Preview

Platform: Nintendo DS
Developer: Brownie Brown
Publisher: Square-Enix USA
Previewed by Justin Fassino on 2007-07-13

Let's get real for a second: the Mana series has been in a funk since the SNES days. Legend was a big departure from the series' conventions. Children was fun, but lacked both depth and an interesting story or group of characters. And Dawn...well, let's not speak of that one. Can Heroes be the jump start that will rekindle gamers' passion for the franchise?

The answer is a definite maybe, just like all unreleased Mana games. Heroes of Mana is a little different, though, and has some things going for it. It features a beautiful art direction that showcases the pastel hues and soft tones Mana is known for. It's also a real-time strategy game, which is a first. It always seems like there's one fatal flaw in all the Mana games that keeps them from being solid games. But I won't get to that just yet.

The start to the story of Heroes involves an airship crew that has to make an emergency landing in beastmen-held territory during a storm. Players take the role of Roget, a crew member who discovers that the captain has injured himself during the descent. Like any good subordinate, Roget sets out to repair the ship and get away from the mearby beastmen.

As with a traditional RTS, you will create new units and buildings from gathered materials on the map. You actually build new "buildings" (they're more like structures in this game) inside the ship itself. These structures will then be able to spawn new units that you can control. Rabites are good for harvesting material; there are two types, Gaia crystals and Treant stones. After gathering for a bit, it is then possible to spawn mushroom units, which are good for combat. This is right around the time the beastmen come-a-callin' and the game forces you to take Roget and his mushroom cohort on an attack run.

Controlling units is very simple: touch it with the stylus to select it, then touch where you want it to move. If you touch an enemy, your unit will attack that enemy. The game also makes it easy to select multiple units by either drawing a circle around those you want to control or by touching the unit icon (this will select all units of that particular type; there are three different icons that pertain to the three types of units in the game).

This all sounds well and good, but here comes the fatal flaw (two of them, actually). First, because the sprites are so tiny, it's very common to miss selecting a unit or miss touching a moving enemy for an attack command. This will cause you to try and adjust your aim, which in turn causes more misses, and finally, irritation. This problem is mitigated somewhat by the slow game speed. But, it's far too slow. It's agonizingly slothful, in fact. Units move at such a small speed and the maps are so large (well, the tutorial map anyway) that the game will put you to sleep as you push back the fog of war.

Now, it's very possible that in the more chaotic battles that involve large numbers of units, the slow speed will actually be a boon for players who like micromanaging. But for the first half of missions, the gathering stage will take forever, and with no speed-up function, the game might end up suffering from tediousness.

If, however, you are a gamer with patience and can stomach the slower pace, you'll get to experience a very pretty and innovative DS game with fully animated cutscenes and an interesting look at the history of the Mana canon.

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