Heroes of Mana First Look

Along with a new action role-playing game on the PlayStation 2, Square Enix is continuing its revival of the famed Mana series with Heroes of Mana, a new Nintendo DS game that comes scarcely a year after last fall's Children of Mana on the same platform. But where that game presented a middling overhead action experience in the traditional Mana style, Heroes breaks the series' mold with story-driven and multiplayer modes based on...real-time strategy? It's a first for the Mana franchise, but from what we saw during a brief demo of Heroes of Mana recently, developer Brownie Brown (of Sword of Mana and Magical Starsign fame) may just make it work.

Heroes is set in roughly the same world as Seiken Densetsu 3, the famed final Super Famicom installment of the series that never made it to North America. For those who aren't up on their 16-bit Japanese RPG obscurities, this would have been the direct sequel to the Super NES's Secret of Mana, the first game to be released in the States bearing the Mana name. At any rate, Heroes of Mana takes place within a few years of the events depicted in Seiken Densetsu 3, and you'll play as a scrappy young hero named Roget, who was conducting aerial reconnaissance over the beast kingdom of Ferolia until his aircraft was shot down behind enemy lines. You'll have to link up with a ragtag band of allies, such as the dashing, Han Solo-like Qucas; the wise captain Yurchael; and the mysteriously powerful young girl D'kelli, to fight your way through your enemies and get back to safety.

In gameplay terms, Heroes of Mana looks like it conforms to a lot of the typical RTS parameters--although you might not recognize it as a strategy game at first. You're presented with an isometric view of the battlefield that you can rotate around. There's a resource model, whereby you gather gaia stones and berries to construct unit-producing buildings and then pump out those units. Unlike most RTS games, though, where you have to build your base structures on the map, you'll have a large flying ship that you put your buildings inside. So the terrain of each mission will be used solely to conduct battle.

Unit controls in Heroes are entirely stylus based, as you'd expect, and you can simply tap on any unit to select it and then give it orders. If you want to select more than one unit, though, the game will pause and let you draw a ring around the desired characters to select them all at once. Luckily, Heroes will give you five gradations of action speed, so you can get used to the gameplay without being too rushed at the beginning. In addition to your produced units, and depending on the mission and terrain, you'll get to bring between two and five main characters (from a party that will reach around 25) into each mission. For these named characters, you'll get to select specific weapons and armor to tailor their capabilities to the impending mission. Finally, those classic Mana series spirits such as Salamander, Gnome, and Dryad will appear in the game as special magic spells you can use in battle.

Like in most RTS games, in Heroes there will be a number of win conditions in different missions. Some will task you with eradicating all enemies, while others will simply require you to neutralize one important enemy unit or move one of your own lead units to a specific point on the map. And like any good RTS game, Heroes will have a local two-player mode that will let you set up a custom match with another player.

We didn't get to try Heroes of Mana for ourselves, but from what we could tell of the demo being played before us, it looks like the RTS-style gameplay has meshed with the DS controls and dual screens pretty well. We'll look to bring you more information and a hands-on report in the months preceding the game's third-quarter release later this year.