ecmyers

The town of Mistria was hit by an earthquake and they need more hands and more income to get it fixed. How do you lure in a sucker new resident to help? Offer them the nearby crappy overgrown farm and a chance at adventurous living, of course. Maybe the local dragon god will bless them with magic powers while they’re busy gathering forage and plying your population with gifts.

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Overall: As noted above, this version (the March 2025 update) is only version 0.13.3, which I’m guessing means there’s a lot of content they hope to add before calling it complete. Hell, by the time it’s “finished” my current save file might no longer be valid. I got to the lowest available part of the mines, got through all of the available town story quests, and did a full year (which meant I filled most of the museum). That’s probably enough to call this version “completed” until the next big update rolls around. This is cute and has a lot of potential, and I suspect a few of the bits I was most annoyed by (needing to collect So. Much. Wood. For one) will end up with workarounds eventually; along with plenty of additional quests and storyline. There’s certainly 30 hours of entertainment in the current version.

This is just an R36S in a horizontal format, which means it strongly resembles the Anbernic RG35XX-H and earlier 3.5” screen/horizontal form-factor line. It has pretty much exactly the same internals and software; to the point I suspect you could swap cards between them--It’s running ArcOS and EmuElec and plays most things decently, including managing some N64 and weaker PSP titles. (“Tier 2” is the standard for anything but the bottom-level crap at this point—even the $30 devices are playing SNES perfectly with cheat codes and fast-forward options.)

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Overall: While the build quality of the RG35XX-H is a little better, and the stock software is arguably a little better, there’s a lot to be said for getting this at half the price to fit the same form-factor and run basically all the same things.

Trials of Mana, known for some time by the Japanese name Seiken Densetsu 3, is the sequel to Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy Adventure. The original SNES game wasn’t released in the US until Collection of Mana, but it was originally fan-translated 25 years ago in the early days of emulation. I was inspired by the Talking Time Mana games thread to go back and replay Trials for the first time in forever...and I was reminded of why I keep replaying Secret (and FFA) but not Trials. For the record, I played the SNES rom that had the new translation patched on, on my Trimui Smart Pro because I wanted access to cheats; but I’m led to believe that it’s basically identical to the Collection version.

The game has some really clever ideas! There are six characters with interwoven storylines, and you choose a party of three, so you only see pieces of the other plots (and your main character gets a unique prologue). The game sets up three different groups of antagonists, and the one specific to your main character eventually triumphs over the other two in their race to take Mana power and conquer the world. Which means that there are three unique final dungeons and final bosses, depending on your character choice.

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So then I broke out the copy of the 3D remake of Trials of Mana that’s been sitting on my backlog. It’s significantly better in a number of major respects! Honestly, it’s like they read my review and addressed each of my complaints.

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Overall: The 3D remake of the game is a big improvement over the original, which I feel like is not something you usually hear me say about SNES classics.