We got to check out the new Mana mobile game from Wright Flyer Studios.
My affinity for Mana games is weird. I’ve never been able to get into Secret of Mana after trying many many times, but for some reason I really like Trials of Mana and Legend of Mana. I have no real explanation for why, but that late-in-life renaissance for Mana games (I played both games on Switch for the first time) piqued my interest in Echoes of Mana, the mobile game that is a celebration of the franchise developed by Wright Flyer Studios, a studio that you might know for their mobile RPG Another Eden (that was announced for Switch several years ago but is available on mobile and PC). Of special note (at least for me), Masato Kato is also a part of Wright Flyer Studios and in addition to being the writer/director for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, Kato also was involved with the Mana series in the 2000s.
Echoes of Mana is certainly a free-to-play mobile game. It has your gacha content, multiple currencies, the whole nine yards, etc. Without getting incredibly deep into the game, I can’t speak to how fair it is as a truly free game, but I didn’t have any issues in my time with the game as far as reaching plateaus and being funneled to pay money. It does make use of a stamina meter, where you can only play so many levels before waiting for your stamina to recharge, which is one of my least favorite mobile game elements, but it wasn’t burdensome and only hit the stamina wall when I was trying to binge this for the sake of the preview. My normal everyday play of this was not hindered by stamina.
I got what the game does as a mobile game out of the way so I can focus on the better parts of it, which is how it adapts Mana combat to mobile. You start with an original character as your core party member, but quickly unlock the ability to fill out your party with gacha pulls that are all pulled from past Mana games, such as Hawkeye, Kevin, and (sigh) Charlotte from Trials of Mana. You create a three-person party and go through several screens of action RPG combat where you hold your phone in landscape mode and drag your party around by tapping the screen. Combat is mostly executed in the lower right hand of the screen, where your thumb would lay, and you can tap the main attack button easily to automatically target the nearest enemy. Special abilities charge during your basic attacks and you can trigger those by tapping smaller buttons around the main attack. It’s way smoother than I expected and after a while, it just felt like a nicely simplified Mana combat system. You can also switch between party members on the upper left part of the screen, allowing you to use different weapons and builds.
As of now, Echoes of Mana is just nebulously due out sometime in 2022 on iOS and Android, but you can pre-register for it now if you’re interested. Here’s hoping this mobile game can help support more Mana games coming to Switch in the future. Or at least bring out that weird real-time strategy Heroes of Mana that was developed by Brownie Brown (now part of Nintendo as 1UP Studio) with a story written by, well, Masato Kato, who is likely involved with Echoes of Mana.
