I know I said that I’d review the games I’ve played, but haven’t done so recently. The stack of game titles that I’ve played has been growing, I’ll have to start a list in case I forget which ones I’ve played already. Let’s see, these are what I’ve played over the past few weeks:

• Bomberman Land Touch 1 & 2
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker
• Tetris DS
• X-Men
• CSI
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
• Trauma Center: Under The Knife (currently playing this)

Don’t worry, you won’t be getting long long reviews for each game, in fact, some barely even warrant one paragraph! Anyway, today’s post is about Children of Mana. The reason I chose this game was because I played a Mana game on my PS last time, I think it was called Tree of Mana, and I really enjoyed it. This one? Well, read on for my review.

Children of Mana
Genre: RPG
My rating: 4.5/10

When you start, you can choose between a few different characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I never enjoy defending or casting magic spells, so I always choose the characters with a strong attack power. Of course, as in the case with most RPGs, there’s evil around, you need to defeat it, blah blah blah..

The game consists mainly of several dungeons. In each dungeon, there are a certain number of levels that you need to complete before you face the boss of the dungeon. In order to complete a level, you need to find a gleamdrop (which functions as a key), and a gleamwell (which functions like a teleporter). There are a few ways to do so, it will be displayed on the screen. You either have to defeat a certain enemy, defeat all enemies, or it could be hidden by pots / bushes, etc. During the dungeon crawling, if you are defeating in the middle, you will be teleported back to your village, and you will have to start all over again, which can be a major pain if you’re up to Level 11 out of 19!

Really, that’s the only main thing to do in this game. You can take up sidequests like searching for an item, or clearing areas of enemies, but to do that, you will need to go through the same dungeons all over again. There is a side area, where you can collect these crystals to enhance your stats / give you special abilities. How do you get these crystals? Well, you can either buy them, or get them as rewards from your sidequests, again…dungeon crawling!

One thing I found really annoying was a part of the battle system. You have several weapons you can use, swords, bows, whips, and a hammer. I like using whips, because they can hit many enemies at one go. Anyway, when you fight, you can knock back your enemies a few steps. If they are near the wall, they will ricochet off the wall, and whack into you. If you so happen to be standing near thorns, or areas that can hurt you, well, you will end up getting hurt!

It was quite enjoyable for the first few hours, after awhile it got really monotonous. Of course, me being me, I had to finish up the game. I generally will finish a game unless it’s so bad that I really can’t stand it. I suppose you could call it perseverance!

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