Children of Mana is a crazy-go-nuts $15 new at amazon.com right now. It was practically an automatic purchase for me. I dig the Mana games no matter what anyone says about them, but the reviews on CoM made me think twice about paying full price.

The series doesn’t have a great track record lately. Secret is mythically great. Seiken Densetsu 3 is pretty good, but I never really got through it. Something about it was too epic for me to be playing it on an emulator.

Around Legend, it started getting weird. LoM has no overarching story really, it’s just a series of highly expressive missions that teach you a lot about the world, but nothing about your character. It’s really charming if you let yourself get into it. Personally, I love the game for it’s episodic nature. I can pop it in and play a mission, grow the mana tree a little more, and feel good. On the negative side, the controls are clunky and unresponsive. They’re usable, occasionally satifying, but they stick out like a sore thumb. It’s a 32-bit game that gets shamed by the controls in the original Zelda.

Sword was hard to like. It was pretty solid, the controls are a little better (collision detection is still vague), but the return to a “large overworld”-style game didn’t work so well for it. I would get lost a lot. It was often hard to go on, even though I had named the male and female leads after me and my girlfriend. ;.;

Requiring use of the shoulder buttons for certain actions also lost it a few points with me, but that’s just due to my monkey-hand complex.

So, at $20 after shipping, I like Children quite a bit. The controls are much more responsive than in Sword or Legend, and the 4 face buttons all pull their weight, even allowing dual-wielding. This game feels more purposeful than the last two installments, even though the story is still pure Square cheese.

I appreciate being able to choose a character at the beginning too! It’s not a tough choice like SD3, but it’s not an “Are you a boy or a girl? ^^” choice. I’m pretty sure this is the first game to let me play a niccolo wanderer, which gives it many awesome points for me.

The gameplay progresses dungeon-hack style. Simple, straightforward. Collect items, collect gemstones. The simplicity is great, since I’m coming off writing like 26 pages of text for classes in the past week. Brain’s a little fried.

I tried some multiplayer, and it is a blast. Enemies and objects bounce around and deal damage to everything they touch. It’s beautifully chaotic. The team dynamic makes it a whole new game, and I wish I could play in some 4-player teams. Sadly, it requires your friends to have carts, but maybe the price will stay low so I can talk some friends into it. This game really needs online multiplayer.

In closing, I just wanna say that the Mana series is Square(-Enix)’s way of releasing its aggression. Why else would I have to beat up so many cute, fuzzy things?