Children of Mana: Love Repitition?
Freeinternet
40% score
One of the great things about video games is that it continually trys fresh ideas, and trys to reinvite an genre, or at least take an old one and make it seem new. Children of Mana is far from that.Sure you could be swayed by its pretty graphics, but once you get many hours into it, two or more hours, you realise what this entire game is about. The concept of this game is to go into a dungeon, get the "key", and go to the "door" with the "key", and open it. You actually don't use a key, but a gleam drop, but it is interchangeable. There aren't any puzzels, just find that key, which is either in a box or dropped by an enemy, and open the well to get transported to the next room. Once you get to the next room you either have to do that same process all over agian, or do an old school boss battle where you have to figure out his weak spot and exploit it, which isn't challenging at all. The bulk of the game is you running through the dungeon and hacking away at hordes of enemies. The game is as simple as that. You are literally put into a randomly generated dungeon, and you have a mass of enemies that spawn through the ground, and you just hit one button until that mass is dead, you walk a few more steps, and more enemies spawn. This is what you get to do, and you do it a lot because you have to do the dungeon once, and end up revisting that place two to three times, with an increasing length of that dungeon by two to five floors. This is a recipe to put any gamer that likes some sort of variety in their games to sleep. Sure you can use magic, but it isn't very effective. When you cast a magic spell, it goes up into the air for a few seconds, letting the foes you wanted to use it on to walk away from it, then it is finally released on the room which will cause minimal to no damage because the magic is weak, and also the strange patterns the ice, fire, earth, ect. magic takes forms of, such as X's, or a swirl that misses all enemies. You can use a secondary function of the magics, but they have such a low duration and have little impact on battle that you will never use it. You get varity in your weapons, you get a sword, a flail, a bow, and a hammer, but in the end you will end up using the sword because it is the least clumsy out of the four. The best part of this game is the gem system. You can collect gems which imbue you character with certiam attributes. You fit these gems into a gem frame which gets expanded for more gems, or for even bigger gems. These gems can give you better strength, defence, magic power, more experience per kill, but those are the least interesting ones. You can craft gems that can give your sword a sonic shock wave, and make your sword swings more powerful, or a gem that makes you swing your flail even more. The gems are the only redeeming part of the game, and you can try to fuse gems together to make new gems and try them out in battle. But that cannot save this game from the repetitive battles.
