Legend of Mana Official Strategy Guide (Official Guide)

Rating:
Summary: This is a totally awesome guide, one of the best written!
Review: This is a really really really cool guide! If you are stuck on Legend of Mana, which happens a lot, you should buy this right away! Unless you are able to beat the entire game and every quest by yourself, buy this NOW!

Rating:
Summary: WAIT A MINUTE! STOP DESIST!
Review: Unless you absolutely CANNOT find the information you need then do not buy this guide. Now that I've grown A LOT more serious about collecting guides I can easily tell you what's good and what's not. This guide is not good. It has a walkthrough and that's about it, which gives the guide a two. However if you read this review (or if you just want a quick overview see below) I'll tell you EVERYTHING that this guide has done wrong.

First the good things. There's a nice complete walkthrough (although under the bad there is a con even here). The guide has a good handy flow chart that will take you through each even telling you what leads to what. The bestiary is complete at least, eventhough the only "real" reason to use it is to see what enemies drop. The guide also tells you all that stuff that artifacts turn into and such. Clearly if you're out to just complete the game then the guide will help.

But if you're out to master the game the guide sinks lower than an ant. The walkthrough, while good has a lot of confusing directions at times, which make you flip to the back of the book to look at maps. The maps are horrid and you all know that SEVERAL areas of any one dungeon sometimes look the same. Thus the maps don't help you nagivate either. For the event titled "The Crimson Dragon" (beginning on Page 91) the sequence of events get out of order when they tell you to fight a boss that actually appears AFTER you battle another one.

The guide also doesn't tell you when you can go to Domina to import a character, foreshame BradyGAMES! The guide also doesn't detail everything it says it contains. There is so much more the guide needed that it didn't have. They say they tell you about abilities but they have maybe a paragraph...or two. But they don't tell you WHAT abilities you can get or HOW to get them. They only explain the importance of using them. Not only that but your special techniques aren't detailed either. For example: How do I get the ST Impulse? How do I get Moonsault? An FAQ at GameFAQs was able to tell me.

What's almost worse? The guide absolutely will NOT tell you much about creating your own weapon. They don't tell you how to create a powerful weapon instead you have to experiment on your own and hope you get lucky that something doesn't drop your attack.

What else is really wrong with this guide? Maps are in the back of the book and did I mention the stats for weapons are wrong? Yeah they are. It stats that a 2H Ishe Platnium Sword has an attack of 62 when it's actually 50.

The guide also assumes that you do absolutely everything there way. So if you stray from the walkthrough just once you'll find yourself flipping all over this book trying to find out what you need to do. At least the table of contents points you in the right direction.

Aside from the blurry screenshots the guide can't really do much else wrong really. They never mention about importing a character from another game...EVER!

So the big con with the walkthrough? They only cover the events! They don't cover all the other things you can do in towns! They only do that for Domina, but aside from that they never mention about all the sort of different things you can do in other towns like Geo or Lumina. They only focused on the events.

The key to this guide is to only get it to complete the game. The guide won't give you anything to help MASTER Legend of Mana. A guide is supposed to cover the entire game. It seems as though that once they finished what was already a mediocre walkthrough, the rest of the guide didn't matter anymore.

Pros
+Complete Walkthrough
+Bestiary

Cons
-Walkthrough gets confusing
-Armor lists are inaccurate
-Guide never mentions what you can do with items such as "Angry Eye" and the like. They tell you what the game already states
-Weapons and Armor lists are inaccurate
-Nothing on forging weapons or armor
-Walkthrough only focuses on the events
-Abilites, Special Techniques and Magic go unexplained

ONLY buy this guide if you're looking to beat the final boss. Other gamers who want to master the game look to GameFAQs.

Rating:
Summary: WAIT A MINUTE! STOP DESIST!
Review: Unless you absolutely CANNOT find the information you need then do not buy this guide. Now that I've grown A LOT more serious about collecting guides I can easily tell you what's good and what's not. This guide is not good. It has a walkthrough and that's about it, which gives the guide a two. However if you read this review (or if you just want a quick overview see below) I'll tell you EVERYTHING that this guide has done wrong.

First the good things. There's a nice complete walkthrough (although under the bad there is a con even here). The guide has a good handy flow chart that will take you through each even telling you what leads to what. The bestiary is complete at least, eventhough the only "real" reason to use it is to see what enemies drop. The guide also tells you all that stuff that artifacts turn into and such. Clearly if you're out to just complete the game then the guide will help.

But if you're out to master the game the guide sinks lower than an ant. The walkthrough, while good has a lot of confusing directions at times, which make you flip to the back of the book to look at maps. The maps are horrid and you all know that SEVERAL areas of any one dungeon sometimes look the same. Thus the maps don't help you nagivate either. For the event titled "The Crimson Dragon" (beginning on Page 91) the sequence of events get out of order when they tell you to fight a boss that actually appears AFTER you battle another one.

The guide also doesn't tell you when you can go to Domina to import a character, foreshame BradyGAMES! The guide also doesn't detail everything it says it contains. There is so much more the guide needed that it didn't have. They say they tell you about abilities but they have maybe a paragraph...or two. But they don't tell you WHAT abilities you can get or HOW to get them. They only explain the importance of using them. Not only that but your special techniques aren't detailed either. For example: How do I get the ST Impulse? How do I get Moonsault? An FAQ at GameFAQs was able to tell me.

What's almost worse? The guide absolutely will NOT tell you much about creating your own weapon. They don't tell you how to create a powerful weapon instead you have to experiment on your own and hope you get lucky that something doesn't drop your attack.

What else is really wrong with this guide? Maps are in the back of the book and did I mention the stats for weapons are wrong? Yeah they are. It stats that a 2H Ishe Platnium Sword has an attack of 62 when it's actually 50.

The guide also assumes that you do absolutely everything there way. So if you stray from the walkthrough just once you'll find yourself flipping all over this book trying to find out what you need to do. At least the table of contents points you in the right direction.

Aside from the blurry screenshots the guide can't really do much else wrong really. They never mention about importing a character from another game...EVER!

So the big con with the walkthrough? They only cover the events! They don't cover all the other things you can do in towns! They only do that for Domina, but aside from that they never mention about all the sort of different things you can do in other towns like Geo or Lumina. They only focused on the events.

The key to this guide is to only get it to complete the game. The guide won't give you anything to help MASTER Legend of Mana. A guide is supposed to cover the entire game. It seems as though that once they finished what was already a mediocre walkthrough, the rest of the guide didn't matter anymore.

Pros
+Complete Walkthrough
+Bestiary

Cons
-Walkthrough gets confusing
-Armor lists are inaccurate
-Guide never mentions what you can do with items such as "Angry Eye" and the like. They tell you what the game already states
-Weapons and Armor lists are inaccurate
-Nothing on forging weapons or armor
-Walkthrough only focuses on the events
-Abilites, Special Techniques and Magic go unexplained

ONLY buy this guide if you're looking to beat the final boss. Other gamers who want to master the game look to GameFAQs.

Rating:
Summary: BradyGames = mediocre
Review: When will Brady get it right?

It clear to me by now that BradyGames certainly knows what makes a good guide. What they constantly fail to do though, is put all of these elements into a single book, but rather churn out one mediocre guide after another. Legend of Mana: Offical Strategy Guide is no exception.

The good first: The intro is decent, and proves a rather informative read (something the instruction booklet was lacking BIG TIME). All game screenshots are very clear, and the events are labelled properly. The correct amount of space is devoted to each event as needed (it's not like each particular one is squeezed onto one page as some other guides have tried in the past). The monster compendium is also nicely done, telling you about where each baddie can be found, what they can do, and what goodies they'll give you upon their defeat. All of the mini-games and other secrets are accurately detailed in the back of the book as well (though there aren't many).

And the not so good: The walkthroughs start out rather decent. Up front you are told where to go, and how you get there. Given that Legend of Mana is a non-linear game, a good effort was made to cover all areas of the game and what is required of the player to get there. Unfortunately, this information is not always accurate. I found numerous incorrect event "prerequisites," navigational mistakes in the dungeon walkthroughs (sometimes with whole sections missing), and some bosses were just plain left out of their events' discussion. Maps to most of the games' areas are all together in a separate section of the book, which would otherwise have been fine had they not been so poorly layed out. Very few of the treasure chest contents are labelled--if you're going to label some of them, you label them all. This is laziness on the part of the author in it's purest form. In addition, some game screen are missing from the maps, and the lines that show you how rooms connect to each other are only often mismatched or run off the page--literally. This is laziness on the part of the editor!

And the downright bad: The lists in the back of the book. Talk about completely useless. This is obviously something pulled off an online FAQ and formatted nicely, or it's direct information from Square that was cut and pasted onto a spread of 14 pages. You get a list of the items, weapons, armors, and instruments, each with their basic stats. You are not given where to find them, how to make them (equipment creation is a major area of the game), or what to do with them. That's ludicrous. The whole notion of golem creation and pet raising are ignored as well. This might be acceptable had the list section been a lot more comprehensive, but to not be mentioned at all (save repeating what's in the instruction booklet) is very bad. The worst feature of this guide, though, is the complete lack of information regarding character abilities and magic spells. The fact that battles are the core of this game makes this absence inexcusable. The worst part about this, however, is that in the book's introduction, it says "we have included a complete list [of abilities] in the abilites section." WHAT ABILITIES SECTION!

Overall, I just can't recommend this one over an online FAQ for the game, of which there are many. It might help to get you started on a quest if you have no clue as to where to go or help you solve one of the few puzzles, but there's so much more that you'll be craving if strategy guides are your thing.

Rating:
Summary: BradyGames = mediocre
Review: When will Brady get it right?

It clear to me by now that BradyGames certainly knows what makes a good guide. What they constantly fail to do though, is put all of these elements into a single book, but rather churn out one mediocre guide after another. Legend of Mana: Offical Strategy Guide is no exception.

The good first: The intro is decent, and proves a rather informative read (something the instruction booklet was lacking BIG TIME). All game screenshots are very clear, and the events are labelled properly. The correct amount of space is devoted to each event as needed (it's not like each particular one is squeezed onto one page as some other guides have tried in the past). The monster compendium is also nicely done, telling you about where each baddie can be found, what they can do, and what goodies they'll give you upon their defeat. All of the mini-games and other secrets are accurately detailed in the back of the book as well (though there aren't many).

And the not so good: The walkthroughs start out rather decent. Up front you are told where to go, and how you get there. Given that Legend of Mana is a non-linear game, a good effort was made to cover all areas of the game and what is required of the player to get there. Unfortunately, this information is not always accurate. I found numerous incorrect event "prerequisites," navigational mistakes in the dungeon walkthroughs (sometimes with whole sections missing), and some bosses were just plain left out of their events' discussion. Maps to most of the games' areas are all together in a separate section of the book, which would otherwise have been fine had they not been so poorly layed out. Very few of the treasure chest contents are labelled--if you're going to label some of them, you label them all. This is laziness on the part of the author in it's purest form. In addition, some game screen are missing from the maps, and the lines that show you how rooms connect to each other are only often mismatched or run off the page--literally. This is laziness on the part of the editor!

And the downright bad: The lists in the back of the book. Talk about completely useless. This is obviously something pulled off an online FAQ and formatted nicely, or it's direct information from Square that was cut and pasted onto a spread of 14 pages. You get a list of the items, weapons, armors, and instruments, each with their basic stats. You are not given where to find them, how to make them (equipment creation is a major area of the game), or what to do with them. That's ludicrous. The whole notion of golem creation and pet raising are ignored as well. This might be acceptable had the list section been a lot more comprehensive, but to not be mentioned at all (save repeating what's in the instruction booklet) is very bad. The worst feature of this guide, though, is the complete lack of information regarding character abilities and magic spells. The fact that battles are the core of this game makes this absence inexcusable. The worst part about this, however, is that in the book's introduction, it says "we have included a complete list [of abilities] in the abilites section." WHAT ABILITIES SECTION!

Overall, I just can't recommend this one over an online FAQ for the game, of which there are many. It might help to get you started on a quest if you have no clue as to where to go or help you solve one of the few puzzles, but there's so much more that you'll be craving if strategy guides are your thing.