Children of Mana

Screenshots

Notes

Children of Mana is one of the lower rated games on the list, which I included because Sword of Mana on the GBA has a particular place in my heart.

It's not a direct sequel, but a spin-off. CoM is pretty much a pure dungeon crawler. There are 8 dungeons to play through, with a single hub town that contains all the NPCs and shops for the game.

It's super grindy. It's basically mandatory to do a bunch of grinding between story dungeons, as you'll get stomped if you try to go to the next dungeon too early. That's purely numerical too, you'll be taking too much damage ,your HP will be too low, and it will take too many hits to finish off enemies (which you have to kill by the dozen to progress).

The game has some randomization. If it came out today they would try and spin it as a roguelike/lite. It's not really well done enough to carry the rest of the game though, you start to recognize floors quickly, especially given the grinding required.

The loot system doesn't help with the grindy elements. There are a very limited number of items and gems that will drop from given enemies, and you have a low limit to how many of each kind you can carry. No diablo-style loot accumulation, just piles of identical junk to sell off.

Also excaberating all this is the fact that all the menus have way too many clicks to get things done and slow transitions on every single click.

Overall, just falls down and becomes kind of unfun, despite a decent core gameplay. Lacking content and way too grindy.