An SNES classic that time tragically has not been super kind to. The menus are laggy as all get out, half the mechanics don't work properly, the replay value is high but it takes half the game for playstyles to really diverge, and the balance is a mess. If you can slot yourself into the era though, you have a gorgeous game with a phenomenal OST and tons of options for viable-to-busted end game parties, and it's good fun to make a cohesive unit with the 3 characters you pick at the start. It doesn't light the world on fire like it did when it first got fan translated, but it's a quick and satisfying 16-bit romp with a handful of variations depending on your main character to keep things fresh. Highly recommend checking it out if the Collection of Mana goes on sale, or heck just check out the original fan translation at least once if you're a fan of SNES RPGs.

This game is so good. In many ways it is a major leap forward from SoM. Except the menus. I wish they would have kept the ring menu system. But whatever, ruin a good thing by going bog standard rpg menus.
I haven’t finished the game as my save got lost in a move. That was when it was still Seiken Densetsu 3. That killed me. I was about halfway through the game.
That kind of thing just puts me off a game for a while. But I’m thinking of starting over, and that is why I’m doing this review.
Because this game is worth starting over with. The story is whatever. It’s not bad, it’s just serviceable. But that’s ok, because the gameplay is fun. They added a class system of sorts to Trials of Mana. You start off as a class (each character has a predetermined class) and at certain points you can upgrade that class to a new class.
It’s sort of an upgraded version of Final Fantasy 1’s class system. Where the Fighter can become a Knight at a certain point in the game, or the Thief can become a Ninja (I think it was Thief -> Ninja).
Except in Trials it has been expanded to two moments a character can upgrade their class during the game.
But it’s more involved than that, you can go dark or light.
Honestly, if you okay this game, look up a class guide for it.
I didn’t in my playthrough and I should have. I was struggling lol
But this game is fun, like I said.
The characters are interesting -for the most part. The class system is involved. The graphics are nice. A definite upgrade from SoM (though it lost some charm in the process).
This is, overall, a much darker game than SoM. Whether that’s a good thing is up to you to decide.
Personally, I liked the whole vibe SoM had. This game doesn’t share that vibe.
It doesn’t share much with SoM, or Final Fantasy Adventure. But what it does share is fun gameplay, nice graphics, but Lenny to do and see.
I do like the wide variety of characters. Like SoM you only have 3 characters, but when you start a game you can mix and match them in any combination. I find that pretty compelling.
This review is way too long.
So I’ll cut it off here with one last thing:
Give it a try.

Man was I not expecting to like a Mana game this much. Almost every problem I have with the first two is either fixed or else I don’t care that much about it anymore, story is better-ish than Secret of Mana and it still looks and sounds great.

I have to be honest, most of the stars in my rating come from having picked kevin for my first playthrough. I loved the hell out of playing as Kevin. This is a pro-Kevin account and if you disagree you can GTFO with your Kevin-hating ass. He’s a great starting character, strong as hell and can also kind of heal, and he’s just wholesome and good. He talks in this like Tarzan kind of broken English and walks around in this ridiculous gait like a dad chasing around their young kids being like AAAAAGH IM THE BIG MONSTER IM GONNA GET YA. Another neat touch is the way he lands on both feet and shakes whenever he falls from the sky in cannon travel, in much the same way Conan does, another anime wild boy character (Future Boy Conan is great and you should watch it, by the way). Not to mention his whole motivation is the goodest of them all: he’s avenging the wrongful death of his beloved dog. He’s a dog lover, folks. It turns out all I really needed to get into the mana series is a John Wick

Trials of Mana has all the bells and whistles of an iterative sequel. The combat is faster and less glitchy then Secret of Mana with fun bosses that have really cool designs. The music and graphics are stunning, pushing the capabilities of the SNES to its absolute limits. The game is huge with different characters to play as, complete with different endings depending on your party layout. This game is so big Square didn’t localize it until the Mana Collection in 2019. A real shame, but better late than never. If you want a good classic RPG with real-time combat, Trials of Mana is the best one I’ve played.

Trials of Mana is the 3rd game in the Mana franchise, following Secret of Mana. It keeps the general gameplay from its predecessor (that is, it's still a party based ARPG) but it makes big changes in some areas. First, the party you play as isn't fixed and, instead, you pick which 3 characters you'll use (from a pool of 6) at the start of each playthrough. The first one you choose will act as the main character and will determine some key parts of the story. This is a pretty cool mechanic as it makes each playthrough unique. The second main change is progression: Trials of Mana added a "class change" system that lets you, at certain levels, pick a new class for your heroes, making them learn new abilities. The combination of the party and progression systems makes Trials of Mana a surprisingly customizable game that's highly replayable. Despite this, I only cleared the game once.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Trials of Mana but I wish I could say I liked it more. The game's customization features are really neat, the graphics are beautiful and the soundtrack is stellar but, sadly, the game's held back by a lot of annoying quirks. First, combat is full of interruptions that almost destroy the "action" part of ARPG, controls at times feel unresponsive, menus are a complete drag to navigate (I seriously don't understand how a late SNES game has such slow menus) and some dungeons are ridiculously long for no real reason... I guess it's still worth a recommendation though.

Beautiful but boring to play. It's designed to essentially function like a turn-based RPG thanks to the wait time between each hit and the way that your characters slow to a crawl around enemies so you can't do much of any dodging. Unfortunately, it's one where the optimal strategy in almost all battles is to just use Attack until you win, throwing HP recovery items as needed. There are spells, but you can kill enemies in less time than it takes to cast a spell by just using attacks, not to mention that there are screen-wide attacks you can unleash after using your basic Attack enough times. As was not uncommon of Squaresoft in this era, many of the spells also don't work or don't do what they're supposed to, and some of the stats don't work right either. The Luck stat and the Energy Ball spell are supposed to increase the critical hit rate, but you can't actually deal critical hits in this game. Agility also allegedly has no influence on accuracy/evasion, but it's hard to tell.

With all that said, the art design is phenomenal and it's visually one of my favorite sprite-based games, so it manages to be okay as long as it's letting you move from new area to new area at a decent clip just to see them. Sometimes it doesn't let you do that, though, because there's a fair amount of backtracking.

This is a vast improvement over Secret of Mana, and adds a whole slew of new and complex features that keep it interesting (like a day/night cycle and an expansive class system), but a lot of the flaws of that game are still present here.

In my SD2/SoM review I mentioned how "dead" the environments feel in that game, and how limited your options for interaction with them are. SD3/Trials is sprawling compared to its predecessor, with huge locations for you to explore... but with no reason whatsoever why you'd want to explore them. Every time you end up in any kind of castle, for instance, you find yourself with dozens of completely empty rooms to run through (occasionally peppered with a handful of NPCs who provide incredibly generic flavor text dialogue).

Likewise, while the variety of expendable items you start getting access to once you reach the Black Market were really cool, the equip-able gear follows the same simple pattern as in the previous game, with each new town offering new weapons, armor, and/or accessories that boost one of your stats by a few extra points. It would have added so much more to the game if there had been a little more variety to the gear, with different items offering different buffs or debuffs in addition to the stats, so you'd have to strategize a bit on what gear to equip and what gear to keep or sell.

I loved how they played up the arcade beat-'em-up vibe: the "VICTORY!" message after clearing a screen, the roulette wheel when opening a chest, etc. But at the same time, the melee combat leaned a bit too much toward mindless, repetitive A-button smashing, while at the same time also maintaining a lag between attacks that slows down the combat (the charge bar from SD2 is gone, but the lag is still there - only whereas in SD2 you could attack before the charge bar filled for a lesser amount of damage, here there's a hard limit to how frequently you can attack). Just about the only element of strategy in melee combat is if and when to use your tech, although very often you'll end up clearing the screen before your tech even activates.

Oh well. It is what it is, I suppose. Overall, this was a bit of an odd mix of overly simple and needlessly complex elements for me. I can see why people love this game. I had fun playing it, but eventually got bored.

After playing/suffering through Secret of Mana a few weeks back, this was still nonetheless a game firmly on my radar. No matter who I talked to about it, this was a game basically universally agreed to be flat-out better than SoM. Where SoM is the experiment, Seiken Densetsu 3 (or “Trials of Mana” as it’s known these days) was the fully realized product, a capstone for the series at the tail end of the console generation. SoM was a game that I did not enjoy very much, to say the least, but there was just so much room for improvement, I couldn’t help but be curious about its immediate successor here. I played through Duran’s route (paired up with Angela and Charlotte), and it took me about 31-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Very similarly to the first two Seiken Densetsu games, SD3’s story revolves around the seeming end of the world. A long era of peace is coming to an end, and the forces of darkness gather. The Mana Tree has begun to wither, and the sword of mana at its base will decide the coming fate of the world. Unlike the previous two games, however, you have your choice of protagonist this time, and it really meaningfully changes the narrative depending on whom you choose. There are six choices, and there are three pairs among them of characters who have stories that relate to one another (for example in my run, Duran and Angela share a route, so there were extra story scenes for me between the two of them in addition to little glimpses of Charlotte’s route here and there). The overall content of the game doesn’t change super massively, but the final dungeon or two of the game as well as some earlier areas are affected by it, giving a neat incentive to replay the game for those who would be so inclined.

The actual narrative itself is sorta trying to do something interesting, but it ultimately falls a bit short. They’re trying to tell a story about how, at the end of everything, bad and selfish actors will nonetheless try to devour the corpse of the old order to try and come out as kings of a wasteland rather than try and fix things for the better. It’s interesting, especially how, depending on your route, which of these competing enemy factions comes out on top changes. However, the pacing of the story just doesn’t really allow the narrative to do much with this beyond having an interesting premise. While there are certainly attempts for character arcs too, they don’t super tie in with that larger premise very well, and the narrative is casting such a wide net that it struggles to really get very deep into anything. It’s not bad by any means, and it’s got some fun and well done moments for sure (like how much of Duran’s route is just Star Wars XD), but it falls quite short of other late-SFC SquareSoft games in terms of how well its put together.

The reason that it just doesn’t have time to craft much story is no doubt because this cartridge is PACKED with so much game otherwise. With over a dozen major areas and almost twenty dungeons (or like areas) with bosses to match and bunches of enemies too, this game has so much in terms of present graphics and mechanics that it’s no surprise there wasn’t much space to fit more story into things. That gameplay in question is absolute derived from Secret of Mana, and they’ve thankfully taken a lot of big strides forward in making the systems present work a lot better.

You’re still a group of three party members (who slowly accumulate over the first few hours, so if you’re trying to play with a buddy, they’ll be waiting a while for their turn to play still, unfortunately), and being able to choose your group of three at the start gives you a wide degree of choice of what your prospective party will look like. There are certainly good and bad choices to make (foregoing anyone with any kind of meaningful support or casting magic is probably a bad idea, for starters), and I chose my party on a recommendation that it generally made for the easiest of the three playthroughs, but it’s very cool that there are so many options for you to engage with here. They’ve also improved the camera and allied AI significantly. Now that the camera focuses on player 1 all the time and the other two party members don’t need to be on screen, the basic gameplay of things is SO much better that it’s easy to look past the game being bumped from 3 possible human players down to only 2 (though I played it alone, for the record).

Unfortunately, as much as things have been improved significantly, there is a LOT that is still meaningfully flawed, and in many ways I found this game to be meaningfully worse to play than Secret of Mana. For starters, there’s the normal melee combat. They’ve ditched the visual of power bar charging from SoM, but the whole “charged swing” mechanic is still present. You can no longer swing between full charges, but now you know that every swing you’ll do will always be at full power. Those charges also come more quickly, and the combat is a lot faster as a result. There’s even a super meter your normal attacks charge than you can unleash for a stronger tech attack after enough normal bashings. However, I found this to be a very painful double-edged sword.

While combat is faster, yes, it’s also far harder to parse. Your characters are a lot better at attacking what you want them to attack, sure, but this means there’s basically no reason not to mash the normal attack button constantly because you’re going to want to just be smashing stuff as fast as you can. I found combat to be even more boring than in SoM if only because it felt it was even more mindless now. There was no reason at all to think about anything other than just staying near the enemy, mashing the button, and keeping as much attention on your health as possible to heal when needed. You REALLY need to keep tabs on your health as well, as the faster combat and JUST how powerful enemy spells and attacks can be (not to mention how brutal the level curve is, but I’m getting ahead of myself there) make it so you can die VERY fast, and there were a good few game overs I got where I barely had any idea of when our health had even gotten that low.
Additionally, this button mashing combat ends up dismissing a lot of the mid-battle popups almost immediately. While most of these don’t ultimately matter, as it’s not like you can react to incoming enemy attacks anyhow, these popups are actually what determine a lot of the pace of combat given they’re the big limiter on when spells and techs can be used. Unlike Secret of Mana, where spell casting time was effectively non-existent, spells now have casting times of a sort. You’ll need to wait your turn until enemies are done casting their spells, sure, but you’ll also need to wait until the loads of status effect popups from various spells and attacks have gone past as well before you can finally do things. Not only does this make healing mid-fight harder, as you’ll often be ambushed by a much longer wait to your next very needed healing spell than you thought you would, you actually can’t even bring up the item/spell ring menu while one of these popups is on screen. You cannot pause the game in any sort of menu while one of these popups is on screen, in fact, and frantically mashing the X button hoping that you’ll by some miracle be able to heal eventually is a very common part of gameplay, particularly in the back half and when you’re under-leveled.

Being under-leveled is another very common thing in this game, frankly. Your overall character level now dictates your strength far more (for both melee and spells), and with how powerful magic is for your enemies, having the HP to tank their attacks and the physical strength to kill them quick are the main determiners of whether you’ll win or lose any given encounter. While they’ve thankfully gotten rid of the requirement to grind up individual types of magic, the experience curve is so awful that you’ll need to stop what you’re doing and start grinding very frequently once you hit about 25% or so through the game.

I joked at one point during my playthrough that the gameplay loop was roughly 1 to 2 hours of progression followed by 1 to 2 hours of grinding, though I quickly realized that my joke reflected the actual gameplay loop far more than I realized it had. Sure, not needing to grind spells anymore is nice, but this game still has SO much grinding in it that it’s really hard to say the grind as a whole has improved any. I’d reckon at least 10 of my 30-ish hours are grinding, and that number is honestly probably too low. Secret of Mana was at its absolute weakest when it was hard, and this game being by and large much harder is doing nothing to help cover up those weaknesses. The only real solution you have to overcome that is just more hours of grinding. Even then, you’re not getting to the point where you’re making the post-grind fighting more fun, you’re more so just making cumbersome, unsatisfying combat go by quicker and/or be possible to win in the first place.

Ultimately, this game still suffers very badly from the main issues that plagued Secret of Mana so much. We’ve combined a 2D Zelda-style action game with a turn-based RPG, but we’ve kept few of the best parts of either. All of the moving around and swinging your sword in combat feels meaningless after a while because so most attacks (both yours and theirs) just can’t be dodged in the first place. Your positioning on the field of battle is almost entirely performative, so the main gameplay mechanics are just mashing the attack button, casting spells as soon as you can (though this game still suffers from lacking enough MP to get much use out of magic for more than half of the time you even have magic), and keeping as high a tab on your health/status effects as possible so you don’t get insta-mulched. Combat consistently struggles to be fun as a result, and bosses even more so.

Just like back in Secret of Mana, bosses are the worst excesses and features of normal combat’s issues magnified, but now it’s even worse because this game is so much harder. Where SoM’s bosses were either pushovers or arduous slogs (though both were always boring), now we have almost entirely arduous slogs even when they’re not too hard. You’re always on the lookout for a boss or even normal enemy with a move that auto-counters techs or spells leaving you instantly dead after two-chained powerful spells you have no way of surviving or healing between, and that’s an even worse gameplay loop once you factor in the popup problem before AND how bosses often slow down the game so badly that your button input reactions are even less responsive and difficult to access than they already were. Even if the final boss that took me 40 minutes to kill is a big exception, bosses being something I basically never enjoyed and always dreaded reaching was absolutely not an exception. Struggling to find the fun is a very persistent aspect of playing this game, especially when there’s effectively nothing to do but the horrible slog of combat.

While most games (RPGs, adventure games, or otherwise) from this era have very little in the realm of side content, this game genuinely has virtually nothing to do outside of story progression. Even something as simple as chests full of fun or valuable loot, or any loot at all, are something almost totally absent from this game (I counted maybe six total chests or findable items between all towns and dungeons I went through, and they always had normal consumables in them). Sure, it’s great that you can carry WAY more normal consumables now instead of SoM’s limit of 4, and it’s also great that the chests normal enemies drop no longer drop nearly such hilariously lethal traps, but we’re still left with the fact that there’s really never any need to explore in this game beyond just looking for the path forward.

The lack of side content wouldn’t be such a bad thing in a vacuum, but with just how badly combat struggles to be enjoyable paired along with an often not terribly present or engaging story means that combat being effectively the ONLY thing to do makes this game wear out its welcome far sooner than it otherwise might’ve. While the findable (and missable) weapon upgrades in SoM were a badly thought out mechanic, the lack of even anything as simple as that to hunt or explore for does not do this game much of a service. If you don’t love the cruddy, plodding combat, there’s sage little else here worth sticking around for, at least mechanically.

Aesthetically, this game does its SquareSoft lineage proud, at least. Just as you’d expect from a SquareSoft game from ’95, the music is excellent and so are the graphics. This game is made up of an incredible amount of environments and very well animated characters, enemies, and especially bosses (even if they can slow down the game an annoying amount sometimes). While there’s a lot mixed or negative you can say about this game, the graphics and music are absolutely not one of them.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While, on paper, this game may seem like a significant improvement over its predecessor, in practice I found it to be a game I enjoyed just about as much if not even less. If nothing else, this game did a lot to convince me that Secret of Mana’s whole thing of “2D Zelda-type game with turn-based RPG combat mechanics” isn’t simply something SoM gets wrong, and instead it’s just a fairly weak premise for an action-RPG full stop. It’s got a lot of neat ideas and features, and it’s certainly beautiful, but it just doesn’t come together into a fun gameplay experience. If you LOVE Secret of Mana, you might well enjoy this, but if you were skeptical of either game or didn’t SUPER love SoM, this is one to stay far, far away from.

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Ahhh, the famous Seiken Densetsu 3. Calling this game “Secret of Mana 2″ in front of the romhacking “scene” elite will earn you a QUICK correction, let me tell you something. Just think, all the newbies just take it for granted that SD3 is in English. You guys didn't have to endure the sheer pain that came before. The dull, empty VOID. Such is the way of all translations, I suppose.

So yeah, this is Seiken Densetsu 3, which is (still) to date the only game in the series to not make it overseas. (editor's note: not anymore) It's a damned shame too, because this installment is unquestionably the best. Sure, Secret of Mana may give it some competition, but I couldn't stand SoM for some reason. And the less said about Sword of Mana the better.

SD3 uses the old Squaresoft crutch of multiple playable characters within the same timeframe (see: Rudra, RS3). The whole “see the same events from a different perspective” thing works out really well here, it turns out. I seem to say that about every game, though. As far as gameplay, if you've played Secret of Mana you know what to expect. If you've played the others in the series, like Legend of Mana or Final Fantasy Adventure… well, you still know what to expect: run around and hit things with your sword. In realtime. It's like Zelda, Squareified, for a complete lack of a better comparison.

Hiroki Kikuta returns (I think) to compose the music in SD3. The end result is GORGEOUS. The game comes highly recommended, but play the game for its music, if nothing else.

Revisited this classic SNES game again and it is still phenomenal. It's a title that has a lot going for it, impeccable music, 6 playable characters, 3 different storylines, bosses aplenty, a class change system, and stunning late SNES graphics. I have not only emulated this in the past, but I also own this via the Collection of Mana on Switch. There's really not much to say other than every RPG fan worth their salt should give this game a chance. A fantastic and challenging experience that only loses points for the ??? Seed hunting that occurs in the last third of the game.

After wasting time trying to get into the previous Mana titles I jumped unto this and I had a blast. 6 different really cool characters and your protagonists and companion choices influence the story. Each character has a beginner class which they can change into 2 other classes later in the game, twice. The game isn't really an action RPG since the only action element is moving in and out of enemy melee range, spells and special attacks can't be dodged but despite that the game is still immensely enjoyable. The biggest thing if favor of this game is how fast progression is for the genre, you're always moving forward and seeing, doing new things. Needless to say it looks and sounds great. Major criticism is that the story isn't overall that engaging, main party is a highlight for sure and depending on how much you like those characters you might not be bothered by it, still the story has a lot of strength and presence for 2/3 of the game but the last third up to the final section of the game it feels like it's barely there. Minor complaints, spells animations can't be skipped and you'll get tired of seeing them but you sped them up in an emulator and the grind for the 3rd class change is boring but you can also sorta cheat it in a emulator I suppose. Play this game it's awsome

The presentation finally caught up to the gameplay with Seiken Densetsu 3, a more polished affair that reiterates the format with a greater dose of narrative ambition. What propels the story is not the premise or themes but its execution, offering a sort of linear, synchronous version of Romancing SaGa's character routes: Six main scenarios that occasionally weave and interact as they run parallel to each other. Creative story beats and a memorable cast adorn an overlapping structure that encourages many playthroughs under many team comps.

Without SD2's weapon-swapping or hard knockdowns, combat turned to a less mobile variant that favors dogpiling over stun-locking, shifting its center of mass while smoothing out the general pace. A fluid battle system which loses a bit of its luster in cramped spaces or with heavy repetition (i.e. grinding), while mini class paths and the return of stat-allocation provide it with some much-needed RPG depth. Sadly, its second half reveals the same set of problems that burden Secret of Mana: Tedious boss fights, gauntlet-style JRPG padding, unavoidable damage, etc. But this time, its world and dungeons are a step-up.

Having fully shed the Zelda influences of its early years, this release marked the complete maturation of Mana as both a stadium brawler and a charming storyteller.

I've played this game with every character, and I can say that it's one of my favorite RPGs on the SNES. It's a giant step up from Secret of Mana, and still holds up well to this day. The class and combat system is fun, and having a lot of variety is a nice decision. The story isn't something you'd find in other SNES RPGs such as Live-A-Live or FF6, but it's still decent at best. After all, this is a Mana game. The music and sprites are probably the best there is on the system, and man are they beautiful. Unfortunately, the game suffers from some severe balancing issues (looking at you, Hawkeye and Kevin) and combat can get tiring, but it isn't a huge deal. Some people will say that you should play the remake, Tr(w)ials of Mana over this, but you really shouldn't. I'd say that both are worth a playthrough, especially if you played the remake first. Otherwise, SD3 is a must play if you're a fan of SNES RPGs.
tl;dr: game good

I first played this as a teen and was in love. It was a shoo-in for five stars and one of my favorite games I had played at that point of my life.

It still holds up in many ways: it's a damn beautiful game with fantastic spritework and smooth animations, the presentation is unbelievable, the characters have lots of personality and bounce off of each other very well, the class-change system and gradual unlocking of abilities as you meet new spirits gives the player a Pavlovian endorphin rush.

A few things didn't hold up so well. The hit detection isn't great (not as bad as Secret of Mana, but not great) and the game lags occasionally, forcing your character to walk in the same direction - often into enemies - for a couple of seconds after you release the D-pad. Many of the dungeons contain nothing of consequence besides the boss, making the branching paths and mazelike structures seem rather pointless. Then there is the absolutely mystifying decision of most enemies (and pretty much all bosses) auto-hard-countering your level 2/3 special attacks with powerful attacks of their own. The level 2/3 special attacks are part of what makes each class change special and unique, and there doesn't seem to be any reason at all for the game to punish the player for using them!

Is it still worth playing? Several times? Heck yes.

(Played on an emulator with a rewind feature, so I could quickly go back and re-do a battle that I lost. Genuinely don't think I'd enjoy this as much as I did without such a great time-saving feature)

Instantly one of my all-time favourite JRPGs. Absolutely incredible spritework that brings the expressive characters and gorgeous environments to life. The soundtrack is a pandora's box of unforgettable melodies. The combat system evolves as you progress and eventually becomes one of the most captivating styles of combat I've ever seen in a JRPG, with its genius obfuscation of an ATB/stamina system. The story is a goofy hodge-podge of every trope imaginable, but the characters are so fun it all strings together perfectly.