Because of this chanel I've played games I never thought of like every mega man, tales of arise armoured core and more. Great chanel son keep up the good work.
I had always seen Ys 8 Lacrimosa of Dana on the PSN Store and was always curious about it as I never heard of the Ys series at the time. It was THIS channel that I saw my first review of Ys 8 and Trials of Mana Remake that completely sold me on the games. I absolutely love his positive energy, enthusiasm and passion for gaming. So wonderful he has a Wife into gaming as well, I know personally because my Wife is very much a gamer. I trust all of his reviews and recommendations, especially when it comes to jrpgs 😎
@GeorgeZimmermen Tales of Arise was nothing like it's predecessors thanks to what was a better budget. That said, Armored Core and games of its ilk remajn somewhat unknown to many gamers, even outside of Call of duty and other multi player games. I have been gaming since the late 80s and have never played or even heard much of the series. I have played tons of Rpg's over the years but Tales of Arise was my first dive into the series and it was brilliant. The others are fine.
@brianl6151 I agree and I enjoyed Tales of Arise very much, still need to finish up Beyond the Dawn expansion. Tales of Berseria was nice, but the prior to Berseria, the others just are a bit "dated" for my personal taste. Arise just felt so polished well paced that it was hard to put down Lol. Hope Bandai Namco builds on that for future entries into the series.
I think part of the "clunkiness" you mentioned about running around the world is how the jump feels, It feels like it doesn't carry your running momentum and almost like you hit the brakes whenever you jump
@@johnlawful2272 I like how in Trails of Mana if you choose 2 characters that share a storyline they interact more in dialog, like Kevin+charlotte being numbskulls with each other more.
Day One for me. Secret of Mana was first-ever SNES games in my childhood, but I didn't play it directly. I saw my bro and my Dad playing it, while I doodled the characters on a scrapbook with pencils. We both had fun in our own ways. Time moving forward, they stopped playing games, but I continue playing games with those cherished memories about Mana series.
When my brother and I played Secret of Mana back in the day, we joked about how the mode 7 map reminded us of the Doppler radar on the news, lol. What a classic.
The best thing about Secret of Mana IMO was the co-op mode. My brother and I must have played through it ten or more times. When we learned how to emulate we got the English patched Seiken Densetsu 3 when it became available and played it together on the same keyboard by mapping player 1 controls to some of the left side keys and player 2 to some of the right side keys. Good times.
@@acidwizard6528 Those games are just so memorable because they’re so accessible. It’s funny to hear people talk about the new game feeling clunky, because it’s like…yep, that sounds about par for the course! Classic series.
Thanks Johnny for talking about so many games and sharing your passion for them! I have discovered Ys because of you, and can safely say that Lacrimosa of Dana is now one of my favorite games of all time. Everyone should give it a try that has any interest in action games or rpgs. It's charming, the music is amazing and the combat is excellent! I'm finishing up Monstrum Nox just in time for the Western release of Ys: Nordics in a couple of months.
The demo didn't blow me away like other JRPG's normally do. The traversal is just soooo clunky and you don't really magnetize toward aerial enemies so you're striking the air pointless. After beating the demo, I got used to it and found the fun in playing. I'm gonna wait till it's $30 since it's not worth the full price they're asking for
Pre ordered my physical copy at my local game store the other day. Can’t wait for this game to come out. I had so much fun with Trails of Mana that I had to get this as well when I found out about it
They REALLY need to cut back on the flashing lights and other effects when you are attacking, it doesn't improve gameplay that much when they do it for every single attack and it also pollutes the screen.
The advertisement for VoM got me into playing the other Mana games. I finished playing the Collection of Mana and Children. I am currently working my way through Legend of Mana.
@Mkj119 It's so different from the previous titles I've played, but I love that I can bring my capture creature with me throughout the world. So far, I'm enjoying it.
Rpg's and jrpg's also have Irish accents, Kings English, Scottish, Japanese so on and so forth. Fantasy is IMAGINARY and can take on many forms. That's what makes it great. There shouldn't be any language or dialect that's excluded. How else are we supposed to understand it? Besides a entirely made up dialect with subtitles. Which is alot of work. People get caught up on minute details because it takes them out of their comfort Zone. Edit: not a shot at you Johnny. Your channel is one of my favorite gamming channels. Keep being awesome 👊🏻
Well in a time, often the dialects are meant to communicate something about the character. For instance an Osaka accent is often used to communicate that the character “isn’t from around here”. And that’s vent often gets translated to be a southern accent in English media.
In my opinion it makes it sound so cringey. I never think of a American southern accent when I'm playing a jrgp and definitely makes the voice acting seem even worse then other generic jrpgs. This is gunna be a hard pass for me.
The character with the Southern accent probably has a Kansai accent in Japanese--it's usually localized as a southern American accent in English. I get that we don't usually hear it in fantasy, but it really doesn't make any less sense than any of the other accents in the game, and it makes sense that a fantasy world would have different accents based on where people come from, and at that point you might as well use accents that already exist rather than trying to invent new ones
Good idea. I might try out the demo later. About the soutern accent; In anime the unique Osaka dialect, Osaka-ben, is often localized as a southern accent as to maintain some of a characters unique speech patterns. So even if you play japanese Careena will have a very distinct Osaka accent.
Hey Johnny, I want to thank you for being such a positive person and for sharing your genuine enthusiasm with all of us. Your videos mean a lot to me ❤🙏🏼
Mana Series Music veteran and character designer Horoki Kikuta actually made an entire OST for a mana sequel long time ago, but since it took them so long to make one, he opened it up for public. The album is called Alphabet Planet, and it's available on his youtube page. That might explain why the ost feels out of place, he scrapped his old one and made a brand new one.
Yes can’t wait for this game . Ive preordered the collector’s edition. The music is made by Hiroki Kikuta same composer for Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 . For Visions of Mana i wasn’t impressed much with the music, hoping that changes with the full game .
I've been a subscriber for a while, and unfortunately your videos started to hang back in my list, but lately they've been starting to show back up, and that's most likely because you have been covering trending stuff, and that I have watched more of your content, and I've got to say, since I haven't commented on any of your videos before; I love your energy! I see that people say this all the time, but you deserve to hear it from all sources. Thanks for sharing your new Mana-experience - can't wait to follow you further on your journey. We seem to be in for a great ride these coming months (I'm looking at you Metaphor: ReFantazio). Cheers from Norway!
I got to play for a few hours last night....i immediately fell in love with the art style due to it evoking fond memories of playing Secret of Mana. Its kind of an odd juxtaposition of childish, innocent imagery versus some very dark themes. I actually love that aspect as it shows that it is deceptively complex and rich in story and features. Great review.
You can't go wrong with HappyConsoleGamer and a cuppa, i want to play the demo for Visions of Mana but i'm too busy playing Star Ocean the Second Story, i just got physical copies of Star Ocean for Switch and PS5 after loving the game on PC
12:44 I don't know why, but hearing Johnny say, "Thank you for having me," in response to a demo saying, "Thank you for playing," made me laugh. Being overly polite to a video game seems hilarious to me, in a good way. 😆
The southern accent character speaks in a clear Kansai (Osaka, Hyogo, Nara,) dialect in the JP voice, with the other characters so far have no noticeable dialect just standard Japanese. Will definitely get but probably used a few months later as i know i will get it quite a bit cheaper especially here in Japan where there are so many used game stores.
I immediately pre-ordered the digital deluxe edition as soon as I finished the demo and I'm thinking of replaying Sword of Mana/Final Fantasy Adventure :P
Been casually playing through Adventures of Mana, Secret of Mana, and Legend of Mana on my Vita in anticipation for Visions. Looking forward to the release!
So, just to give a brief explanation on the clumkiness and stuttering of this game on pc: it is using UE5 with realtime shaders compilation, and thats what makes the stuttering/lagging sometimes all over the place, either battling or exploring. Actually thats the reason, in modern games, whenever you first start them you see that "shaders compilation" so this kind of things can be avoided, since shader compilation is more heavy work on your CPU than GPU. Moreover, most people nowadays cheap out on the CPU to focus on a GPU, hence you will feel much more in this game. TBH, I highly doubt this will ever be fixed by SE, in addition to the fact this game doesnt have any support for frame generation or DLSS, makes matter even worse.
Even with a complete shader cache, towns in the game still draw massively from the CPU instead of offloading to the GPU. No idea why the game is designed this way but I am reminded this game was outsourced to NetEase for development.
About the Southern Accent, it may be that the girl has an Osaka dialect in the original Japanese. It’s a bit of a standing translation trope that a dialect gets translated as a southern accent when translating to English.
Personally what made the game feel great was I never felt like they changed the Mana formula for a newer audience. This is a Mana game through and through and sure they may have added some more modern features to the game, it doesn't take away from the Mana experience. I'll be picking it up day one.
There are so many games to get through that I haven't been able to bring myself to click that preorder button, but it's been tempting me. One of my most expected games of the year since I saw the reveal.
I definitely enjoyed the demo and have been looking forward to this because I am also a long time fan of the series,so definitely can't wait for the full game
What I love about out this series and this demo in particular is they really nail the whimsical fantasy theme. It is so light-hearted and cozy. I’ll buy it on launch for sure.
When the female character said “Hibernation” in a Southern accent, it reminded me of Sandy the Squirrel saying the same word in SpongeBob. Maybe that word in the script made the voice casting director think of Sandy the Squirrel and request a Southern accent.
Oh man the first time I heard Careena’s voice I did a double take. Love it! Great voice actress. I am wondering if in Japanese if she has an Osakan accent and they did a southern English accent to match.
First Mana game to ever come to the XB!!! I preordered a phtsical copy as soon as I could. Having this series and more like it on my XB is awesome! I have basically bought every single japanese style RPG and action rpg i can find on the XB just to promote more coming. We need games like this everywhere.
Never played one of these games, had a lot of fun with the demo. It is a little clunky in some aspects but overall, I think I’ll enjoy it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to afford it when it comes out.
How much you wanna bet the Japanese voice for that one chick uses Kansai Dialect. In other words from Osaka. (Japan’s equivalent to our southerners.) Lol
I haven’t played the demo yet cause too engrossed in la mulana 2, ha. I did however preorder the collectors edition and will play it for sure. I’m very excited for this one and hope it performs well so we can get more mana loving. Especially with how much we were spoiled with the remakes recently and mana collections.
I enjoyed the demo and it took me 2 and half hours to finish everything, however the ps4 version was very laggy and had multiple camera issues. I hope they acknowledge the problems!
My honest opinions on Visions, plus discourse and others thoughts. 1. I find combat to be pretty seemless, I’ve played Tales of arise right before the demo and the combat as said by some does feel similar. One thing I can say is that I didn’t like the combat when I first sat down and ran through the demo, I went through only fighting a handful of mobs and some slight exploring but not much before the boss, immediately switching to Morily bcs he felt really fast and had some nice strings. However, bcs I really wanted to give it a chance I went back and played the demo entirely, exploring to get every chest, fighting the two Nemeses, the one time trail, and the boss and I can say that it was definitely more enjoyable actually experimenting with everything. I ended up going through every character and each of their classes and I can definitely say that I love the lance class a lot, has the weighty feel that others mention, especially with saber magic, it feels like I’m doing combos, and can chain together moves, etc. 2. The content in the demo actually felt pretty hard, I found myself getting pretty close to dying or having my party members do the same, and the AI actually was very responsive so it definitely felt challenging when facing some of the more difficult mobs. I know, or at least think, this game will have a hard mode like Trials, but even the current standard felt challenging. The time trial I faced had these knight enemies that were soaking up hits and knocking me back to the point I almost didn’t complete it, there were also other knight enemies in some runes that were only purple enemies, not even nemeses but they were able to knock me or my party members out bcs a lot of their attacks have super armor. Even the Nemeses had very tough mechanics such as how fast they move around or the Queen bee that was able to transform me and my party into weird little drakes that couldn’t really do much. I do hope for the boss’s difficulty to be turned up tho, after I used fire saber, bcs the boss was weak to fire, I was doing a lot of damage and the boss was only able to sometimes knock me away, even some scripted moments didn’t really push me back and the bubble attack that it uses to try and knock you away has a decent blind spot only slightly off to the side where you can still attack the bosses weak points. 3. I hope there is better exploration, I don’t mind the bubbles that show you where smt could be since Trials had a similar thing, just with you getting the lil cactuses as sorta a reward for exploration. The game still offers other reasons to explore anyway like with the lil cactuses, grizzly honey, and other locations being timegated on how far you are into the story with collecting elementals. Overall, I would like their to be better jumping bcs on the Picuol you face the same problem as standard running and jump, however standard running and jumping can be remedied by just preforming mid air dashes that allow you to still carry momentum unlike the mount. 3. Story and voice acting, I don’t see many peoples issues with these. I typically hate people saying anything bad abt this as you can typically just change it to another language if you really dislike it, even tho that typically also doesn’t change the actual voice acting for natives of said language, since what I’ve heard is that their is still dialect that corresponds to what is in English any way, like the southern girl using Kansai dialect which is basically southern Japanese I believe. Story is pretty standard and I doubt the wheel will be reinvented every time a game releases so I’m pretty moot on it, HOWEVER, I find the connotations of the story to be pretty interesting that not many people are pointing out. Specifically, presumably, every character aside from Val is actually just a sacrifice to be made to the mana tree to keep the existence of mana going. It honestly sounds pretty dark for how the demo sorta puts us into this sorta adventurous journey sorta vibe Edit: I would like to say tho that quite a few people think that this stuff couldn’t change bcs it’s a few weeks from release, however this demo is probably one of the oldest demo’s that they’ve released, possibly from last year, as IGN and a few other people like Bio-Roxas have shown gameplay from an earlier section that looks way smoother, being from before the actual demo, that is the actual track up the snow covered mountain we start off in. The section appeared more linear than what we were given, but I think that’s bcs they wanted to actually showcase the world rather than such a small portion of the game. On top of that, it probably goes to show that we are a good ways into the actual game, probably 3-5 hours in, which is a good and a bad thing depending on how you take it. A sorta nother point to add on to the credit of the demo being early is that, unlike with the builds I mentioned before, we don’t have the fire elemental which we should get since Hinna is literally the alm of fire, plus that unlike the other two who get their stagger and charge attacks from their own elementals, Val doesn’t have either, which is however shown in another build of this same demo as well as the other build I mentioned before. This is all to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of complaints that people have in terms of gameplay are very likely to be corrected, but I’ll respect anyone who still feels put off by the gameplay or story as I know that, while in recent times these elements aren’t the most popular, it’s one of the very few modern ones that has ever been given the time of day. Thank you if you’ve read this far, have a great day ✌️
My experience is much like Johnny's. Played both the OG Mana on the Gameboy (Final Fantasy Adventure in North America) and the SNES Secret of Mana in 93. Liked the Gameboy game and absolutely loved Secret of Mana. The best thing about Secret of Mana IMO was the co-op mode where you and your buddies could play together 3 player with a multitap or 2 player with a second controller. My brother and I must have played through SoM ten or more times back in the 90s. Anyway I'll skip the rest and say I've been very excited for Visions as it looks like Square Enix learned from the success of the 3D Trials remake and is giving longtime series fans what they want instead of the experimental games from Legend onwards. I won't be buying day 1 as the last game I bought day 1 was Final Fantasy IX some 25 years ago. My backlog is large enough that I can wait a couple months and buy it half off during a Steam sale. I hope it ends up being great and that you all enjoy it!
I remember getting Secret of Mana for my birthday one year with a secondhand SNES and a fair amount of games. Loved that game, had no concept of level grinding though so I got stuck at the Fire Palace till I bought the official guide(which was black and white and through MAIL ORDER) for my birthday.
Day one for me baby! Secret of mana is my favourite game of all time, let’s hope they do the series justice and bring mana back to its roots. I didn’t see the ring menu in the gameplay, they better have it!
I couldnt agree more with this review. Looking forward to it, But I hope there is some more Mana-like music in the game. Noticed you had Trials of Mana music in the background. I really hope they stick to the Mana music!
The special attack is now only limited to one bar for one character. Which kinda step down from the previous mana remake. Each character SP attack now is AOE range. Class change limits to one element for each character. No new moves set combo added after class change. Overall gameplay and new system is kinda interesting. Already pre order hope the story doesn't fail us.
Thanks for reviewing this. One of the titles I was looking forward to. I'll play it and hopefully the clunkiness doesn't ruin it overall for me. It's a gorgeous game. Your channel was also the reason I got into Trials of Mana as well.
It really feels like a new era of fhe Mana series but still faithfull to the original ones. Much love for Secret of Mana & Sword of Mana. Can't wait to play Visions 🤍
I loooovvvveeeeeee the Mana games! The remakes have been such a god send to the SNES classics. Even tho Secret of Mana was lacking in character model detail.. but Trials of Mana was excellent and Visions looks like another step up from that!
I played the classic 16 bit ones and the Trials of Mana remake and I love the demo to this one. I'll wait for a sale though, because 70.00€ is too expensive, but I will totally get this game later.
