YMMV / Mana Series

• Awesome Art: Every single game has incredible art direction, and several are some of the best-looking games on their respective consoles.
• Complete Monster: Thanatos; Stroud, later known as the Dark Majesty; Goremand; the original version and Shiro Amano's manga version of Emperor Drakonis. See those pages for more details.
• Cult Classic: The World of Mana is far from SquareSoft/Square Enix's most notable franchise, much less well-known and successful than the Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts series, but they have a hardcore base of dedicated fans who regard several of them as being among the best games the company has ever made.
• Game-Breaker: Magic spamming in Trials of Mana. Also, the Kevin bug allows Kevin to shoot to absurd levels of strength if he transforms into a beastman at exactly the right moment.
  • While it takes longer, Magic spamming (particularly once you get Luna) is similarly game breaking in Secret of Mana. Even more so than Trials of Mana, considering the fact that the spell animations freeze the enemy in place, so casting with the right rhythm can allow the Sprite to kill any enemy before it can move.
  • Secret of Mana has a damage cap of 999. By the time you can actually reach that with spells, most bosses will have 3000+ HP, but then again, only two bosses in the entire game have over 5000HP. Also if you leveled up spells to "Level 9" (8:99), if you invoke a Level 9 animation, you effectively can't spam anymore.
  • Killing a boss in 4-6 hits is pretty dang game breaking. The level 9 animations slow down the magic spam but don't change the fact that the boss is being killed in 4-6 hits.
  • There's also the Sword Orb bug in Secret of Mana that you can exploit as soon as you get reliable means of transportation. If you exploit long enough, gives you a sword that can pretty much kill enemies in two hits, at most.
  • Having Blackpearl as your NPC assistant in Legend of Mana, since her support ability boosts your super meter to 100%. If you bother to learn Item Crafting, you can also deck yourself out with an arsenal of god-slaying that makes even the No Future Mode (ALL enemies lvl 99) a breeze.
• Player Punch: Some parts of some games are so depressing it hurts the psyche:
  • The Big Bad killing your Exposition Fairy in Trials of Mana.
  • All three major story arcs of Legend of Mana
  • What happens to Unlucky Childhood Friend Ritzia in Dawn of Mana
  • For an 8-bit game that came out in a time when Nintendo heavily censored most games, Final Fantasy Adventure has a lot of tragic Plotline Deaths. Naturally carries over in the remake Sword of Mana as well.
  • The death of the Mana tree just after finding out she was your mother in Secret of Mana. Also just about anything involving Purim (the female player character) and Dyluck.
• Quicksand Box: In Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana you could theoretically travel to any spot on the globe, but realistically it'd be a lot easier to take the path recommended by online walkthroughs and there are multiple choke points where you can't get past unless you have the right kind of magic.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) and 3 (Trials of Mana) were both vast improvements over their predecessors. (Seiken Densetsu was first released in the US as the underwhelming Final Fantasy Adventure.)
• That One Boss:
  • Spiky Tiger from Secret of Mana; fighting Vadise and Sierra in Legend of Mana can be a pain as well since Sierra will revive if you can't defeat Vadise quickly enough.
  • Legend of Mana also has the two Tropicallo fights, during which you can't attack it directly but can only take off a portion of its HP every time you defeat one of its tentacles. One casts magic at you nonstop unless you knock it off its perch, in which case it self destructs and takes a massive chunk of your HP, and the other attacks aggressively. Both continually respawn until the Tropicallo dies.
  • Trials of Mana had the second fight against the Bil and Ben, two ninjas who will always counter any spell (and Limit Breaks count as spells) with their ninjutsu.