1. It is apparently impossible to write about Sword of Mana w/o mentioning it's a remake of the Game Boy non-classic Final Fantasy Adventure but I will do my best not to.
2. Since I have not yet mentioned what this game is a remake of, it will not surprise you at all that the game play here in no way resembles a Final Fantasy game. It seems to be an attempt at a Legend of Zelda type experience--and, yes, it's only an attempt.
3. It feels more like a straight-up bit-era RPG that has real-time combat awkwardly overlaid. Your character always moves w/ this sort of stiffness that's fine when combat is always dealt w/ in a separate battle sequence but doesn't work w/ real-time fighting. In theory, there's lots of depth to the combat system. In practice, I just mashed attack towards enemies that were easy enough to kill and ran past the ones who weren't.
4. This is pretty representative of the quality of Sword of Mana as a whole. There's a lot of good ideas here but everything lacks polish to such a degree that it ends up being a few things that are done well poking from behind a wall of mediocrity. Honestly, I can already tell this review is going to just be a list of things that annoyed me about this game and I'm not even going to fight it.
5. To get it out of the way, the music is rocking and awesome and I love it. Now, let's hop aboard the complain train!
6. You play most of the time w/ a various NPC companions. They are, of course, supposed to be helpful and, of course, they are not. Let's just say that when one of mine walked into a pit of lava and just stood there until he died, it did not surprise me even slightly.
7. There are a ton of different weapon types and different kinds of elemental magic but the GBA does not offer enough buttons to access to all this stuff easily so you are forced to pause the game and go through multiple levels of menu in order to switch things out. It's cool that various enemies and obstacles require a certain weapon or spells to deal w/ but having to dive into a menu every time you run across these things gets grating after a while.
8. Graphics look technically great and will pull at the wee nostalgia strings of those who are fond of 90s RPGs but I found I missed all kinds of important details and got stuck a few times just because it was too difficult to discern a wall w/ a small crack in it from the hundreds of nearly identical wall sections near by.
9. There is a day and night cycle that doesn't matter at all. I mean there are different enemies depending what time it is and sometimes there's obstacles that can only be passed at a certain time of day but you can just walk back and forth between screens until it's the time of day you want so it's more annoying than anything.
10. Save points are scattered haphazardly throughout the land. They are normally fairly frequent but there are some pretty long stretches w/o one which is a big problem for a handheld game. Also, they love placing them such that you have to rewatch the cut scenes before boss battles over and over if you don't win the first try.
11. Number 10 is not a problem because most of the bosses are trivially easy, aside from one that is strong against literally every single weapon type. What the hell? I just loved having to take down a 600+ hit point boss a couple hit points at a time. Sorry I didn't do a magic-based build that was completely useless against everything but this one boss.
12. There's some puzzle solving invovled here but the puzzles are like, "find each switch and hit it." They went as far as to copy the classic Zelda trope of having to hit switches from mine carts on tracks and it was still just an exercise in hitting every single possible switch.
13. For all my complaining, Sword of Mana is actually a pretty good game. There's a ton of complexity and build options for your character, lots of side content and two playable characters that change the way the story is told depending on who you picked to play. Nearly every single moment of it though is marred by some oversight or another. If you are not hitting five buttons to switch weapons, you are hitting five buttons to switch spells or having to hit the same button five times in an attempt to find the correct spot to jump over a wall. Writing this here in mid 2019, I wonder just who the audience to this game might still be. It is certainly not a must-play classic. It is not really a hidden gem for action RPG or handheld nerds and there's tons of better options if you are just looking for something fun to play. I suppose if you are some sort of GBA or Square Enix completest, this might be worth playing but otherwise I am just not sure it's worth your time.
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