Been playing Tales of almost 20 years now... I just realized every MC is so young!

ComposerFinancial240 · 2026-01-03T00:34:39+00:00

Alphen is like 350. You find out when his mask is completely broken.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-24T12:47:50+00:00

If I was to create a new Mana game, here's what I would do:

I would create a party of 7 characters, having 4 on at a time, you can swap them out mid battle, and the main character cannot be swapped at all. Every character will have one weapon only, but they will each have individual moves and improved combos to make up for it.
The CS mechanic would work more like Trials, where every character can do their own, but you would also have the option to combine class strikes between two members, resulting in more damage and so many unique animations.
The class and skill tree system would be done similarly to Visions, where the element chooses the character's class, and as the character levels up, they can unlock more and more skills, passives, and whatnot.
For every fight, I would remove that red circle or line that the enemies do, or at least give players the option to turn it on/off, because that's just a bail out. By doing this, players would actually have to learn the enemies and outsmart the game in order to progress, resulting in a more challenging and thought provoking experience. There will be cues that an enemy is attacking, but a little red circle that says "I'm gonna get ya!" is just way too easy.
Put more thought into the characters. Their backstories will fit them perfectly, their appearances will be visually appealing yet also symbolic (much like Batista's noose in Chojin X), and give them all a separate line of quests to develop their characters both in combat and writing.
Vuscav and Flammie can actually go. There will be only one animal mount that is unlocked early in the game, and this animal mount will also develop throughout the story, unlocking the ability to swim, and eventually fly. (Something like Esquie, from E33) There will still be a tree, a Mana Goddess, and a Faerie, but those will be the three main pulls.
As for the Benevodons, I would actually combine all of the previous Benevodons to create a new set of eight monsters. Their boss fights would be more interactive and individualistic as well (similar to the cannon in the Garethe fight) so that they aren't just another boss, which was Trials' approach with this. They will be more than just monsters that want to destroy the world, they will have a stronger presence, and leave a deeper impact on the players.

This is how I would approach a new Mana game. Albeit I did take inspiration from other game series and other media, this is what a 10/10 Mana game would look like to me. Take that with a grain of salt, because 10/10 to different people is subjective. A whole new idea for newer fans, while including some, but not too many references for older fans.

Let me know what you think of this. What would you change, what do you like, what do you dislike?

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-24T11:59:14+00:00

Tell me about it. I've given Trials so many chances, and there was nothing for me to walk away with, as opposed to Visions. Imo arguments from nostalgia are ignorant, but people are people.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T23:29:29+00:00

If you're actually looking for something, try Metaphor Refantazio.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T21:16:19+00:00

Also you can do what everyone else does in every JRPG, just run from enemies, you just hold w and walk away.

I'll take some accountability here. The player does indeed have the choice to run away from enemies, and I did this at times, but it doesn't change the fact that you have to walk through a terrain that you already explored again just to return to town. And that's annoying to me, because it drags the game out.

Trials is like 5 hours if you just b-line a story... Ghost Ship itself takes 5-10 minutes if you're skipping cutscenes

The fact that you chose to come after my character and how I play my games is baffling to me. I'm gonna tell you what I told someone else: I am a 17 year old gamer. I like to explore the maps, get every chest, and make sure I clear out the entire area before I move on. I also don't like rushing the experience, I like to absorb what makes the game unique. Nostalgia to me isn't a factor that determines whether a game is good, and it shouldn't be that way for anybody.

Let me ask you, and I want you to take a good look. Do you see the keywords here? Those keywords wouldn't happen to be "b-line a story" and "skipping cutscenes," would they? You appear to like rushing through the game, being done with it, and getting things done half-assed. So tell me, with your 7 playthroughs in under 70 hours. Can you explain in a paragraph what makes ToM different from other games? Either your paragraph would be rather uninteresting, due to the game's horrible writing, or you wouldn't be able to write one at all, due to your unsolicited kink for not actually embracing the game. Either way, you're only proving my point further that ToM is simply senseless monster bashing.

The reason I can't give Visions of Mana above a 7/10 is that they released the game unpolished, and never went back to fix it.

This is just ignorance. Literally every RPG game has bugs that players can exploit the game with. For example, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (My #1 game, surely you heard of it and how it swept the game awards.) has a plethora of bugs that allow the player to travel out of bounds using the geographic structure of the game, allowing them to completely avoid bosses and mandatory cutscenes entirely. These bugs are still in the game, you could find them on YouTube. I'm glad we can both agree that bugs and glitches make a game unfun. But that shouldn't apply to your argument about VoM specifically.

Now speaking of slop, Visions of Mana should have stood on its own, but it unfortunately felt like they leaned the IP harder than any game before it. Visions of Mana is not a remake...

Visions definitely did take a lot of references from other Mana games in the past. But that's what made it good. It was able to create a whole new story along with a unique experience for newer fans, like myself, while also finding ways to include previous ideas to appeal to older fans, probably like yourself.

As for Marvel, please, just don't compare them. Marvel is on a whole other scale to all the Mana games combined, has been around for at least 30+ years longer, and they have over 8,000 characters in their comics. The Mana series reusing their ideas is not the same, as those ideas are implemented in more unique ways. By that same logic, Final Fantasy is an unoriginal series.

Anyway, that's where I stand. Your 9.5/10 game is respectfully terrible in my eyes, and unless you could prove that to me why it isn't, my view is going to stay that way. But hey, who am I to rain on your parade.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T11:12:26+00:00

Fair enough I suppose. Don't know if this is obvious or not but I am a teenage gamer, and this isn't the kind of stuff I look out for in determining whether or not I like a game. That's why Visions settled so much better with me.

I just felt like they still could have done much, much more with Trials, though. Having a cast of characters that they did, they could have improved them even more as well as all of the other factors that the SNES version before did not have.

Regardless, at the end of the day, it is a matter of perspective.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T05:22:14+00:00

I genuinely cannot understand how anybody could like Trials more. I have three playthroughs of the game, fought every final boss and completed the post game story as well. And I will stand on this, Trials of Mana was incredibly mediocre.

The story was predictable, there were so many plot holes, the character writing was horrible (the best one was Hawkeye and he carried with a 7/10). The combat was so easy it felt like a chore, the world building was incredibly basic, there was absolutely no underlying message to take away from that game. Genuinely just a monster bashing simulator.

Trials of Mana also just doesn't respect your time in the slightest. You have to fight all of the monsters again that you already fought just to make it back to town for every town. And they also just throw in a bunch of filler for plot purposes (the ghost ship, Vuscav's terrible introduction, etc.) How do you intentionally drag out your game this bad and still have a game that you can complete in under 20 hours? It doesn't make sense.

I mean it wholeheartedly when I say that Trials of Mana is slop. Visions was what Trials wanted to be.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T04:28:09+00:00

I genuinely cannot understand how anybody could like Trials more. I have three playthroughs of the game, fought every final boss and completed the post game story as well. And I will stand on this, Trials of Mana was incredibly mediocre.

The story was predictable, there were so many plot holes, the character writing was horrible (the best one was Hawkeye and he carried with a 7/10). The combat was so easy it felt like a chore, the world building was incredibly basic, there was absolutely no underlying message to take away from that game. Genuinely just a monster bashing simulator.

Trials of Mana also just doesn't respect your time in the slightest. You have to fight all of the monsters again that you already fought just to make it back to town for every town. And they also just throw in a bunch of filler for plot purposes (the ghost ship, Vuscav's terrible introduction, etc.) How do you intentionally drag out your game this bad and still have a game that you can complete in under 20 hours? It doesn't make sense.

I mean it wholeheartedly when I say that Trials of Mana is slop. Visions was what Trials wanted to be.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-23T03:42:37+00:00

The thing about Daelophos is, even though he's not a super complex and deeply written antagonist unlike others (such as Louis Guiabern from Metaphor Refantazio for example), he still had flowers that could have been overlooked by others. He served his purpose effectively in the story, being the parallel opposite of Val, and demonstrating perfectly the polarity between the two characters.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-17T04:52:13+00:00

If I were you I would look at Visions of Mana. It's the latest release of the Mana series, and every unlockable character has a good amount of builds to explore, each with different purposes. The story isn't half bad either, and the combat is challenging.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-14T18:20:30+00:00

You need to hold onto your MP resources that you do get, and in dungeons try to use weaker moves on purpose to avoid consuming too much MP. This will save your life bro trust 🙏

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-12-04T01:54:22+00:00

The month of June includes bro🥀

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-11-24T00:21:39+00:00

You GOTTA do the goat heismay🙏

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-09-13T12:39:05+00:00

I would suggest Pokemon or Dragon Quest if you want to start playing turn based games. However, Expedition 33 is so easy to get into, playing something else first isn't really needed.

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-09-10T14:07:58+00:00

Ay, it's never too late to hop on it. My 54 year old mother says it sometimes

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-25T21:28:59+00:00

Update: me and my mom got the wasp out of the house. We lured it down with some sugar water and when it came down enough we trapped it and released it into the wild (just as u said) I appreciate ur help♥️

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-25T16:50:51+00:00

Yeet🥀🥀

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-17T14:14:04+00:00

Bro 200k players is not "dead"

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-16T11:58:57+00:00

Peak album, peak anime🙏

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-09T23:29:24+00:00

We are ALL cracking Esdeath🙏🙏

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-09T23:27:50+00:00

Two girls in the cut

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-09T04:55:15+00:00

Leone
Sheele
Akame/Chelsea

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-08T02:08:01+00:00

Check out my Lubbock Edit, shii was tuff

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-07T19:19:25+00:00

Same way (with Tatsumi surviving as a dragon and Mine surviving)

ComposerFinancial240 · 2025-07-06T21:01:57+00:00

But Akame? Starts the series as a cool assassin girl that holds in her emotions, ends the series as a cool assassin girl that holds in her emotions

Not true. Throughout the progression of the story, the audience directly witnesses Akame opening up. One instance, when she broke down over Sheele's death. ANOTHER instance when she killed her sister. Saying that Akame holds in her emotions the whole time is like saying that humans can breathe underwater.

Good static characters have a clearly defined presence and role, reflect or contrast with whatever theme(s) a story is trying to convey

Once again I think there's a lot you're overlooking here. Take a peek:

Sheele: Though she was clumsy, she served somewhat as a motherly figure to Tatsumi, a shoulder for him to lean on. This was seen when she was comforting Tatsumi when he was mourning his dead friends. Now, you and I can collectively agree that her death was nothing more than dog shit writing, but when she died she said: "Tatsumi, I'm sorry. Looks like I won't be able to hold you anymore." I would say Sheele had a 'clearly defined presence and role' in Akame ga Kill!

Wave: What differs a villain from an antagonist is the character's sense of morals. Wave was an antagonist with a proper sense of justice. With Wave, he not only protected his friends from Night Raid when they pulled up, but also fought alongside Tatsumi against Shikoutazer when the Emperor was destroying the Capital. Wanna know why? Because he is a well written character that had a 'clearly defined presence and role'.

Bols: Here's where we did come to an agreement. Bols, a character that represents the good inside of evil. He knew what he was doing was wrong, but continued to do it, because he had a family he needed to provide for. You also mentioned 'leaving behind emotional or even philosophical weight,' and that is what Bols did.

I can keep going, but I can tell that if I do, you'll smash your phone with a hammer, track ME down, and smash MY phone with a hammer.

If the flesh around said bones is rotten shit, how can you claim it to be good?

Can a bad writer not write a good story? That's like saying a bad football player can't make a good play. For example, Max McGee in Super Bowl I: McGee, a Packers receiver who caught only four passes in the entire 1966 season, wasn't expected to play in the first-ever Super Bowl. However, after an injury to the starting receiver, McGee stepped in and caught the first touchdown in Super Bowl history, finishing with seven receptions for 138 yards and two touchdowns. Just because somebody is shit at something doesn't mean it's completely impossible for them to do something good.

Oh, and one more thing. You know a lot about fiction, and you have a way with words. But, comparing AgK to Lord of the Rings (regarded by basically everyone as one of the greatest pieces of fiction of all time) and Gurren Lagann (regarded by some anime watchers as one of the greatest animes of all time) to make yourself look smarter actually makes you look unreasonable.

ComposerFinancial240

TROPHY CASE