Trials of Mana anyone? Haven't played Mana series.
I am about 10 hours in.
- Voice acting is ... horrible. As is the dialogue really. But the delivery is just odd. There are sentences where they emphasise just random words, speed up or slow down in the middle. Granted I've only heard most of Angela, the spear lady and the little girl. I went Angela to grind some silver seeds in the demo and the spear lady had good DPS when I tried her. Little girl was only healer I saw. The girl speaks in some weird tone where they try to make her talk like a child with "W" instead of "L" in words, but it just comes off weird. Though her dialogue is at least consistent. Angela sounds like a confused valley girl. The way voices and dialogue is presented (so far) it appears that their target demographic are children. It's the type of dialogue/acting/delivery setup you'd expect from something your 8-10 year old would watch. Can switch to Japanese voices.
- Graphically - Meh? It's not bad, but certainly not good either. Average.
- Combat. 10 hours in, and 90%of my attacks on the spear lady are pure melee. MP is still so low that you don't really use spells often, and spells only unlock as you gain elementals. I have no spells on spear lady. There are 8 elementals to get and I have 4 so far (you unlock wind, light, earth and dark before you open up the world to where you can pick where to go after that). You can only use spells that you have the element for. You have 2 passive skills that unlock to 4 once you get to class change (level 18, I was level 20 when I got to the place that let me do it, next one is level 38 + need an item). There are 4? class changes. Those unlock extra skills. IE: I had holy bolt (light skill) and the class change let me get holy bolt +. So far my mage has 2 spells and healer has 2 + 2 summons (that are basically spells).
Point being, I can see combat evolving to use more skills, but even 10 hours in, I mostly just mash attacks. I play on hard, and up until the bosses around 7 hours in, everything is easy, then suddenly I had to spam items. One boss was actually kind of cool as it was a door with lots of different AE attacks that you had to dodge, but sadly that is also where the AI kicks in (or I should say, it doesn't kick in). If there is an AE attack, your party members will stand in it. And you can't really switch party members to run each one out as they start moving once you switch. They can also use massive spam of their best spells on trash mobs, but suddenly (even though their AI tactics are the same) do nothing but melee a boss.
It's fluid though. Not noticed any frame drops or lag.
- Story. Very generic so far. Manatree dying, need to find 8 elementals. Big bad apparently behind the scenes. Not sure what happens later. Encountered a few of the people you can pick at the start, but nobody except the three I picked at the start have joined me. Not sure how much of the early game changes based on who you pick, but assume it has to be fairly significant as up until this point, everything I've done have been mostly tied to my characters.
Oh, and loading times on PS4 are bad. Because there are so many. You load into a place (10 seconds), have a cut scene, run out of place (load), enter city only to have to exit it (load). Once you have a place loaded though, most everything in it is instant, so entering buildings/exiting is fast. But sometimes, especially when you have to backtrack and just pass through places, it is noticeable.
I'll probably keep on playing it, but would I recommend it based on what I have played so far? Not really. Going from FF7 remake and Persona 5 golden to this is jarring.
Wait for sale. Will update if this changes, but in all honesty, 8 hours after the demo, there really isn't much "more" than what the demo showed you.