YMMV / Legend of Mana

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Throughout the game, characters passively refuse to take action because they don't want to infringe on anyone's freedom, only for The Hero to show up and do what needs to be done. "It doesn't matter what you do, the Chosen One is going to breeze through and fix all of your problems", perhaps?
  • Just sitting around and accepting things as they are won't make anything better, change things, or get anything done. One of the only people in the game that takes an active role in things is the protagonist, and things only get resolved through their actions.
• Alternate Character Interpretation
  • Alexandra. She's quite an intriguing and complex character. There are way too many interpretations to list them here.
  • The Lord of Jewels. Was the Jumi arc a plan to save the Jumi race from extinction on his part?
    • And if so, did he realize that the main character was suffering emotionally enough from Sandra's genocide to form a crystal teardrop on their own, and would do so once he was defeated and the quest was over? To put it another way, was he aware that both outcomes of his boss battle were likely to save the Jumi?
  • The world of Fa'Diel has an In-Universe ACI: is it really real, or All Just a Dream? (The opening cinematic also seems to suggest that the world is permanently destroyed and you're just replaying its last memories, and thus the New Game Plus is just a giant cosmic Reset Button.)
  • The four characters of the Fairy Arc.
    • Is Daena too much of a Wide-Eyed Idealist whose efforts to help made things worse, or is she the only one with a sensible plan that would benefit everyone?
    • Is Escad too cynical and too blinded by his hatred for Irwin that he crosses the line, or is he, despite his attitude and actions, right in seeing Irwin as nothing more than a monster?
    • Did Irwin never care about Matilda in the first place, like Escad says? Or is he simply going too far in his attempts to make Matilda happy?
    • Is Matilda a sympathetic character who doesn't want to curb Irwin's demonic urges, which is why she doesn't object to him trying to destroy the world? Or is she an unlikable, love-addled fool who would willingly step on the rest of Fa'Diel's freedom to avoid stepping on Irwin's freedom? Or is she a Secretly Selfish Magnificent Bitch who orchestrated both her own and Irwin's deaths so that they could each fulfill their obligations as best they could and be Together in Death afterwards (basically having her cake and eating it, too), a plan that would have worked flawlessly if only Irwin had chosen to stay with her? Or was she just as angry at the world as Irwin was, and thus happy to let him destroy it for her?
    • In the same vein, every Wisdom is involved in the Heaven's Gate Arc in one way or another. Most of them are unhelpful at best: but is this by accident or design? When Selva (the hardest Wisdom to encounter in the game) first appears in this arc, he explicitly states he wants Matilda to be their Seventh Wisdom. If all six of the Wisdoms agree on this, their actions (or lack thereof) might've been meant to secure their desired outcome. For instance, when Daena speaks with Gaeus about Matilda, he tells her to allow Matilda to let herself die. This takes on a whole new dimension if Gaeus' motive for this was to enable Matilda to become a new Wisdom like he and the others wanted.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The citrusquid fruit is likely based on an actual kind of lemon-like citrus fruit with creepy Cthulhu-like tentacle segments.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Lord of Jewels 1000. You can't lose to this guy if you try. He barely even fights back. It's especially disappointing after Lord of Jewels 999, who was (by Legend of Mana standards at least) fairly difficult.
  • In keeping with the general ease of the game, it is very possible to one-shot even the final boss - even without all that much of the crafting system. Just come into the battle with an ST of max strength ready.
• Awesome Art: One of the few things people generally agree on with this game, is that it sports an enchanting, gorgeous art style.
• Awesome Music: Despite the Broken Base nature of the game, the soundtrack is universally agreed to be amazing. Fans of Kingdom Hearts will recognize Yoko Shimomura's style.
  • Of particular note to Kingdom Hearts fans, try listening to The Crimson Dragon Emperor. You'll notice it's a precursor to Destiny's Force, Shrouding Dark Cloud, and The Deep End, some of the first KH game's best boss themes.
  • The opening song and it's accompanying cinematic of the world falling apart, with the game coming to rest on the last place in existence.
    • The opening song is the same as the ending song, only truncated a little. Song of Mana is a truly magical song befitting its name.
  • The Anime of the Game contains a brand new opening theme composed by Kevin Penkin and sung by Saori Hayami (the voice actress for Seraphina), "Tear of Will", that is absolutely gorgeous.
• Better Off Sold: The vast amounts of random junk that drops, including weapons, armor and relics, can be used in the labyrinthine crafting system. Even then, however, most of it isn't useful for anything and is better off sold.
• Broken Base: Aesthetically, it’s a masterpiece, but the quests can be very tedious and sometimes impossible without reading a guide. The hand-drawn art style, rotating cast, and overall lack of direction is just too big of a shift for many longtime fans to continue. Conversely, fans of Legend tend to prefer it to other Mana titles for its unique style and mood that is pretty unique to the game.
• Complete Monster:
  • The wicked dragon Drakonis was trapped in the Underworld for his crimes. Taking Larc, the brother of heroine Sierra, Drakonis uses him to lure his sister into attacking three dragons who keep Drakonis sealed before forcibly turning Larc into a monster to face his sister and kill or be killed by her. Drakonis devours many souls to empower himself, intending to go to Earth to conquer it and reap even more souls until he finds himself satisfied.
  • Manga, by Shiro Amano: Emperor Drakonis is a cruel, megalomaniacal dragon banished to the underworld for his cruel designs on the world. Playing on the desperation of the fallen warrior Larc to reunite with his sister, Drakonis makes Larc his servant and through him slaughters the dragons who initially stopped him to return to the world of the living. When Larc confronts him on this, Drakonis painfully transforms him into a horrible beast, loosing him on his own sister and hysterically laughing when Larc is forcefully put down as a result. With his physical form attained again, Drakonis intends to devour the souls of all in existence, scouring both the souls of those alive and in the underworld to sate his lust for power.
• Contested Sequel: Much like Chrono Cross (another contested sequel for PS1) the title didn't harm the game's exposure...but it doesn't really service it, either. Most of fans' problems with the game come down to their expectations not being met because Legend threw so many accepted conventions out the window.
• Demonic Spiders: Zombones. They have a long reach, no attack windup animation, and one of their attacks squashes your character flat and then s/he can't move until un-squashing. Well, Zombone can spam the squash attack and you can get killed without ever having had a chance to fight back. Oh, and you only get 3 exp crystals for killing one.
  • Really, any enemy with a spammable attack that restricts your character's movement in some way could count, especially if you get surrounded by them. Rattler Boas have a constrict attack that basically functions like the Zombone's squash move.
• Game-Breaker: Prodigious Gold Coin farming, combined with some smart Item Crafting, can net you your very own weapon that can slay gods even on No Future Mode. If you exploit the crafting system for all it's worth, the Infinity +1 Sword and Armor of Invincibility you can end up with make the game pathetically easy.
  • Also, using Blackpearl as your NPC assistant, as her synchronization effect instantly fills your Charge Meter.
  • A Robot Buddy Golem with a Infinity +1 Sword as a key ingredient in its Logic Block can wipe out average monsters with ease, and take as much as three bars off a bosses health with one single laser-cannon shot.
  • Some of the Mons, normally overlooked for the Golem, can be Game Breakers as well. The Synchro Effect for the Succubus pet is HP Drain. If you have your crafted Infinity +1 Sword, you can easily heal yourself to full in a single attack. Even nastier is the Synchro Effect of the Springball - Invincibility.
• Goddamn Bats: Depending on your weapon equipped, any monster can either be a walkover or massively irritating, but high controller throwing points go to monsters that can confuse you (reverses your controls), drop your Charge Meter to zero, squash you, freeze you in place, or set you on fire.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Orc boss is basically Sharktopus.
• Ho Yay: Pearl blushes and gets self conscious in front of the female hero, and Esmerelda develops a tiny Bodyguard Crush towards her as well. Granted, since gender has minimal effect on in-game dialogue, this also happens with the male hero. Sandra exchanges suggestive dialogue with various female Jumi, and then there's her relationship with Florina. Daena is said to love Matilda like a sister, but there's a little room for speculation.
• Moment of Awesome: Cap'n Tusk insisting that Elle go ahead and sing. The voices of sirens cause nautical disasters. Tusk keeps his ship afloat anyway (with a little bit of monster-slaying help from you, of course).
  • In a way, Sandra ripping her own Core out and throwing it to the Lord of Jewels.
• Player Punch: One per major story arc, as horrible things keep happening to the characters you grow to care for either as a direct result of your actions or because you weren't strong enough to protect them.
• Polished Port: The remaster has new high quality backgrounds, a newly arranged soundtrack (plus the option to use the original one if you want to), quality of life features such as the ability to turn off random encounters and save almost anywhere, and includes the Ring Ring Land minigame which was previously japanese-exclusive.
• Replacement Scrappy: Aura for Luna. Because Luna (the moon) and Dryad (trees) were the elements with no opposite, LoM ditched Luna and created Aura (metal) to be Dryad's opposite. There's nothing wrong with Aura per se, but just getting rid of Luna like that annoyed part of the Mana fanbase.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The problem lies on the hitstun mechanics. It's easy to stunlock any enemy in the game, even bosses, though one can argue that you need not abuse the hitstun mechanic. It just happens to be the path of least resistance. Higher difficulties just exacerbate the problem since the enemies turn into damage sponges. There is a romhack which addresses this issue.
• Squick: The squishing sound you make as you walk around inside Lucemia. Fieg Snowfields makes the exact same sound, but it's a lot less gross to hear it when you're walking on snow than to hear it when you're stepping on fungi and mold.
• That One Boss: Despite the general ease of the game, there are a couple.
  • Boreal Hound. His level scales with the players and he has multiple attacks that can only be dodged if you're lucky. Plus he goes invulnerable when he's charging his attacks - and he charges so frequently it's tough to finish a combo to stun him and pull off your own big move. He's moderately difficult even on the normal Easier Than Easy mode, and if you meet him in No Future Mode? You'll need that gamebreaker sword...
  • Orc, for the same reason - he has a special move where he dives into the ocean and that causes waves full of junk to land on most of the screen. There is no surefire way to dodge it - you need luck. Fighting him is a battle of attrition and if you take on him too late in the game and/or undergeared, he can be intensely difficult.
  • Tropicallo. He's a plant monster with two heads - a "fighting" head and a "magic" head. You knock the heads off the main body, kill them, and each dead head drains a bit of Tropicallo's life. The thing that makes him hard? The magic head, after getting knocked off, releases an area-of-effect magic blast that one-shot-kill you. It may not be too, too hard to avoid, but when you literally have no room for error, "not too hard" can easily become "way too hard". It doesn't help that Tropicallo's rate of demise is tied to how how quickly you can kill off the heads, and therefore, later on (especially in No Future mode), it winds up with eleven FREAKING life bars. Tropicallo also has a brother named Labanne, who is easier only because he's fought in a much bigger area where it's easier to dodge his magic blasts.
  • Kima. It's not a particularly strong boss, but it constantly goes into attack animations, making it almost impossible to hit with special techniques.
• Tear Jerker: Most of the arcs have at least one or more major ones. The Junkyard and the Jumi Storyline especially are often cited as a source of actual tears.
• That One Sidequest: Dodging Shadoles.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Seriously. The three main plotlines needed an overarching meta-arc to tie everything together and the ending needed to be better than the Sproutlings fixed the Mana Tree. A Winner Is You!
  • Made worse by the fact that Matilda's comments at the end of her arc suggest one. Years of picking the game apart have produced nothing on it so far. It seems it was conveniently forgotten about.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Kristie. She's supposedly a Rich Bitch, but she's never anything other than gracious to the Hero, or nasty to anyone besides Skippie and Hamson (who, to be fair, are quite deserving of her anger due to their obnoxiousness and sheer incompetence). Yet when she loses everything to Niccolo due to his dirty tricks, the game still treats it as though she was getting her just rewards. It doesn't help that the guy who claims her fortune is a much more greedy, self-centered jerkass than Kristie's ever shown to be.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Due to a case of Values Dissonance. In Japan, greediness can be seen as cute or endearing in some characters. This is not the case in the West. So Niccolo is one of the most promoted side characters in the game art because he's just seen more sympathetically in Japan. Western audiences generally find him to be a highly unlikeable Jerkass and Karma Houdini - in fact, his karma houdini status is one of the main reasons he's disliked there.
• Vindicated by History: At the time the game was released, it was contentious among gamers for its more experimental game design such as its decision to forego a strong central story in lieu of having a bunch of self-contained sidequests with their own plots and its "lego" map design that made some events permanently missable. However as time has gone on and subsequent entries in the Mana franchise were considered disappointing and forgettable, Legend (while not necessarily universally liked still) is looked upon more favorably now as the last Mana game that had much of a creative spark to it, with its audiovisual presentation being routinely praised and people appreciating the game's various sidestories on their own terms.

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