Games
| Title | Year | Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final Fantasy Adventure
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden Released in Europe as Mystic Quest |
|
Game Boy | The first game of the Mana series was marketed in Japan and the United States as a Final Fantasy game and drew many stylistic influences from the Final Fantasy series, but deviated in that it presented real-time, action-oriented battles comparable to The Legend of Zelda, rather than traditional turn-based battles. An enhanced port was released on mobile phones in Japan, which features an artistic style closer to the original game than that of Sword of Mana. In 2004, Square polled customers regarding interest in porting Final Fantasy Adventure and several other games to the Nintendo DS. |
| Secret of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2 |
|
Super Nintendo | Originally planned for the SNES CD-ROM add-on in development by Nintendo and Sony, the game ended up being altered to fit on a standard cartridge when the add-on project was dropped by Nintendo. The game introduced the Ring Command menu system, which enabled prompt access to features such as items or magic spells. In 2003, the game ranked 78th in IGN's yearly "Top 100 Game of All Time". |
| Seiken Densetsu 3 |
|
Super Famicom | Seiken Densetsu 3 introduced a degree of nonlinearity to the series, allowing players to choose at the beginning of the game a party of three members out of a total of six characters. Distinct encounters and endings can be seen depending on the characters selected. It was never released outside of Japan due to technical bugs and the game being too large for Western cartridges, although an English language fan translation was released by Neill Corlett in 2000. |
| Legend of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana |
|
PlayStation | Legend of Mana features different gameplay from its predecessors. The locations of the game's world are represented on a map by artifacts placed by the player, with different artifact placements allowing him or her to obtain different items. The game features temporary sidekick characters that the player can recruit, breed or build, and a weapon and armor creation and tempering system. It also features a story with many diverging subplots. Critical reaction was mixed at the dramatic shift in gameplay and story structure from Secret of Mana. |
| Sword of Mana
Released in Japan as Shin'yaku Seiken Densetsu |
|
Game Boy Advance | Sword of Mana is a full remake of Final Fantasy Adventure developed by Brownie Brown. Features of the original game were reworked to be brought more in line with the direction the Mana series had taken with the later games. |
| Children of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu DS: Children of Mana |
|
Nintendo DS | Children of Mana is a dungeon crawler which was developed by Next Entertainment. Creator Koichi Ishii was most interested in the further development of multiplayer gaming that was first attempted in a limited way in Secret of Mana. |
| Friends of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Friends of Mana |
|
Mobile phone | Friends of Mana is a multiplayer role-playing game set in a fictional world called Mi'Diel. |
| Dawn of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 4 |
|
PlayStation 2 | Dawn of Mana is the first fully 3D game in the Mana series, utilizing the Havok physics engine seen in Half-Life 2 that allows a large amount of player interaction with their 3D environment. In the series in-universe timeline, Dawn of Mana is set at the very beginning, while Children of Mana takes place ten years later. |
| Heroes of Mana
Released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Heroes of Mana |
|
Nintendo DS | Heroes of Mana is a tactical role-playing game and a prequel to Seiken Densetsu 3. It was born out of the desire to make a real-time strategy game similar to Age of Empires, StarCraft, and Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. |
Read more about this topic: Mana Series
Famous quotes containing the word games:
“The rules of drinking games are taken more serious than the rules of war.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)