You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/trials-of-mana.1394/

The Mana trilogy is something I’ve always wanted to get lost in. With Secret of Mana touted as a timeless classic, both its predecessor and sequel would surely share this title. I went into Trials of Mana with little knowledge of the series prior, and I did so with a great sense of anticipation to what I hoped to be a RPG reminiscent of that golden era; I didn’t quite get what I wanted.

Trials of Mana starts out strong. Allowing you to choose your party is something I’ve appreciated since playing the original Final Fantasy. It gives your adventure an incredibly personal touch, and can transform an otherwise-linear experience into something special and unique. Here, you get a choice of your main character, as well as two allies to accompany you on your journey. This decision does little to alter the main story, but provides you with differing dialogue as the story progresses, as well as a few different endings dependant on your protagonist.

Before jumping into the bulk of the story, you have a motivation-establishing prologue chapter for your chosen protagonist. A fan of thieves, I went with Hawkeye. He’s a part of the noble Nevarl Thieves, and until recently, was having a great time of it. Everything changed when their leader Flamekhan declares himself a king with no kingdom, and sets out plans to invade the neighbouring country of Laurent. As Hawkeye confronts him about this, alongside his childhood friend and son of Flamekhan, Eagle, it’s revealed Flamekhan is being controlled by the evil Isabella. Controlling Eagle, Isabella forces the two of them to face off, this battle actually acting as a tutorial. In the end, Isabella kills Eagle, with Hawkeye taking the blame. Isabella then goes onto place a cursed artefact on Flamekhan’s daughter, and Hawkeye’s love interest, Jessica. Intent on saving his friends and freeing Jessica of her curse, Hawkeye sets out to meet the Priest of Light for help.

Usually I wouldn’t feel it necessary to go into such detail on explaining aspects of the plot, but this prologue stood out to me. It didn’t necessarily last long, but it did a fantastic job of establishing characters and motivations before seeing you on your way to get stuck into the game. As you meet your allies down the line, you’re given the choice to play their prologue chapters too, and I can say that each of the three I played were delightfully crafted. They set the game off on such a high note, it makes what is to follow such a disappointment by comparison.

From here, I can only say the writing got lazier and lazier. The game relies too much on unexplained detours and convenient events to both pad out the story and keep it progressing. The Minor Mallet was a notable case of this. To enter the city of Laurent, you first need the assistance of a sage. To meet with the sage, you must shrink yourselves, and to shrink yourselves, you must track down an incredibly rare item–one that eludes even the merchants of the famous Night Market. That is, until a random NPC appears with it for sale, who handily gives it you for free with no real reason nor rhyme. It’s bizarre. To put in these detours to the plot, you expect some kind of challenge, some kind of detail, or payoff for your time. Instead, you find yourself left with a kind of meaningless backtracking that serves only to burn players out before reaching the events that truly invest you in the world. The story does have its interesting moments, but the journey to them is excruciating.

Of its strong points, I find myself time and time again coming back to the world itself and the established lore. They’re both brilliantly interesting, but it only goes to shine a light on what Trials of Mana is by contrast–an extra. Having not played Secret of Mana myself, I struggle to say whether the series as a whole is simply unsuited to my taste, or whether its final entry is a lazy addendum to milk fans dry in a time before post-release DLC, but it’s difficult to recommend all the same.

Of the other major aspects of the game, combat is something I find myself incredibly conflicted on. Featuring what feels to be fairly traditional action RPG gameplay, combat as a whole is a polished and satisfying experience. Movement is fluid and attacks are clearly and fairly choreographed to allow you time to react. Skills can be used either by consuming MP, or by charging a meter after stringing together power attacks on an enemy. At its core, there’s a lot to enjoy. What I found, however, is that it becomes tiresome–not by fault of the system in itself, but by my AI companions.

With how fair the game feels, and how well it marks out its attacks, it is frustrating beyond words to see my teammates get hit time and time again by things so easily dodged. There’s a necessary balance to be maintained in the design of non-player-controlled allies. If you make them exceptionally strong, they deprive the player of the satisfaction that comes from a challenging fight, but contrary to this, making them too weak or simple-minded, you’re left with a fight less challenging, and more frustrating. You’re left micromanaging your AI companions, as though they’re children with metal forks constantly drifting towards a power outlet.

As a whole, Trials of Mana comes across as a multiplayer experience forced into the confines of a single player game. Were this a cooperative adventure, I feel I’d be singing its praises here. Instead of having to constantly swap between characters to perform simple dodges and manage health, I’d be able to focus on myself. I’d be able to focus on the bosses, I’d be able to coordinate and laugh as somebody else took damage instead of lamenting it. The whole thing isn’t a system without merit, but to avoid frustration you have to decide between casting aside your allies as they die, or grinding out levels to the point of their HP being enough to power through. It’s not ideal for me, but to some that may yet sound appealing.

There are a few other areas of interest. Item seeds turned out to be a refreshing take on random loot; you find seeds out and about, and can grow them into items at inns. The more you grow, the better items you can get as the magic pot levels up. It’s small, sure, but when the item pool is all generally quite useful, you never really feel cheated by the randomness. As well as this, there’s a great deal of customisation on offer, somewhat of an expectation for many RPG fans. Through allocating skill points in various stats, as well as talking to NPCs, you can acquire abilities that can be distributed between party members as you desire. It’s a neat system that promotes skill allocation for a party, instead of looking at each character individually. You also have weapons and armour, but I felt a little let down in this department.

Where in many an RPG you’d have a wide array of weapons and armours of all shapes and sizes, with a variety of costs associated with them, Trials of Mana doesn’t seem to give you much choice. As you advance through each area and visit the weapon and armour sellers, you’re usually greeted with a single item for each character. It’s boring, and for a game shouting about its own customisation, I’d have expected more. It’s not even as though these items accumulate in the shops as you go on to at least pretend you have choice; you have a single item you either will or won’t buy. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Despite its shortcomings elsewhere, one aspect of the game I struggle to find fault in is its soundtrack. It’s frankly delightful. Featuring a fantastic re-imagining of the original scores, it fills the game with the same sense of excitement and wonder I had hoped for going in. Like many a remake before it, you also have the choice of the original soundtrack, giving you a chance to compare, or even switch to it if you happen to prefer it. Both options are equally enjoyable, with the background music being one of few consistent positives as I played. 

I really wanted to like Trials of Mana, and for the first hour or two, I really did. The story was captivating, as were its characters, but from there it seemed to snowball into a mass of frustration. If you’re a fan of the previous two games, maybe there’s something in this for you. As a continuation to the saga, maybe it warrants playing. For those looking in for the first time as I was however, there are better RPGs out there, go play them instead. 

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/disaster-report-4-summer-memories.1362/

Disaster Report is a series previously unknown to me, and for good reason. The first two games launching in Europe as SOS: The Final Escape and Raw Danger, with the third not even making it out of Japan, Disaster Report 4 is the only game with the series title to make it to Europe. A tale of struggle and hardship, of grounded reality and difficult decisions. A treacherous environment to explore and progress through while avoiding its many dangers. I went into Disaster Report 4 expecting these things, and while I didn’t quite get what I expected, I can say with an unparalleled degree of certainty that I was not left disappointed.

Starting out in Disaster Report 4 is a standard affair. You make your character, answer a few questions, and off you trot to what is about to be the worst day of your life. The character creation process is simple and offers you opportunity ample to make your character truly unique; add to this the myriad of costumes you’ll find on your journey and you’ll be riding out the earthquake in style. Past character creation, the game doesn’t take long to establish its tone. Picture the scene: you’re on a bus. Suddenly, one phone rings. Then another. Every phone on the bus is making its respective jingle. You look down, and there it is, “Emergency Earthquake Information.” How do you react?

Do you:
a) Follow the rules and hold onto something
b) Confusedly copy what everybody else is doing
c) Decide to act calm despite feeling embarrassed
d) Act unfazed and don’t believe the report
e) Start humming to show you’re not scared

Welcome to Disaster Report.

At its core, the game can be broken down into four key components. You have wandering time, cutscene time, decision time, and fallout time. There’s not much to each component–you could say that much for the game as a whole–but they weave together to form a perfectly satisfying and ever-interesting cycle. It’s self-explanatory really. You start each section by wandering around and surveying your immediate surroundings. There’s something of a checklist here that’ll eventually force you into the next part of the cycle. Are there any obvious means of progression? As you move towards your obvious means of progression, a building or something similar will collapse, blocking you in. It taunts you for thinking you could simply move forwards. With that out of the way, you’ll either wander into the one building that still has its door open, or find one of the many NPCs in their hour of need; it’s cutscene time.

Cutscenes are a joy. Having seen some high-end PC footage, it’s interesting to know the game at its best could look like a high-end PS3 game. Don’t expect this on the Switch. Scale back those expectations to the early PS2 era with a sprinkling of Dreamcast magic, and you can just about envision the Disaster Report 4 for Nintendo Switch experience. It’s all such low quality; I know I should hate it. I know I should. But I don’t. I want to be perfectly clear, this isn’t the kind of thing I expect every person reading this to fall in love with. I don’t expect a fraction of those reading to share my opinion, and that’s perfectly okay. By any rational scale, the entire game, never mind the cutscenes, would be cast aside as low quality and poorly performing. There’s something to it however. There’s something magical I can only describe as Disaster Report, and if you get it, you really get it. It’s in the cutscenes. You’ll have a genuinely heart-rending scene, an early example being a man sat in the park staring at his lunch on the ground. Talking to him, you find he lost his job several weeks prior, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell his family, and so every day set out to work all the same, every day sitting in that park. It’s emotive and well-written, and the content cuts through the poor presentation of the Switch port. The magic comes from the juxtaposition of the responses.

Decision time. Listening to the man, there are a number of responses. Condolences, well wishes; positivity, negativity, disinterest, it’s all there. Of course, you can also express interest in him romantically. This is Disaster Report after all. It’s amazing really. The writers, with due credit to the localisation team, so perfectly capture every feasible and unfeasible response to a given scenario. You have a spectrum of emotion to play with as you see fit. You want to hit on every suffering person that crosses your path? Sure. You want to con people into paying 100 thousand yen for a “miracle bandage?” Sure. This is your disaster, your stage. Rock it.

What’s the comeback for these decisions? Generally, you feel a little worse as a human being. Doing bad things gives you “Immoral Points,” and doing good things gives you “Moral Points.” Though they don’t really have an impact on the gameplay, it’s fun to keep track of how low your character can sink, but I also found the distribution of these somewhat skewed towards morality. When presented with an option to be immoral where it benefits me, I would take it, and get maybe one Immoral Point. Whether stealing from a shop or selling my miracle bandages, there were only a few accumulated points. Contrast this to situations where I can’t gain anything, but I can actively mess with one person by helping another, I find myself stumbling into rewards of ten points. If these decisions have no impact on the game, I don’t understand why they couldn’t be a simple counter of good decisions vs bad decisions. As they are now, they feel like several layers of useless statistic. On top of these points, your decisions do have a knock-on effect. The power truly is yours to see who lives and who dies, which really hammers home the reality of powerlessness in the face of disaster when it is occasionally beyond your reach to save a person. The game saunters between comedy and calamity in a way I’ve simply never seen. It’s magnificent.

Though I’ve touched on this, I do feel it necessary to reiterate: this is a choppy port. If you have a PS4, or a suitably powerful gaming computer, look to them to experience the game without blurred visuals and a framerate more disastrous than the earthquake itself. It’s not to say you can’t enjoy the Switch release, but you really have to be a particular kind of person to work through these faults. I am this particular kind of person, but you may not be. There’s a free demo available, so test your mettle.

Disaster Report 4 isn’t your average game, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s bizarre, it’s brilliant, but above all, it isn’t for everybody. If nothing else, I’m glad I’ve had this opportunity to experience it, and write about it so more people can just know it exists. With a fifth game teased, I can only wait in anticipation for what the future holds.