3 is pretty classic for a number of their best games, but if you're worried about FOMO due to liking more than 3 characters, be careful of Trials since you had to pick 3 of 6 characters for an entire playthrough, haha I would definitely recommend playing other Mana games but I wouldn't necessarily play them all as they do run the gauntlet between great and kind of mid IMO. They all have their fans so it's not like it isn't worth checking out the rest if you're interested, but the ones I would prioritize are Trials of Mana and Legends of Mana. I would also say Secret of Mana but you played that - though it might be worth playing the OG or the version on the Collections of Mana Switch cart which also includes the OG Final Fantasy Adventure which is the first Seiken Densetsu Title and not actually a "Final Fantasy". Since Visions comes out fairly soon, if you want to ramp up on the series in the most efficient way possible, my recommendation would be the 3D Trials of Mana remake, because stylistically there are a lot of similarities between that and Visions. It also includes all of the classic Mana elements in a 3D format, from the spirits, to the creatures, to fairies, the Mana Tree, etc. It might help to make the appearance of a lot of Classic Mana elements feel more homey and familiar when they show up in Visions alongside the new pieces. Trials of Mana is almost a masterclass in how to do a 3D remake of an old JRPG, IMO. There's a lot in the Visions trailer that feels like taking Classic Mana stuff and expanding on it, which I think is a great way to build a franchise, and by that I mean they've always had the elemental/spirits be a part of powering up your characters, but they've dialed that up into some bigger techniques that involve more movement and maybe greater variety. They had class changes in Trials of Mana and now it seems like they've expanded on that idea by injecting the elemental spirits into that as well, so I'll be interested to see where they go with that concept. I would definitely recommend at some point playing both the Trials 3D remake and the 2D original from Collections of Mana, because to me that 2D->3D change for the remake is so interesting and the original is still absolutely phenomenal for the time. If you want to play 1 game before Visions but you still want the sudden 3D feel to be a bigger impact then I would say OG Trials might be your best bet. Even if you've played through Trials, there might (cough spoilers cough cough) be more to learn depending on which protagonist you selected (cough that's the end of spoilers cough). And if you're not looking at Secret or Trials then as mentioned above I would say Legends of Mana is the next best, though definitely others may rate it higher than the other two and for me they're sort of the holy trinity of Mana games. I would say Legends is probably not as necessary to get the feel of the series as a whole because they did do some things very differently in that game, but it's still a really excellent game with a lot of Classic Mana elements to it. I definitely already preordered Visions, which isn't usually something I'd do, but there was no shot I wasn't going to get it on release so I just locked it in, lol A few notes on Classic Mana elements would be for example the 8 elemental spirits are the same throughout the games, although at times there were slightly different names for them. In particular Trials of Mana has a lot of different names because of the long era wherein the only way to play the game in English was using an emulator with a fan translation, and the fan translation could be slightly more lewd in some instances although in others it just had different names for stuff. Some of the different names for things were IMO much cooler, but there you go. Monsters like the mushbooms, porobins, and especially the rabites are all classic and included in every game along with many others. There were also some (which I won't mention specifically) things in the trailer which looked like bosses from previous titles. One thing that I love laughing about is that the Mana series is a world in which every monster appears to have evolved the defense mechanism of being incredibly cute, so you end up leveling up by slashing and stomping on thousands of the cutest little monsters in existence and I imagine that part will never change. The story looks interesting to me and I'll be really interested to see where they go with it given the setup in the trailer sort of priming us to think a certain way about it.
that DOES help! i love it when jrpgs do that & you get to explore all the characters situationally rather than feel trapped w/ the crew you picked originally!
Why didn't I put this together sooner? A girl takes a journey with guards to inevitably die to temporarily keep the world living, a guy named Auron, party of 3, the mage girl is in kinky outfits, the sombre edgy guy uses a katana in default form, Careena sounds like there is a bit of prejudice towards her while she also attacks quick with support abilities like Rikku.
Suggest you play Trials of Mana remake if you want a good idea of what the game will be like. Trials is amazingly fun to play. This one is going for a more serious tone in the story. The setup looks very similar to FFX or Tales Of Symphonia. I’m expecting significant plot twists because (1) that similarity is so apparent, and (2) the Godess of Mana appears in Trials, but in a way that makes me skeptical about the apparent story framing of Visions. Encourage you to try it out and see whether you agree
