Children of Mana

The Good
Let me start by saying that I have not played any of the other games in the Secret of Mana series. All I knew about Children of Mana before I bought it was that I would be getting a dungeon crawl, more of an action/adventure game than an RPG.

The first thing I noticed was the game's art. The backgrounds are beautiful and the characters look really nice too. You can notice the people doing the graphics put some care into it. After a couple of hours playing the game plot will have advanced noticeably, you will have fought through a couple of dungeons and used four kinds of weapons.

The Bad
After those first few hours, you will see that there is not much more to the game. You have already used all the different kinds of weapons and the maps just a few per "region" that are randomly chosen, so you will be playing the same maps over and over again. All this makes the game more tedious than fun.

The way the world is explored is also a big disappointment. There is one village in the center of the world which is the hub to all the dungeons. So the world exploration is as follows: 1) Talk to the characters in the village, 2) Choose a dungeon 3) Fight through dungeon an return to step 1. That is it. There is only one village in the whole game and you do not get to explore the world and fight your way to each dungeon. There is only a map with a dot for each dungeon and you are flown directly to it once it is chosen. It would have probably helped if the dungeons were randomly generated or at least had a puzzle or two thrown in.

The story does not help move things along either. What you have been told after the first couple of dungeons is all there is to it. The rest of the conversations just rehash the same. Most of the side-quests are pointless and make you go through the same few maps of a region (most of which you have probably played more than once already) once again.

The Bottom Line
The game is pretty to look at and fun for a while. But that while is not long enough to make you want to go through the rest. I must say I finished the game through sheer inertia.

I must say I did not check out the multiplayer part of the game.