameplay aside, the game isn’t horrible. Using iconic Mana series monsters to destroy your enemies is a joy in itself, and controlling the rest of the game works really well. It’s entirely controlled by the touch screen, with buttons being restricted solely to camera movement and rotation, and it works out quite nicely that way. If you want to select multiple units, you can make whatever shape you need around them, instead of being limited to a square like in most RTS games. There are even shortcut buttons to select unit types or single specific units. All your structures are built within your ship/base, which moves. Hence, if your base is under attack, you can simply fly it to a safer location. This isn’t an issue early on, but it does become a necessary strategy once the enemies start piling it on. There are a wide variety of units to choose from too, but they are unlocked very slowly as the game progresses. I don’t think you even have access to all the different unit classes by the tenth mission, but maybe that’s just because it’s a really long game. I’m not sure, I haven’t gotten very much farther than that yet.

The music in Heroes of Mana is, like in all Mana games, quite good. Not as epically memorable as the soundtrack to Secret of Mana, but lovable no less. It’s all done by Yoko Shimomura, who did the music for Kingdom Hearts, so that’s to be expected. She’s a wonderful composer in every respect, and I’ve loved all of her work that I’ve listened to so far. Graphics are also pretty standard for the Mana series, featuring colorful hand-drawn sprites. The character portraits look pretty nice too, and give the characters far more depth than their personalities do. Even the various interfaces look really nice and sophisticated, which is notable because I usually don’t care much for the appearance of menus and whatnot. Let it be known that Heroes of Mana’s presentation is by far it’s greatest strength.

Heroes also offers some level of multiplayer functionality. There is a basic two-player battle mode, but the interesting thing is the Wi-Fi mode. Ironically enough, I’ve completely ignored this mode. It’s got something to do with joining a clan and getting a high ranking to unlock something or other, but I couldn’t be arsed enough to figure it out back when I was still actively playing the game, and I’m not going to try to understand it now that I’ve left it to the wayside in lieu of better games.

Overall, it’s really not that bad a game. I may have overemphasized the AI’s lack of said “I”, but there are some issues. It’s not the return to glory that we Mana fans were hoping for. I mean, it really wouldn’t have been anyway because it’s an RTS and not an ARPG, but it would have been nice to be able to associate the Mana name with the word “quality” for the first time in over a decade. I’ll say it’s worth a try if you’re really into the Mana series or lighthearted RTS games, but otherwise you should probably just ignore it. Mediocrity is just something we Mana fans have been getting used to for years now, so it’s not a huge surprise for us, but if the last Mana game you played was Secret, well, you’ll just be floored by how far downhill the series has gone. And even with the flawed gameplay and monotonous narrative, Heroes isn’t even close to being the worst chapter.

Holy Jesus I just opened this in my browser and it is way long.