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I felt like a lot of care went into the game but at the same time a lot more could have gone into the characterization, storytelling and dialogue. The voice acting was really hit or miss. Some characters were really good, like Sara Miller-Crews' Angela, who immediately became my favorite character in this version. A lot of dialogue limited what other actors could do, though, like the Priest of Light in Wendell's canned responses to whatever your party says to him (and even Faerie's, and so many other NPCs) kind of sound flat or over-emotional depending on what character spoke before they did (usually Riesz is to blame for them sounding over emotional by contrast). Special mention to the Dark Prince for being described by Belladonna as having "closed off his heart to the whole world, even his own people who raised him up, and to her," and then to REALLY be a dick to her, rather than being cold, literally cackles with glee between every sentence he speaks. He's a cartoon villain within a minute of that backstory and retroactively makes Belladonna worse than (love is) blind, because he is truly evil. Some of the spirits were also great. I laughed so hard at Wisp (er, Lumina. We're using Secret of Mana's OG translations a lot, and I guess what was settled on in games after Legend of Mana, with spells like Lucent Beam, though Nevarl still sounds way funkier to me than Navarre, and yes, Hawkeye would definitely insist that everyone call him Hawk) and was really looking forward to some of their interplay like on the ship where Lumina says something like "Uhh, I actually really don't like this guy at all!" when you meet Shade, who was also incredible. Gnome owns bones, but the rest weren't really as interesting. I think having Faerie do less in the remake would have been a good choice to give them more of a chance to shine, and the story naturally could let it happen at the first Sanctuary visit (the original scene pulling the sword from the tree there WAS much better, even syncing up with the unique piece composed just for that moment), and heck you could even let the villains kill her off at this point or after you try to rescue her in their city so they can still get the Mana Sword from you and release the God Beasts. This would also force the characters to have to find their own way without a guide, supporting each other more and having your hero come into their role as a leader. As you said, the villains definitely could have been improved with more backstory during the Benevodons and culminating in Pedan and their final dungeon, especially because this is all after two of the threats have been wiped out on your first visit to the Sanctuary so they could really focus on their backstory at this point. This would also serve to break up the prestissimo the game hits of dungeon bossfight dungeon bossfight dungeon bossfight when compared to the pace prior to the Sanctuary visit, where there was at least some exploration and meeting characters involved. Given so much of the game is traipsing through dungeons and even repeats of dungeons for the Benevodons, it's a shame they didn't include more plot-relevant dialogue among your characters there, or at least just banter. Heck, they even sort of do this in the final dungeons, like the dialogue that was happening between Belladonna and Riesz during the fight (not that it was paced well, the ring menus interrupt the flow a bit; maybe boss charge-up attacks at key moments would make the conversations fit better) The characters interactions were always part of the joy of replaying the game, and it would have been a lot of fun to have a party of Duran and Kevin in which Hawkeye complains every time they have to leave the towns and girls and go back on the lonely road, or one in which Charlotte and Angela tag-team clown on enemies or tease Riesz for acting so weird. Lise was one of my favorite characters and seemed sensible and competent. Riesz felt like an buffoon, which, given some of the choices the game railroads you into is apt I guess, and it's my canon explanation as to why she keeps referring to the Dark Prince as the Dark Majesty when that's a title a Belladonna was using because he's their royalty. Then again, I can see Riesz just being like "well, hating him and what he's done to my family and my kingdom is no reason to be rude," which would be pretty funny and I wish they leaned into more. As it is her voice just seemed wooden like she's trying to behave as she imagines a princess should and at other times she yells "JUSTICE!" or "THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE" or "IT IS OVER!" but I feel like I'm having to dig into her motivations a lot more than I have to for Angela or Kevin, who I feel they comfortably nailed the personalities of. I get that there's always things that can be improved, time and money are limited resources and a lot of what I'm going to take away is going to be colored by nostalgia, but even what they did recreate could probably have used some trimming. Like, I never understood why the game always forced you to see Charlotte's backstory in the Cascade Cavern and again at Dior even if she wasn't in your party or Ludgar's backstory when you don't have Kevin. Cutting this sort of thing would keep the game's plot more focused on your team's goals at these points and add some variety to having those characters at those story beats. But at it's heart I guess the game's plot and story was never really the point. I'm just attached to the characters because of nostalgia, but it's really just an early action RPG and by and large that aspect has been tremendously improved. I'm generally leery of remakes and not exactly confident of Square Enix's track record (FFVII2 is NOT the norm, and it also took them a decade) and was terrified they were going to make class strikes and spells interrupt everything like they did in the original (because of hardware limitations in the original), but to their credit they let you skip the cutscenes and they'll even whiff if you use them carelessly. The verticality of the exploration and the combat (not only to attack flyers but also to avoid attacks) was a surprise and were great. The Forest of Wonder's sidescrolling perspective was refreshing and neat (sorta reminded me of NeiR) and I wish they made more of these types of choices throughout the game. Each character has a lot more choices with how you can build and it seemed like no stats were useless because they had different functions depending on the character (Hawkeye's Ninja Master tech was absolutely devastating despite him not having very much strength probably because intelligence affected it), though it would have been nice to have them actually document what each stat was meant to do in the menu. But goddamn was Angela powerful. I bet if you just saved enough points to have her get Ancient Curse immediately after changing to Magus, all of the Benevodons would have been as easy as the last boss. Something that might mitigate the usefulness between melee and spells would just be having more deadly enemy melee attacks (especially on hard mode) like in that Sin of Mana romhack. You needed at least one character to keep enemies off of your back line or Angela or Carly would just get pasted. Maybe as an incentive they could give the more unique functional melee combos like the knockback and stun to Duran / Riesz / Kevin and limit those similar tools on characters like Angela. Rather than as a reward for melee centered builds, I think the class strikes were meant to be equally strong for all characters and used more in unison whenever you'd break a boss' bubble, because typically you'd have the time and the gauge saved up at those points to have all three characters get them out, though Whirlwind Spear did a lot of work gathering enemies up to be blasted by Dark Force for a long time in your game. I dunno, in the end that romhack (that Natural 20 introduced me to, by the way, thanks again for that) spoiled me for gameplay and choice. The only way that could have been improved upon in my eyes was just limiting the interruptions by animation cutscenes and Praetarius even went back and added a "hold X when the spell name appears in text in battle" option that would skip most animations to speed up a lot of the fights at my suggestion. I'd be crazy if I didn't say I'm glad they made this game as well as they did, though, and hope that the series keeps getting titles if they can keep improving the formula, because it was fun to play. Maybe they can remake Legend of Mana next, but of the earlier games this one would definitely lose the most going from sprites to polygon models. Its combat and environments could certainly stand the improvements though. And they wouldn't even lose much by not touching characterization, since you're basically a mute protagonist in that one and all the whimsy comes from all the other characters that don't do anything! Or, just make a new game. Gonna need a composer on the level of Hiroki Kikuta or Yoko Shimomura for that, though. As always Nat, thank you. I'm pretty much lurking all of your LPs, I've been a fan since the first one you did. Edit: Woah, typed a lot of words there. TL;DR I put a lot of thought into lesser aspects of the game I might not have otherwise because it committed the cardinal sin of not being multiplayer and I couldn't just finally share a game I loved from my childhood with my good friends now. Heck, the original game was multiplayer and only wasn't three player because they dummied out that option due to a bug caused on the ghost ship corrupting your save file. Again, that romhack disabled this and allowed you to play three player. All you had to do to avoid the bug is not save when you're a character down for that part. Jabbering Idiot fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 22:22
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I dunno, just having the Faerie seems to make most people go "oh snap" and do stuff differently than they would otherwise, look at the mini village. And they could just have easily have had some random npc dialogue in town suggesting where the ice mana stone was. I'm basically suggesting they didn't have to force the worldbuilding in like the original game did, there's plenty of opportunities to explore or just play with other characters to make those other places more important when you have the relevant team. And I don't mean to say Reisz being an overly formal wooden character is a bad thing, it's just that especially in her case either the dialogue or the direction or the acting doesn't feel like she's the same person between her situation-to-situation reactions and canned voice lines. She feels stilted in a way that isn't the character herself forcing the formality, if that makes sense.
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Jun 19, 2020 02:36
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