Dawn of Mana

[Demon Cleaner]

Dawn of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 4) has been released. It got rather bad reviews, can't say anything, don't have it yet, and it's not yet available on the net (I mean illegally ).

[Harrison]

Lets hope it is better than some reviews think. I love some of the previous titles on the Mana series.

[Demon Cleaner]

Here are some excerpts from magazines:

Picture a surfer being tossed into a vicious undertow--that uncontrollable motion is how fighting through Dawn of Mana feels.

Sorry old school Mana fans, this is nothing like that gem back on the SNES. This is a pure action game with a gooey artificial RPG coating. The controls are horrible, the level design is seriously lacking, bosses can be frustratingly difficult, and not even the story will keep you playing.

Hardcore franchise fans will no doubt want to play it because the story line does fill in some interesting gaps in the Mana universe's history, but this one's a rental at best.

Dawn of Mana is a hodgepodge of ideas that range from nonsensical to decent, all smooshed together in a failure of a game.

Then there's the combat. It's messy. You'll fling ranged spells at enemies and they'll mysteriously miss, presumably due to line-of-sight issues, but it's difficult to tell. Even melee combat seems buggy at times, with monsters you can't hit even though they're stood right next to you.

But that doesn't discourage us, as we d/l the game anyway

[Harrison]

Exactly! How bad can a "free" game be?

[Submeg]

So bad it destroys your abilities to play real games?

[Demon Cleaner]

Tested yesterday. Lovely childish graphics, a bit Kingdom Hearts style, real time combat, which gets very tedious with the time. Nothing special about it.

[Harrison]

I have it, but have yet to give it a test. I quite liked Kingdom Hearts but it's not so good if the combat gets tedious quickly. Shame as I've been looking forward to this game.

[Harrison]

I've now had chance to play this game for a few hours and it's gameplay definitely is very much like Kingdom Hearts, which is no bad thing as that is one of my favourite real time action RPGs. And while it does have a bit of a cute and childlike feel to the look and feel of the game I quite like it. I found myself drawn into the game quite quickly.

The combat is a bit repetative to begin with, but once you obtain Faye and can use her magic skills, as well as the whip feature of your vine weapon, the combat starts to get much more interesting. And the ranged projectile weapon that expands with different ammunition that is given to you by the 8 element faeries adds more variety to the combat.

Granted, the levels I have seen so far have not been revolutionary or unique and similar ideas have been seen in a lot of similar action/adventure/platform games, the graphics are nicely realised with some very smooth and anti aliased texturing that looks very nice.

The story is quite straight forward and so far from what I've played very linear, but that might open up later on is happens with many RPG style games.

I definitely want to play this much further to see where it goes and if the game expands later on to become more non linear. I also hope that later on you can continue to level up, because from what I have experienced so far you and faye are both reset to level 1 at the start of a new chapter which while levelling the playing field and upping the difficulty with each new chapter also makes the sudden lose of the skills you built up in the previous chapter a shock to lose and a bit of a disappointment as you just get into using the full range of skills and then they are gone again.

[Demon Cleaner]

You now tested the 3 RPGs, but still not Odin Sphere, which imo is the best of the latest released ones.

[Harrison]

Yeah, the version of Odin Sphere I had didn't work so I need to find the other version and download it again.