In the waning years of the last millennium, Squaresoft was high off of Final Fantasy VII’s monumental success, and unleashed a salvo of roleplaying games on Sony’s PlayStation console. They were wildly imaginative games that, despite not having the budget of a mainline Final Fantasy title, had a creative and technical mastery that deserved just as much attention.
The finish line at the end of the generation bought the “Summer of Adventure”: Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, Threads of Fate, and Legend of Mana. Me, as a young teen, had the summer sprawled before me to delve into these new RPGs. I filled notebooks with information and light sketches of characters. I fell asleep in the dim glow of a tube TV with Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, or Yoko Shimomura at just the right volume to not disturb my parents. Halcyon days.
Legend of Mana was an endless fascination. Admittedly, it's one of my favorite games ever. Rather than tell a typical story from start to finish, everything had a modular design. Stories told within this world - split up into individual events and scattered about - with the intention of you finding the next chapter rather than simply proceeding to it. You
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