## 2025-12-03 **Sword of Mana** was a Game Book Club pick in a Discord server I hang out in, so I figured now was as good a time to play it as any. It was pretty good overall! It’s held up quite well for a 2003 [[Game Boy Advance]] game. I slapped a QoL patch on top of it that lets you quick swap weapons and spirits and cleared it in about 20 hours. This has always been a white whale game for me. I had to pick between it and **Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced** as a kid, and ultimately went with the latter. And while I felt like I made the right choice, I do remember staring at the commercial for this game on the back of a Nintendo Power for weeks, agonizing over which one to get. Having now gone back to it, I still think I made the right choice, but that’s not really **Sword of Mana**’s fault — **FFTA** is just built different. But I’ll always have a soft spot for **Mana**, and this game is no different. The game has that trademark melancholic tinge that makes the series so special, and because Brownie Brown handled the development, it has the same gorgeous watercolor style that **Legend of Mana** does, but condensed to fit into a GBA cartridge. The game is fairly simplistic, much like its siblings, but still less clunky than **Secret of Mana**, which I’ll forever argue is just an okay game. Here you can swing a weapon whenever you want, which builds up a bar that you can then use for a powered up attack. You also have a button to cast elemental magic dependent on the spirit you have equipped. The way the magic is shot changes dependent on which of the six different weapons you have equipped. This is one of about 800 things the game doesn’t really explain to you in-game, and I found myself reading up on the PDF of the game’s manual for anything else I might have missed. The game has a pretty basic loop of cutscene → dungeon → town → cutscene, with a shockingly large amount of sidequests peppered throughout that I just didn’t engage with. There’s some variety as well, because you pick one of two protagonists, who separate and come back together at various points in the story. They have their own character arcs and dungeons, so it’s worth it to go through both campaigns to see what’s up. Pretty beefy for a GBA game! The cutscenes in question are surprisingly poignant for what I feel is positioned as a children’s game. There’s a *lot* of death in **Sword of Mana**, and a lot of it is senseless and sad. Nor are there any cop-outs — everyone who's gone is gone, and that’s it. There’s a lot of “why” to the plot that you can miss if you don’t pay close attention or play both routes, encouraging a replay as well. Though none of it is so high-brow that I’d call it literature, but it got me engaged enough to play it all twice, so that’s commendable. Overall I’m satisfied with my time playing **Sword of Mana**. Despite my aforementioned soft spot for the series, there’s fewer **Mana** games worth playing than there are worth skipping. But this game falls in the former camp, next to **Legends of Mana**, **Visions of Mana**, and both versions of **Trials of Mana**.