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PS2 | RPG | Dawn of Mana

Boxart for Dawn of Mana
Dawn of Mana 21 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 4.00
  • SOUND: 4.25
  • CONTROL: 2.75
  • FUN FACTOR 2.75
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.5
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 2.5

Review: Dawn of Mana

Review by T3hPanda | 05/22/2007 | 15:07:17 PM PST

Damn it, Square-Enix, what were you thinking when you designed Dawn of Mana? Yes, you got a lot of things right. The visuals? Awesome. The in-game audio? Spectacular. But then you absolutely blow it with one critical design mistake: you reset all of my stats in between each chapter!

Yes, you heard me. Look, half the fun of any RPG is watching your character(s) level up as the game progresses, but this level-wipe 'feature' basically renders my actions meaningless. What's the point of arduously hacking my way through the levels if all of my efforts are erased at the end of every chapter?

Toss-and-Hack-and-Slash

Dawn of Mana's most prominent feature is its emphasis on interaction with the environment. Like Children of Mana, the gameplay emphasizes aiming your attacks so items or enemies ricochet into other enemies to cause damage. When you successfully hit an enemy with a boulder, plant, other enemy, box, etc., it causes them to panic, keeping them from attacking you and giving you a chance to attack uncontested. More importantly, it's only when an enemy is panicked that they drop attack, HP and MP medals which help your characters level up.

Dawn of Mana tries hard to eliminate the hack-and-slash nature of many action-adventure games. Almost every button on the controller has a different function, from camera manipulation, to targeting, to spell selecting and casting, to employing each of main protagonist Keldy's three weapons (sword, vine whip and slingshot).

Unfortunately, aiming your whip-thrown projectiles can be a crapshoot at best, and a terrible targeting system for the slingshot neutralizes whatever positive promise the detailed battle controls had. Requiring players to panic every enemy ultimately makes the gameplay drag on unnecessarily, and like I said before, what's the point of grinding if you're just going to lose the levels, anyway?

Dawn of Mana's co-op mode is also so shallow that it hardly deserves any mention, but I include this mention because co-op play is such a popular staple of the Mana franchise. The second player can only control secondary character Faye's magic and select the slingshot ammunition, and--well, that's it.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

There were a lot of good premises that went into the game--the beautiful art direction, the intuitive controls, the emphasis on strategically employing environmental features instead of headlong rushes--but the unresponsive whip-aiming, useless targeting systems, nauseating camera, vague objectives, and worst of all, the horrible level wiping all but ruined the experience. Hardcore franchise fans will no doubt want to play it because the storyline does fill in some interesting gaps in the Mana 'verse's history, but this one's a rental at best. Save your money for the upcoming Final Fantasy titles instead.

Pros: The art style is beautiful, and the CG cut scenes are pretty exciting as well.
Cons: Auto-trigger sequences, twitchy camera, and did I mention level resetting?!


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