What a surprise. Another anime adaptation of a beloved 90’s video game from a franchise which could use a bit of love… and it sucks.
I myself enjoyed playing “Trails of Mana” and “Legends of Mana” back in the day, but theres a difference between immersing yourself in the world of an RPG and watching an anime pantomime of that RPG with the story completely streamlined and the charm taken away.
Look, if you’ve watched a bad video game adaptation then you’ve seen them all. They all have the same problems. Poor pacing, a main character says and does things contrary to how you’d interact with the world, shoe-horned exposition to replace organically learning about the world through gameplay, at least the animation is fine despite it’s garish use of CGI. In either episode one of two theres a shoot of a talking tree which looked like something out of “Chipper and Sons Lumber Co”. Type that one into Google image search. Even the fight scenes, which look nice, lack impact and feel half assed.
Good anime (and media in general) adaptations of games are born from taking the source material and creating original stories within the world that are just disconnected enough from the games story. They also need to be made by artists who have genuine love for the source material they’re adapting. We’ve just seen this with “Cyperpunk: Edgerunners”. There’s also “Takt Op. Destiny”, “Princess Connect”, hell the “Detective Pikachu Moive”. I was so. fucking. bored trying to get to the end of just four episodes of this anime. The Mana series is an old franchise which I can guarantee a lot of viewers watching will have never heard of. If they watched this anime as their introduction to the franchise I wouldn’t blame them for not wanting to check out the games.
I literally can’t think of anything else to say… It’s that unremarkable.
3/10 Wasted Potential.
