Review: Heroes of Mana for Nintendo DS - Fun, but flawed.

Heroes of Mana on the Nintendo DS has an involving story and fun gameplay, which is ruined slightly by annoying little niggles.

Heroes of Mana is a real time strategy game, and it’s certainly addictive. The story begins as a group of soldiers from a country named Pedda is sent on a reconnaissance mission to the kingdom of the Beastmen, to disspell rumours that they are preparing for a war. However, when they arrive, they find that the Peddans have in fact declared war on the other countries in the world of Mana, and Roget and crew find themselves stuck between loyalty to their country, and defending the helpless.Roget (at the front of the above picture) is the main character in the game, and if he dies, the mission fails. He’s accompanied by a diverse group of other hero units (about 12 in total) - for instance Yurchael (far right), who can attack from range with his bow, and Gemiere, who attacks with strange daggers on gloves (the picture makes more sense: she’s second from the left.) However, they are more varied than just their appearance - each character has an Aura and a Standby power. Take for instance Loki - he’s a knight in shining armour (literally); and as such, his Aura increases the power of Heavy units around him. Other heroes may have Auras to boost the attacks of other types of units (Gauser increases the power of ground units, for instance). This forces you to adapt your strategy to what you’re provided with - a map where flying units are necessary? Time to choose the Amazon hero, and so on.

 The main element of the gameplay is fairly simple: Build a gatherer base in your ship, train some gatherers, collect some berries and some stone, build bases and train units, then achieve your mission. Some missions don’t give you your ship, but instead give you some troops to begin with, and this provides a nice variety. It’s a very similar system to something like Age of Empires III on the PC - stylus control is very similar to mouse control, and rivals other DS games like ANNO 1701 - you can command all units of one type with just one tap of the stylus, and move them with another, and most of the game is this simple. The military system is far deeper than that in ANNO 1701 - there are 4 main unit types: ground, heavy, air, and missile, and they work in a rock-paper-scissors approach. Ground units do half damage to heavy units, and receive double damage, but they can do double damage to missile units, and only receive half damage from them. It means that strategy is required, although sometimes it’s too easy to just create an army of one type of units and storm the opponent. It isn’t as deep as Age of Empires III’s combat, but it’s pretty good considering the size of the DS cart.

 However, Heroes of Mana isn’t without it’s faults, and they can be fairly big ones at times. The main problem is with unit pathfinding - if a unit can’t get to the square it was ordered to, it may randomly decide to go around the entire map, regardless of whether it’s through the enemy base. When you’ve got a small army moving small distances it’s not too much of a problem, but later in the game large armies moving across giant maps becomes the norm, and it’s almost impossible to monitor everyone. It can be a major annoyance if you let it bother you, but there are ways around it: moving small distances at a time seems to work, but not all the time.

The Mana Spirits are also a bit of a waste. When activated, they boost the attack of the character that uses it by a small amount, and give them a 10% chance of inflicting a status ailment. Sounds good, right? Not really. A character has to be standing still and not fighting to use it, and most enemies will be killed in ten shots anyway, so the status effect is irrelevant. So theyre hard to activate and useless when they do. What’s the point?

The other is in the cutscenes. The game has a lot far too many of them. For some people, like me, who like to get involved in the story, that’s a good thing, but even I found it a bit boring in places. Did we have to go to Wendell to be told in a very long speech that the next Mana Stone is there, or couldn’t we just have gone there straight away to save time? Fortunately, holding B speeds them up by about 100x, so that you completely miss them, but they still get in the way.

To its credit though, Heroes of Mana does the job relatively well. Ignore the spirits and try to get around the pathfinding, and you’ll find a deep and rewarding game. It’s a lot of fun when you get better at it, and there are lots of pluses to it. The art style is fantastic, and every cut scene seems to have a new, very detailed backdrop. The character art is of the same standard, and the FMV cutscene at the beginning is brilliant (shame they don’t have it anywhere else in the game, eh?). There’s also the excellent Bonus Maps feature - every time you complete a mission, that map appears in Bonus Maps mode, where you have to complete a different (or sometimes just harder) objective. Some have you hunting down enemies within a time limit, others have you invading a castle full of enemies - which you had previously defended. It’s like a second single player adventure, without the cutscenes. A big plus.

 Overall, Heroes of Mana a fantastic game. If you can get over the annoyances, you’ll find a deep and rewarding storyline (it’s pretty long, too). It’s not as deep as Age of Empires, but its still worth a purchase, and as far as real time strategy games go on the DS, you could do a whole lot worse. 8.5/10

But why do they all have such stupid names?

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