Trials of Mana's 2020 Remake Salvages One of My Least Favorite JRPGs (Review)
Trials of Mana is the 2020 remake of the third Mana or Seiken Densetsu game originally released on the Super Famicom. I didn’t enjoy the grindiness and simplicity of the original game. While not entirely removing the original’s faults, the 2020 remake improves upon the framework that would pave the way towards 2024’s Visions of Mana. // Image: Square Enix
Earlier this year, I played and reviewed Collection of Mana. I had always wanted to play through the series, and despite genuinely enjoying the original Seiken Densetsu (localized as Final Fantasy Adventure), I ultimately found the second and third Mana titles to be largely disappointing. Secret of Mana particularly bummed me out. That game is so often thrown around in discussions about great JRPGs during Square’s golden era of the ‘90s and early 2000s. Having played the game for myself, I found the game to be clunky thanks to delayed, unreliable hit detection and glacial pacing thanks to having to level up magic through repeatedly casting spells with long, repetitive animations.
I somehow liked what came after even less. This surprised me, given how well the original Trials of Mana seems to immediately address many of the things I didn’t like about its predecessor. Combat felt more responsive, progression and becoming stronger was more streamlined, and the game starts with a more involved story that gives its multiple playable characters compelling motivations to embark upon an adventure. Unfortunately, the game fumbles its solid first impression by having gameplay that never really evolves. Trials of Mana suffers by being a combat-centric game with a combat system that is remarkably shallow. On top of featuring a slow levelling system and including a class system with an essential third tier that’s never explained to the player, there are a lot of frustrations to be had with Trials of Mana.
And yet, there was enough to like about Trials that made me want to see where the series’ future would go, particularly with its 2020 remake. There was a charming world with interesting concepts and characters, a strong soundtrack with some catchy tunes, and the game’s structure of choosing three characters at the start of the journey and the variety of classes the player could choose means that there’s a lot of different build potential. An optimistic part of me wanted to see if this game that I struggled to finish playing could be salvaged. I wanted to see if there was, in fact, a good game buried underneath the frustration and poor design.
Having gotten to play through the 2020 remake of Trials of Mana, I can happily report that I feel the game works a lot better through taking advantage of its 3D space and being a generally more involved game. The story is more involved. The mechanics are more involved. The boss fights are especially more involved with the implementation of MMO-like warning areas that indicate where an attack will land. This dedication to more involvement helps elevate the overall experience, despite still being a relatively simple, combat-centric experience. While Trials of Mana’s remake does a great job at diversifying its gameplay, I don’t think it goes quite far enough to turn the game into an essential recommendation. Trials of Mana is at its best when it’s trying something new. It’s at its worst when it’s being strictly faithful to the source material. It makes for an interesting conversation that I feel is particularly worth having, considering how close in proximity this release was to Final Fantasy VII Remake, a remake infamous for its willingness to diverge from its ‘90s counterpart.
Consider this as a follow-up to my Collection of Mana review. Let’s see how Trials of Mana improves upon the framework laid down by the original 1995 game. Let’s examine where Trials of Mana succeeds and fails as a remake, how it granted the series an opportunity at a brand-new release, and how it transformed one of my least favorite JRPGs into a modern game that I’m grateful to have played.
Trials of Mana is still a combat-centric action RPG at its core. Most of the game’s runtime sees the player either running through dungeons and fields or fighting the enemies that populate such areas. Combat features more options than the original, but still pales in comparison to other, more complex RPGs that focus on combat. // Image: Square Enix
Let’s talk about simplicity. Every game comes to the table with its own priorities. Every game carries with it a mission to appease a certain crowd and chooses to employ certain mechanics with varying levels of complexity to appeal to that chosen crowd. A game like Final Fantasy VII Remake brings with it a depth to its variety of mechanics, particularly as they relate to combat, in order to appeal to the game’s core market of experienced RPG players. The game primarily puts effort into its combat and storytelling - and therein lies the focus for the game. Indeed, the combat and storytelling are the most fleshed out parts of Final Fantasy VII Remake, while other aspects like side quests and exploration aren’t nearly as fleshed out because, well, they simply aren’t the immediate priority for that game.
Simplicity and complexity are a necessary dichotomy when making any creative work. Some aspects of art need to be emphasized more than others in order to give the creation in question a meaningful direction. What makes the role-playing game such an appealing genre of video games is that they uniquely bring with them the most diversity with regard to potential methods to allocate that blend of simple and complex. Some RPGs make exploration the very heart of the experience, while their primary narrative is comparatively straightforward. Other RPGs put a lot of effort into building characters and developing their abilities while making side activities minimal to the overall experience.
While the series has experimented with different styles and focuses, all games in the Mana series find commonality in the form that they’re typically pitched as beginner-friendly RPGs. In a genre that is perhaps infamous for offering so much depth and complexity that it can be overwhelming to genre or franchise newcomers, I think there’s immense value in designing RPGs that can be easily approached by both younger players and less experienced RPG players looking for a good gateway into the genre.
This is where simplicity is at its best: when it’s used to make seemingly off-putting systems palatable to a focused audience. With that said, I’ve found the Mana series to have a mixed relationship with the simplicity it posits. Seiken Densetsu / Final Fantasy Adventure made for a digestible Action RPG on the Game Boy that mixed standard RPG fare with a Legend of Zelda-esque design philosophy with its dungeons and environments. The game was simple but efficient in making an accessible RPG experience.
As the series moved on to the SNES / Super Famicom, the series tried to simultaneously evolve while remaining simple, and some cracks began to form as a result. The series became decisively more story-focused with more cutscenes and more characters to interact with. The series made combat a far larger part of the overall gameplay loop, and the mechanics for said combat remained simple - and even streamlined from what came before, in some cases. Choosing to retain simple combat in games like Secret of Mana and the original release of Trials of Mana expose the dangers of not knowing how to balance simplicity and complexity. These games’ combat models are simple to a fault. Given that combat now takes up so much of the far-longer runtime, there is more pressure on the combat to become more meaty for players. Whether it’s through more options being given to the player, a diverse array of approaches to combat, or introducing fight-specific mechanics - there are ways to keep combat interesting and meaningfully complex while retaining the overall simplicity that the series is known for.
However, neither Secret of Mana nor Trials of Mana sufficiently navigate this problem. Both games heavily feature combat as the primary thing that the player will be doing. Side quests and exploration are kept to a minimum and the story is still relatively straightforward. Since combat has clearly been decided to be the focus, it' is up to that mechanic to be the most focused and developed part of the experience to uplift the entire game. And that’s something that the original games simply do not do.
Herein lies the biggest task for Trials of Mana’s remake: take this combat-centric game and make its primary focus more evolved, more dynamic, and more interesting to engage with. The quality of this remake largely hinges on how well it finds this balance. While there is certainly a better balance of simplicity and complexity, I don’t think this remake goes all the way towards making exceptional combat that uplifts the entire game to greatness.
Trials of Mana is at its best when it’s carving its own identity rather than just being a remake of a Super Famicom game. The increased focus on storytelling via cutscenes and more interactions between the game’s playable characters does a great job at giving more texture to a story that remains to be straightforward and successful at incentivizing gameplay. The reworked progression system makes building the game’s various playable characters feel more customizable and unique to the player’s preferences for how they want to take on combat. In these ways, Trials of Mana is vastly improved over its 1995 counterpart.
In fact, the biggest improvement to Trials of Mana in this remake is the game’s flow. The Super Famicom game was riddled with a stop-and-go rhythm thanks to spellcasting and Class Strike animations regularly pausing the action to indicate to the player just how hard the characters are performing their special action. A few times, this was a cool visual flair in the original game, but over time, this made for glacial gameplay pacing. Trials of Mana’s remake excellently speeds up animations by only showing Class Strike animations for the character currently being played as, while the two AI-controlled characters still perform their own combat actions in the background. Class Actions performed by companion characters as well as spellcasting animations across the board happen way quicker and lead to combat that feels much smoother and quicker.
The original Trials of Mana was at its best when combat could just be a matter of performing basic attacks on enemies and defeating them efficiently, and that largely remains the case here. Trials of Mana offers six playable characters, all of whom have a story unique to their background as well as a different combat style and weapon of choice. Gameplay-wise, this largely leads to different strengths and weaknesses for certain characters and how viable they are as a spellcaster. Each character has different Class Strikes depending on what Class they’re set as (more on that later), as well as different aesthetic variations on the same basic attack combo.
Trials of Mana’s remake has fairly typical Light Attack combos that have Heavy Attack finishers, with the finisher generally being slower but more powerful depending on how long the preceding Light Attack combo was. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it gets the job done to an extent. Characters can even perform basic air combos as well now, thanks to the remake’s inclusion of a basic jump button. Aerial enemies were a pain to deal with in the original game, so the inclusion of aerial movement and combat options makes a significant difference towards making fighting against every type of enemy more enjoyable.
Combat gradually gets more options tacked onto it as the game progresses thanks to the Class and progression systems. Like with the original game, Trials of Mana’s remake gives every playable character an option to upgrade their Class at a few points in the game, largely based on level and items they acquire later on in the game. Once they meet the requirements, the player can choose what path they want to walk down, with each Class upgrade presenting two paths - a Light route and a Dark route. Duran, for example, starts out as a basic Fighter-style character. Depending on the class route the player goes down, Duran can either gain access to healing options to top off the party’s health or learn abilities to imbue his sword with certain elements to deal magic-based attacks and exploit enemy weaknesses. Both of these options are equally valid, and they have divergencies within them as the player gets access to yet another Class upgrade later on. This inherently injects replay value in the game by way of having completely different gameplay routes that characters can take.
What adds to this is the more in-depth progression system that injects a much-needed level of customization into the experience. The original Trials of Mana offered the player to upgrade one of six attributes upon each Level Up, with skills being learned based on attributes meeting certain thresholds. The remake reinterprets this progression method as the Training system. For every level increase, the player earns Training Points that they can allocate towards the different attributes present in the original - attributes like Strength, Dexterity, and other usual suspects. Within each attribute are thresholds the reveal benefits to allocating enough Training Points into that respective attribute. For example, if the player invests 6 Training Points into Duran’s strength, his Strength stat will increase by five points. Meeting Training Point thresholds can either result in stat buffs, learning new active Moves such as spells to use in combat, or passive Abilities that players can assign to characters.
Abilities inject yet another layer of customization, as they allow characters to have unique passive skills that make way for player expression and creativity. Abilities can provide buffs to the party, debuffs to enemies, reduce MP costs for casting spells, make critical hits more common, heal the party after regular encounters, make the party deal more damage to boss enemies, and so much more. An additional perk of upgrading classes for each character is that they’ll also be able to equip more Abilities. By the end of the game and being at the third tier of Classes (or even fourth tier of Classes in the newly-added postgame), players will be able to assign a wide variety of Abilities to each character and create a satisfyingly customized gameplay experience as a result.
Trials of Mana benefits a lot from the transition from 2D to 3D. Environments are more open and incentivize exploration to find hidden items and collectibles. Bosses are specifically more dynamic, with 3D space offering more ways for bosses to test the player’s navigation and combat know-how. // Image: Square Enix
Another issue with the Super Famicom game that gets resolved in this remake is that of the rate of progression. The original game saw players gather experience points at a rather slow rate, making the process of levelling up feel like an agonizing grind. Trials of Mana’s remake still features an experience gaining rate that I would still define as slow compared to other RPGs, and there’s still certainly a degree of grindiness that’s present here, but the remake offers an effective way of expediting the process of levelling up. Whenever the player defeats an encounter of enemies quickly or without taking damage, they’ll get a multiplier added onto that encounter’s experience. This incentivizes and rewards quick and careful gameplay, as players that navigate combat most effectively get to level up and engage with the satisfying customization system more quickly thanks to getting larger experience gains.
There are two ways to make this process go even faster. Using cookie items can add 10%, 15%, or 20% more experience on top of the other multipliers offered to players. Lastly, the player can get occasional 2x or 3x multipliers to their accrued experience at the end of an encounter as a bonus for collecting Lil Cacti.
The Lil Cactus collectables help solve one of the original Trials of Mana’s biggest problems: the fact that its environments were likewise simple to a fault. Most environments and dungeons in the Super Famicom were linear corridors filled with nothing but combat encounters and the occasional treasure chest and the even rarer navigational challenge. Trials of Mana benefits in many ways from being a 3D remake of an originally 2D game. Environments are more sprawling, towns feel more lived in, and the world at large feels more expansive and immersive. Most crucially, though, they give an opportunity for the game’s many dungeons to feel more involved. Most dungeons now feature additional chests to collect that require the player to take advantage of dungeons’ new degree of verticality. Trials of Mana doesn’t absolutely transform its dungeons as a result, but it certainly makes them more enjoyable to go through.
Because of additional avenues of exploration afforded by the game’s environments being in 3D, there are naturally more opportunities to have players explore secrets. The main new collectable is that of the Lil Cacti - critters found in nearly every town and dungeons. For every fifth Lil Cactus collected, the player will get a new perk, ranging from decreased shop prices, UI elements revealing how many chests are in an area, and occasional experience multipliers.
This is a meaningful addition to the game in that it solves multiple problems present in the original game. With that said, Trials of Mana’s remake isn’t devoid of all issues that plagued the original. The rate of gaining experience, even with taking advantage of experience multipliers, still feels too slow for my liking. More crucially, Trials of Mana’s remake is still, at its core, a very combat-centric game. There’s a tad more to explore within environments, and there’s a bit more narrative content to chew on but combat still absolutely takes up the majority of the game’s runtime.
And thus, the ugly side of simplicity rears its head. Despite the complex progression system offering more gameplay variety and customization, the core combat system in Trials of Mana is a decisively simple one. Unlike the progression system, combat doesn’t evolve through the game to a meaningful degree. This means that a decidedly simple mechanic remains simple throughout the game’s runtime, and that ultimately makes the game’s combat - the most defining and most present mechanic of Trials of Mana - wear out its welcome by the game’s second half.
The potential saving grace here is the game’s strong assortment of boss fights. All encounters now feature MMO-like red zones to indicate danger areas where an enemy is about to attack. This makes standard combat encounters easier to navigate, especially when trying to avoid taking damage during fights to accrue more experience from fights. However, it’s during the game’s boss encounters where this new mechanic shines.
Boss fights in the original Trials of Mana were mostly gauntlets of attacks, Class Strikes, and casting spells until the boss died. With 3D environments and the inclusion of danger areas, boss fights now feel like all-out arenas that test the player’s knowledge of the game’s movement and combat mechanics. Combat never stops feeling simple in Trials of Mana, but boss fights are when the game does its best at tricking the player into feeling like the combat is complex. And this trick is one that often works. Most fights in the game are satisfying, especially when taking danger zones into account to avoid devastating attacks or dealing enough damage to prevent a boss’ chargeable attack.
Trials of Mana offers a decisively more involved narrative than its 1995 source material. The game’s cutscenes definitely represent a smaller budget and production value, but more narrative to chew on does its job. There’s more of a reason to be invested in the game’s characters in this retelling of the game’s story. // Image: Square Enix
As I put write these words and read them on the screen in front of me, I’m realizing how much good I have to say about Trials of Mana’s remake. Thinking about it objectively, there is a lot that this remake does to improve upon the limitations and shortcomings of the original. Does that make Trials of Mana’s 2020 release a strong remake? Absolutely! But does it make for a great RPG that I can recommend to anyone? That’s a harder question to answer.
When I look back on my playthrough of Trials of Mana’s remake, I can’t ignore the fact that I felt like I was going through the motions with the combat in the game’s second half. Structurally, Trials of Mana becomes a more non-linear game in its later half, giving players the freedom to tackle dungeons and bosses in whatever order they want. By this point in the game, the player has access to their final Classes (prior to the postgame’s additional Classes) and most of the player’s basic combat actions have been well known for a while now. Some of the game’s weaker bosses appear during this part of the game, and it doesn’t help that the repetition of the game’s combat really starts to set in at this point.
I kept wanting for there to be a bit more meat to the game’s combat given how much it accounts for the game’s overall runtime. But that additional meat would never come and in its place were the monotonous taste of basic attack strings with the occasional Class Strike or spellcasting as seasoning. After a certain point, it’s easy to go on autopilot with Trials of Mana’s combat because there isn’t too much to think about.
Is this a boon to the game, though? Does it assist with making the game more accessible to genre newcomers? I want to say “yes”, but I think that is also what makes Trials of Mana a good game and not a great game. A good game is able to offer a simple gameplay experience that’s accessible and palatable to newcomers, but a great game is able to go a step farther and offer more depth for players that are looking for something more. There simply isn’t that “something more” with Trials of Mana, and I think that’s ultimately what prevents me from recommending the game for anyone.
With that said, there’s still a lot to like about Trials of Mana. The game’s brilliant presentation is something that I can’t not mention. In fact, the relentlessly vivid, colorful art style here is a big reason why I wanted to get into the Mana series this year. Simplicity is also an applicable term for the game’s art direction, because Trials of Mana doesn’t try to impress with high fidelity assets and models. Instead, the game takes a minimalist approach and presents a very clean, rounded look to the game’s world, and it helps make the game feel like the original game’s 16-bit sprites come to life in the world of polygonal assets. Environments are an ocean of color and character navigate through them with running cycles that animate so fluidly.
Cutscenes are a bit of a sour spot for the game’s presentation. In fact, this is easily where the game feels at its most AA feeling. From stilted animations to static cinematography to sometimes awkward English voice acting, cutscenes often feel like the part of the game where the game’s budget was stretched the least towards. It doesn’t take away much from the game overall, but it does lead to a feeling of cheapness that takes away from the game’s otherwise commendable visual direction. The potential of the art direction here is fantastic, so it’s no wonder that the art style used for this remake would be the blueprint for the next original Mana title, Visions of Mana.
Despite the original Trials of Mana being one of my least favorite JRPGs to play thanks to its grindy nature and simple-to-a-fault gameplay, I couldn’t deny its greatest quality: the soundtrack. Trials of Mana’s remake offers both the original 16-bit soundtrack as well as a newly arranged and orchestrated soundtrack. Many of the new arrangements add additional layers to the soundscape that, like with the fantastic art direction, help breathe new life into the world of Trials of Mana. “Powell”, my favorite song from the soundtrack, gets elevated from its 16-bit arrangement by adding a tropical-sounding instrumentation that combines the guitar, marimba, and a backing strings section. What results is a song that has more texture and adds more depth to the world.
The only drawback to Trials of Mana’s soundtrack is its faithfulness to the original game. Because of the option to switch between the classic and modern soundtrack, that ultimately dooms the remake to include only arrangements of songs from the original game. No original tracks are to be found here, and the arranged tracks don’t deviate too heavily from the style of the original soundtrack. It’s not a massive blow to the experience, but this is one aspect of the remake that I felt could have afforded to go farther away from the direction of the original game.
The original Trials of Mana on Super Famicom annoyed me in ways that very few games do. Being a diehard JRPG fan naturally gives you an extreme level of patience. I welcome games that introduce a need for grinding so long as the process of doing so is consistently fun and engaging. The process of grinding for experience points, levels, and progression can only be an enjoyable one if the game’s mechanics are built in a way to keep the process interesting. In the case of the original Trials of Mana, the game’s core focus of combat and slow means of progression felt at odds with the game’s exceptionally simple combat. The grind was monotonous and unbearable because there was so little meat on the game’s bones.
Trials of Mana’s 2020 remake is a successful remake in my mind because it addresses this core issue with the original game. The remade Action RPG now features more movement and combat options to make the grindy nature of the experience more dynamic and interesting. However, I don’t think it goes far enough to entirely erode the problem, either.
Trials of Mana is doubtlessly a thoughtfully crafted remake that creates a more customizable and dynamic RPG experience. It balances simplicity and complexity in a much greater way than that of the original game. As a result, it makes for a solid candidate for those looking to get started with Action RPGs. However, Trials of Mana’s primary flaw is its limited depth and dedication to simplicity. There’s just too much combat here for the simple combat to lift up the entire experience for the game’s full runtime. To achieve greatness, this remake needed to either further elevate the combat to make it more nuanced to justify combat being the sole focus for the game, or to include new gameplay ideas for the game to focus on so that combat doesn’t become such a large portion of the experience.
Trials of Mana unfortunately does neither of these things. While I do find that responsible for the fact that I have a hard time wholeheartedly recommending the game, I do think that there’s still great value at what Trials of Mana’s remake brings to the table. In spite of its shortcomings, Trials of Mana’s remake is a fantastic transformation of an RPG that I had once considered to be too grindy to be enjoyable. Through smartly injecting a more thoughtful progression system ripe, integrating more ways for players to navigate environments, and crafting fun boss fights that task players with applying their knowledge of simple mechanics, Trials of Mana makes for a solid RPG that still manages to deliver something not quite like other RPGs on the market.
The game is simple - perhaps to its fault just as much as the original game -, but what the game manages to accomplish despite that commitment to simplicity is still admirable. Trials of Mana is a great remake of a bad game. Cracks of the original game’s shortcomings still manage to reveal themselves in this 2020 update, but Trials of Mana’s remake manages to at least surround those cracks with an armor that’s as pretty as it is promising. Trials of Mana is, more than anything, a promise about the potential of simplicity and how much of a place there is for games that meld simplicity and complexity to make for digestible games in an often undigestible genre. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but with further refinement and a true leap forward without looking towards the past, Trials offers great hope for what the Mana series can achieve.
Final Grade: C+
Thank you very much for reading! What are your thoughts on Trials of Mana? Do you think it stands as an ideal remake for a SNES-era JRPG? Or does this remake not do enough to make it a fun modern RPG? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think in the comments or on Bluesky @DerekExMachina.com.
