• 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!

Related posts:

1. DS Review – New Super Mario Bros
2. FFX-2 Completed!

I said a few posts ago that there would be reviews of the DS games I’ve played so far. Well, the games are beginning to pile up, and if I don’t review some of them soon, I’m going to forget which ones I’ve played already!

The first one I played was New Super Mario Bros. Weird title, isn’t it? NEW Super Mario Bros. So, if they have a sequel, it would be Newer Super Mario Bros? Anyway, I wanted to test out my DS Lite on a familiar game, so that I could have some form of comparison. My brother used to play Mario Bros when I was a small kid, so I kind of knew what it was all about.

I booted up my DS Lite, and began my adventure. It looked a lot better than what I expected, keep in mind that this was the first game I ever played on a DS. The graphics were pretty cool, for some reason, I always thought that the graphics on a DS weren’t good. Of course, I was comparing it to a PSP! The sound quality was not too bad, full volume is a bit soft, but it was clear.

I think that for all people who used to like any version of Mario, they would love this game. It seems to stick quite closely to the original Mario Bros, with a few variations. It’s a standard platformer, where you need to go through the different worlds to save the Princess. As with all Mario games, you can grow to different sizes, but what’s new is the super-sized version where you can romp through the level for X seconds without getting hurt, as well as a mini-version which allows you to get to all the small areas.

There seems to be room for ’side-quests’, where you collect Star Coins. If you reach a certain number, you can access special areas. Now, I haven’t played it fully, so I don’t know whether these are side-quests, or necessary to complete the main story-line. In my opinion, it should be a sidequest, as it’s not so easy to collect all the Star Coins. Each level has three Star Coins, some are in plain view, and others aren’t so easy to find.

Well, I honestly can’t go on and on about this game, because I’ve not played it for very long! I’m more of an RPG gamer, and this game is so totally not my style. For one thing, I have a problem with timing my jumps, and in this game, you need to jump a LOT. I always seem to end up jumping over enemies, instead of on them. And instead of jumping over fireballs, I jump into them. Hehe, that’s why I’ve rated it only as a 7.5, I’ve minused a few points due to my lack of skill in this game which isn’t how it should be scored, but hey, it’s my rating, I can do what I like! :p Other sites have given it up to 9.5 out of 10! So, if you’re a Mario fan, don’t hesitate anymore, go out and get it!

Related posts:

1. DS Review – Children of Mana
2. Fun games!
3. FFX-2 Completed!