Final Fantasy Adventure for Game Boy was one of the first games that I knew that I’ve used a dictionary to guide me through history, because I just didn’t understand a single little thing I had to do.
That’s how the Mana franchise came into my life. And yes, the first game, in the West, is really called Final Fantasy Adventure… Yeah… Squaresoft from the 90s, right? Anyway, I didn’t become a fan of the game or the series at that time, but for a few years now I’ve had an unconditional love affair with this game, including the 9 billion remakes they’ve made of it, and I understand the influence that this game has, like the other games in the series, it was part of my background not only as a gamer, but my taste for entertainment in general.
Today I’m going to bring a little of this franchise to you and if you don’t like it and/or even know what I’m going to talk about here, that’s fine. The vast majority of people let this franchise go by.
The Mana series, despite not receiving so many titles, has been present for many years in the game industry. It is a franchise composed of games in the action RPG genre created by Koichi Ishii together with Hiromichi Tanaka and usually deals with the ethereal, with feelings, sensations and beings (after all, it’s a medieval fantasy rpg, right) that go beyond what can be transcribed into words.
Although it was a world created practically with 4 hands, the inspiration and imagination that gave rise to it all came from Ishii’s mind, after working on the artwork of Final Fantasy III, he was given an opportunity to create a game as he wanted to instead of getting involved with Final Fantasy IV. He accepted right away.
And what makes such a forgotten show like this one special? It certainly doesn’t get the same attention, let alone the same budget for new game development, as the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises do, which ends up conveying a sense that it’s a franchise on a lower level than the rest.
I don’t deny, given this history, that in fact it does not receive the same laurels that other franchises have received over the years. While these other franchises are hugely successful and shape the environment of the games industry, breaking paradigms and presenting new precedents, the Mana series has always been on the sidelines of this desire for prominence, preferring to explore other ways to make a relevant impact on its players.
Any of the games in the Mana franchise work as an invitation to a place where the player will not only have fun in this environment, but also be exposed to all kinds of stories and sensations. Stories and sensations that invite us to think about the weight of our decisions, empathy and resilience.
It’s exactly this point that brings me back to what I covered at the beginning of this article about how the franchise made such an impact on me. It was exactly because of this characteristic that it has since the release of Final Fantasy Adventure in 1991, which is its main differential.
In an interview for the Art of Mana artbook, celebrating 25 years of the series, Ishii and Tanaka commented on some mechanics they implemented in the game to create a greater bond between the player and the story, and I’m going to share a few things from these games.
I strongly recommend playing these games before reading further if you are addicted to stories told through games.
The story of Final Fantasy Adventure is permeated by arrivals and departures, sadness and happiness, excitement and tranquility. Through the constant use of extremes, the game’s story, even if originally translated, has succeeded in extracting some iconic moments from a monochrome GameBoy screen.
Ishii comments in the interview how much to convey this message of duality in life and the impact that emotion has on people as the focal point of the narrative of his games and a notorious fact that reinforced the certainty that he was on the right path was, during a Final Fantasy Adventure playtest session, he observed that one of the people who participated in the session, a woman with very little contact with games, cried at the end of the game.
This type of player involvement with the story being told has some triggers seized by gameplay in a relatively new way for its time, a prime example of this type of interaction with the intention of creating a link between player-story from the gameplay is in the arc of Lester and Amanda.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: IN THE NEXT LINES THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING GAMES, please if you bother with spoilers, pass the text until you reach the end of spoilers notice:
FINAL FANTASY ADVENTURE E YOUR REMAKES (ADVENTURES OF MANA AND SWORD OF MANA)
During the story of Final Fantasy Adventure, Sumo, the main character of the game, arrives in the city of Jadd, there he meets the brothers Amanda (A super agile fighter) and Lester (A good people bard millstone) and because of some things that already rolled in history, the lord who commands the city captures this bard and turns him into… A parrot. Yeah… I know… This part of the story is kind of weird hahahaha. Anyway, it’s all right, I assure you, my brother!
Well, to reverse this curse, the duo discovers that it is necessary to get tears from a jellyfish and give them to the person affected by the curse to drink so that they can heal, and, coincidentally, there is a jellyfish that ended up creating a lair in in a cave near the city over there. Isn’t it so good when the world is super convenient?
After passing through the dungeon and after much dialogue between Sumo and Amanda, the jellyfish is finally defeated, but not before deeply wounding the player’s mate, inoculating her poison into her.
At this point Amanda reveals that, having been poisoned, she will become the next jellyfish and, in tears, she begs to be killed before the transformation. At this point in the game the player is forced to see her suffering from the effects of the poison until he presses the action button, commanding Sumo to kill his partner, thus ending both her suffering and her life.
It’s a relatively heavy time, where the player has no option but to take Amanda’s life. By doing this it is possible to collect Amanda’s tears and take them to her brother, curing him of the curse and making him return to his human form. Explaining his sister’s sacrifice to break the curse and defeating Jadd’s city lord, Lester decides to stay in town playing a Requiem for his sister so that his soul can rest in peace.
This arc is relatively short within the game and has little impact on the overall story of the game, but it demonstrates the intent of the series’ narrative in a masterful way, where the players’ actions matter and they don’t always bring benefits to those involved. This undermines the feeling of accomplishment at each end of the arc, a feeling enhanced by the trick of making the player obligatory to press a button to kill Amanda.
END OF SPOILERS, IT’S COMFORTABLE TO READ FROM THE LINES BELOW
In every game in the Mana series, there are several examples like this arc where narrative and gameplay join forces to evoke some emotional response in whoever is playing it, and that’s something that resonates a lot with me and revisiting these moments during the series always brings to light this kind of empathy through the apparent simplicity how these situations are presented during these games.
The Mana series was born as a product that aims to express the worldview of its creators, and this is a vision perpetuated with each release, where games strongly combine gameplay with narrative in different ways, aiming to surprise players without failing to bring a certain emotion, or sensation to them through the gameplay.
That’s what makes the series so special to me, and I believe that’s what makes the series special to so many other players around the world. If you’re interested in integrating gameplay into storytelling and how it worked in the early days of the industry, maybe you might be very interested in the games in the series.
So play, enjoy (or not hahaha). With this article, I wanted to show my appreciation for a series that has always been a little overshadowed by others in the genre and that, who knows, might arouse the interest of those who have read so far in discovering something new?
The Mana series deals with the cyclicality of the world and everything that involves experiencing different sensations during an adventure. It’s a whole new world just waiting to be explored by those curious enough to take the first steps in it and it’s an adventure that pays to be revisited from time to time, with a new worldview as it awakens different sensations throughout the experience.
I hope I haven’t bored you that much talking about it. The Mana series is really important to me and it’s something I really care about. I enjoyed talking about it here because deep down I believe that we should talk about what we genuinely love with even more intensity than what we hate. It generates more positivity for everyone in such a turbulent period.
Which game franchises move you like that, to the point where you can talk about it for hours on end? Is it super known or few people know of its existence? Use the opportunities life gives you to introduce it to the people who matter to you.
I’m sticking around, my brothers, see you around, and if you want to talk about the Mana series with me, I’m always available.
