4.5/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Seiken Densetsu 3.

The SNES era is often regarded as the Golden Age of JRPGs and for good reason. If you are at all familiar with the genre, you will now be thinking of two games; one involves a frog cutting a mountain in half while the other features an octopus upstaging an opera. Through well considered game design, challenging narrative and scenarios as memorable as the ones just described, these titles made an indelible mark on gaming history. And I am so damn confident you know what these games are that I’m not even going to name them. Trials of Mana (or Seiken Densetsu 3, to give it its Japanese title), falls mere inches short of those lofty heights, but is still a fantastic game that very much deserves to stand among the greats. Secret of Mana is the entry most often quoted in those “best of all time” lists, but it should be noted that Trials of Mana was very much short-changed due to it never being released in the West. To the ire of fans, the developers blamed this largely on software bugs and costs. Unofficial translations were available online, but it wasn’t until 2019’s Collection of Mana on the Nintendo Switch that players could finally enjoy the title, in English and in its original form. And while Secret of Mana does indeed offer a unique experience in a multiplayer action-based RPG, Trials is that concept pushed to the absolute limit. It offers a layered narrative, genuine replay value and a battle system that almost never stops being fun. The game starts off by asking you to choose your party. Unlike previous entries, you are asked to select your three main characters from a pool of six, each one representative of a certain class. All characters follow a similar narrative trajectory, but their motives and experiences will differ. There are occasional crossover moments with the characters you don’t pick, and these do a good job of hinting at the larger, overall story that is playing out off-camera. Admittedly, the game is at its weakest in the opening hour or two. The plot starts a little formulaic and takes a while to get moving. Similarly, the gameplay really only hits its stride once you have access to all three characters in your party. But when that does happen, it settles into a very comfortable groove of excellent boss battles, choppy action and a breezy narrative that only ever steps in when it needs to. As with Secret, the story skewers towards a younger crowd and is aiming for little more than a simple tale of Good vs. Evil. This is a world in which HP is restored via chocolate and candy after all. We are once again on a quest to save the Mana tree by visiting the eight Mana McGuffin’s and slaying the evil villains. That said, there is considerably more nuance at play here, with characters developed a lot further than “Mute Hero finds Sword.” Angela, for example, flees her home when she discovers that her own mother is planning to sacrifice her in order to save the kingdom from environmental disaster. Kevin, meanwhile, is a Beast prince (essentially a werewolf) who renounces his heritage after being set up to kill his own best friend while in Beast form. It’s impressively meaty for a genre that is often content to deliver the bare minimum in terms of origins. Each hero is armed with a unique backstory that admirably distinguishes them from the rest of the team. The villains too, while largely cut from the same cloth, have subtly different motives for wanting to destroy the world, and it’s interesting to see how their interests will occasionally diverge or overlap. How this usually transpires is in an urge to send our heroes to that great big Game Over screen in the sky. When it comes to combat, Trials of Mana sings. Your primary attack has a very short cool-down, meaning you are never more than a second or two from your next action. As with Secret, you have a special move that you can charge up, but it has been smartly redesigned here for maximum efficiency. Previously, you simply had to hold a button down and wait until your power reached its peak before unleashing your special. In Trials, however, you build up power with each individual blow and, once you have enough, you can then unleash your special with a separate button press, whenever you so choose. The action is a lot more fun and frenetic as a result. Adding even further nuance, your special attacks gain additional levels as you level up, forcing you to choose between unleashing a low-level critical hit, or waiting until you are fully charged to unleash a devastating finisher. These are just your primary actions, as each character also has unique skills such as offensive spells, heals and buffs. The game thankfully freezes when you need to select these skills from your wheel menu, and in the later boss battles, this entire experience can feel breathlessly exhilarating as you line up one command after another in a desperate attempt to stay alive. The bosses seem to only get better as you progress, and are often screen filling behemoths who use the battlefield to their advantage in some way. One early boss is essentially an evil mole who can dig through the sides of the screen, while another late boss takes place high up in the clouds, with your team chasing it on the back of a flying dragon. There are occasional duels with named characters and even these have some surprises up their sleeves, such as mimicry or transformations. One section of the game plays out in a pointedly non-linear manner, allowing you to tackle a series of bosses in whatever order you choose, a refreshing change of pace. There are few, if any, duds in the entire roster and while the challenge ramps up considerably in the late game, it is never insurmountable. It challenges players in the right way, constantly making you feel like you barely survived encounters by the narrowest of margins. Using your elemental abilities becomes crucial to this victory as you draw closer to the game’s conclusion, but there are always alternative strategies that can be used, depending on which characters you selected. I opted for Duran, Angela and Charlotte for my playthrough (a knight, black mage and white mage respectively) and while this might seem a little vanilla, it is the default JRPG build for a reason. It seems entirely possible to soft-lock your progress if you accidentally choose an all-physical or all-magical team, but there are items you can buy that help turn the tide of battle. Similarly, each character has the opportunity to change their class at points throughout the game, softening the blow if you’ve accidentally set yourself up with no healers. It should be noted that how these class changes actually work in the late game are a little opaque. Rare item drops are required to level up into one of two different classes, and the difference between the two isn’t always clear. Use of a guide might be required if you want to avoid irreversible mistakes, but luckily, my progress went relatively smoothly. It’s a somewhat archaic system, but one that still works quite well, and offers lots of opportunities to replay the game and have an entirely different experience. There are a few niggling things that keep this game from being a stone cold classic. Some dungeons are confusingly laid out, and navigation is hindered by constantly respawning enemies. This carries over to exploration in the Overworld in general. When travelling directly from point A to B, it’s not an issue, but as soon as you are asked to revisit a location, it becomes a bit tricky to remember where everything is and how you are supposed to get there. The cannons from Secret make a welcome return (still a hilariously extreme method of fast travel), but they don’t always send you exactly where you want to go. The menu screens are also unnecessarily cluttered, laid out in a 3x3 grid format which takes considerable time to navigate. And it’s especially strange that you have to be directly in control of a character in order to buy or equip their new weapons and armour. It’s one of those things that is almost surely fixed in the 2020 remake, a relic of the SNES era that nonetheless has no reason to exist. All of these quibbles amount to very little in the way of irritation however. It’s most certainly a product of its time, so players who like their games all shiny and modern might have a hard time with it. But for those who are willing to put up with some slightly archaic game design and somewhat naïve storytelling, Trials of Mana is a gem of an experience that will lodge itself in your memory and is absolutely worthy of your time.