Alex S. from Link-Cable writes: "My quest to complete my massive backlog has been making some pretty good progress lately as a few weeks ago I wrapped up EarthBound: Beginnings and now another RPG is up with a look at Heroes of Mana from the Nintendo DS. ‘Wait… what is this? It’s not an RPG at all!’ Nope, Heroes of Mana takes the traditionally action-RPG focused series and completely changes it up to deliver a real-time strategy experience that plays more like a cross between Starcraft and Advance Wars with… pretty terrible results. I know it’s sometimes poor form to give away your full impressions of a game in the first few sentences but wow did I not like this game."
The Mana series has been around for decades and spawned multiple titles in that time. Here's how each title ranks up.
Nathan Stiles writes:
"I stated once before that I’d rather play through a train wreck than play something bland, and Heroes of Mana has proven me wrong, or at least proven that I should choose my words more carefully. Then again, Heroes of Mana is less of a train wreck and more of an entire continent sinking into the ocean."
Patrick Gann writes:
"The RTS/RPG hybrid was a somewhat innovative genre to throw onto the Nintendo DS. LostMagic was the first to do it, and other companies have since imitated it. Square Enix did so twice, using different developers. One such game was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. But before that, there was Brownie Brown's "Heroes of Mana."
Heroes of Mana is, without question, the worst game in the Mana (Seiken Densetsu) series. Why is this? Because, unlike every other game in the series, Heroes of Mana attempts to break into a new genre. And in doing so, it falls flat on its face."
