Children of Mana for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

If you're looking for Secret of Mana, you won't find it here, and that was disappointing to me. Not having played any of the other Seiken series games besides Secret of Mana and this, it was fun to see the different history and take on the Mana world. I was hoping for "epic adventure" and got "dungeon crawl," but it's a pretty good dungeon crawl if you've got some time to kill.

There's nothing overtly wrong with the gameplay, short of it being a bit repetitive. Pick a dungeon on the map that you have access to, find everything and kill everything as fast as you can. Advancing the story is as simple as picking the newest available dungeon and beating it. If you feel adventuresome, you can do a "dungeon for hire," which is basically a run through of a different dungeon with the same visual theme as one you did before and the promise of some loot at the end. There's no "overworld" or place to explore outside of the maze-like dungeons and the story is just glue between those areas. Your character grows in strength and abilities in a pretty generic way, and there's new weapons, armor and the like to pick up as you go. In fact, this game focuses so hard on the dungeon crawling that it will actually rate you after you finish a dungeon, based on enemies killed, treasure found, time taken, damage taken, etc. and will give you loot based on your rating. Unfortunately, playing through the same levels over and over trying to get a better rating is extremely dull and not worth it.

The graphics and artistic presentation are excellent. Control is good - glad to see they didn't try to shoehorn stylus control in just because they could. Multiplayer isn't something I tried but looks very ambitious.

All in all, a decent game for a plane ride or a long trip. I don't think I'd recommend a purchase, but rent it if you like hack 'n slashers, leveing and finding loot.