Quote:Richard Amtower is a localization writer for Nintendo, and he previously worked at Square making him perfectly suited to market the Brownie Brown-developed Sword of Mana for Game Boy Advance. We talked with him a little about the new RPG for Game Boy Advance.

N-Philes: First off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the development of Sword of Mana?

Rich Amtower: I’m a localization writer/editor, and usually that means that my role is to work with the translators to get, essentially, the best translation that we can out of a game; the best rewriting, creative writing problems, to basically get the best match of words and gameplay. To make text that fits the style of gameplay as well as the game’s art style.

For Sword of Mana my role was a little bit different because whereas if the localization needs help on this I’ve been operating more in a sort of marketing sense where I can handle as best as possible the questions you guys might have.

NP: How did you get interested in videogames, and what are some of your favorite games?

RA: The problem is I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been interested in games. My gaming experience goes back to Pong, and I have been a fan of gaming all of my life. I just sort of stumbled into a career accidentally when I had a job game testing. I started as a game tester and I had to sort of work my way through a number of companies popping hither and yon until I settled into what I think is a pretty fun career.

NP: What a lot of people don’t release is Sword of Mana is actually a remake of an old Game Boy game. Why was the decision made the remake Final Fantasy Adventure and not make a new Mana game?

RA: My suspicion is, and I say suspicion because I haven’t talked to Brownie Brown about this or anyone involved, that over the years the Mana series has evolved rather a lot. If you checked out Legend of Mana they introduced a very distinctive art style that separates the Mana series from other fantasy role-playing action/adventure games. They also introduced very memorable characters and when you look back at Final Fantasy Adventure, as I did when I first heard that the game was going to be remade, they really didn’t have much in the way of technology on the Game Boy to tell a really expressive story on that system. So when they decided to make Sword of Mana one of the key goals was to bring the art style inline with the art of Legend of Mana, but one of the other goals was to tie the original Mana game back into the Mana universe a little bit more. They’ve expanded the stories of all the characters, or fleshed out all of their roles within the story, added a lot of character depth, and also added a lot to the story and world depth as well. So while I can’t say for certain what their motivation was the end effect is that they’ve done a great job fleshing out this world as a whole and tying this game into the other Mana series game, and adding a lot of depth to the world that they had fleshed out in Legend of Mana.

NP: There are already a lot of good role-playing games for Game Boy Advance. What differentiates Sword of Mana from the rest of the good Game Boy Advance RPGs?

RA: Sword of Mana has a very different visual style than other role-playing games. It almost has a watercolor aspect to it where it feels much more like a fairy tale to me. The story itself also has a light fairy tale quality to it. The gameplay is very easy to get into. At first glance it feels like a sort of hack-and-slash type of battle, but as you get deeper into the game you start discovering not only a deeper magic, but also a relatively a pretty impressive character building quality as well.

In terms of leveling up you can spend your level up points in a number of different job classes. At first you think all your doing is upgrading specific skills like your power or your defense or your magic points based on what you’re picking, but after you start putting enough points towards a different skill you change levels and you wind up switching from a very general character to a much more specific character with strengths in swordwork, or in archery, or in elemental magic, or in defensive and healing magic. As you get deeper into the game and you spend more points developing your character your character becomes much more specialized to the kind of play you’ve been working towards.

NP: At the beginning of Sword of Mana you can choose to play as either the hero or heroine, how does this affect the game?

RA: Ultimately, the story works out to be pretty much the same, however, both the hero and heroine have very different starting points and they also have very different character motivations. The hero starts off as a gladiator who’s escaped from the slave gladiator pits of the Dark Lord and the heroine starts off having her entire village destroyed and going off in search of her real parents. Each one of them has a very different set of experiences to work from, and they experience the different story elements in very different ways. They come together very early on and they play through roughly, depending on if you playing as the hero or heroine, the same series of events, but every not and then if you’re playing as the hero the hero will go his separate way and you’ll have a story sequence with just the hero in it. Then later the heroine will join up again. There are a couple of different dungeon split points as well like in Devius Manor when the hero and heroine separated through actual gameplay sequences and the hero will have a different set of dungeon levels to work through than the heroine. Mostly it comes down to a matter of different perspectives on the same sequence of events. However, sometimes you get an entirely different set of events that the other character simply isn’t there to see. At one point the heroine is kidnapped. Playing as the heroine you get to see what happens to her when she gets kidnapped, and you get to help her make her escape. Playing as the hero when the heroine is kidnapped you have to work your way to find her only to find out that she has already escaped. So the end result is roughly the same, but the way that they get to where they’re going is totally different.

NP: How’s the multiplayer link-up system work in Sword of Mana, and what does it add to the game?

RA: The multiplayer link-up system is called the Amigo system. It’s pretty straightforward actually. If you’ve been played the game for a while, let’s say you’ve got a level 10 character in the game, if you link-up you transfer over your character data to your friend’s system and your friend transfers his data to your system and your character is added to your friend’s Amigo list. You can do this with a number of different friends and you can get a number of different Amigos on your Amigo list. Then once per day within the game you can use your Amigo whistle to call on all of your Amigos basically to come in and join in on a group attack. It is a way of helping to soften up some of the bosses or to clear out tough areas. In essence it amounts to a summon. If you get enough Amigos you actually start summoning things other than your Amigos. You start summoning these things called the Wisdoms that are very different summon attacks. So your incentive to link-up with your buddies is that you can work your way up to get these much more impressive summons that aren’t available any other way.

NP: How much input did Square-Enix and Nintendo have on the development?

RA: I’m not entirely sure how much Square-Enix was responsible for, how much Brownie Brown was responsible for, and how much Nintendo was responsible for. I think most of it came down to Brownie Brown’s work since they were the original Mana development team, but I couldn’t tell you how much input anyone had on the project afterward.

NP: What are the chances of another Mana game for Game Boy Advance?

RA: That I do not know, I’m sorry.

NP: Do you know what’s next for Brownie Brown?

RA: No, I’m sorry, but I also do not know that.

NP: I think that’s it. Thanks a lot.

RA: No worries. It’s been nice talking to you.

Quote:Oh, I was just reading the manual. OB1, you've complained a lot about the menu system. Did you know that, while in combat, when you go to the ring menu (Start) if you press L or R you will go straight into the Weapon and Magic screens? And once you choose a weapon or spirit it closes the ring menu. And then next time you press start you're on the same option you were before (not Weapon or Magic) -- making it easy to get into Item, where it usually is during battle. That makes your (and some reviews like IGNs I think) complaints about the ring system look pretty silly... see the kind of things you get when you read the manual?

Quote:You cannot kill most enemies with just one weapon and you know it. The ring system is crap--every reviewer has acknowledged that. They should have either made switching weapons as easy as a single button press or not make it so that you have to change your weapons so frequently.

Quote:To be honest I wish they kept Secret's weapon switching. It was as simple as going into the ring menu for weapons and selecting it like that. Same with magic. That made selecting spells and weapons VERY easy, regardless of having to pause the game to do it. The way they put item magic and weapon seleciton into SUB rings didn't help. Yes it's nice to have hotkeys, but considering that before it was only one level deep and now it's two, it's still awkward to get to it.

Quote:I'll only add that this doesn't defend them from the whole thing with the AI killing itself on those barrier sphere things like ABF was talking about. It would have been a simple enough thing to do to tell the AI that those are NOT targets and they would have ignored them completely (meaning if they were standing next to them for some OTHER reason, they would still get attacked over and over again, but still they wouldn't be walking TO them at least ).

Quote:Not true, not even remotely. Just because you and a few reviewers have some strange problem with a great system doesn't mean it is bad! I don't get you... how you can think so strongly that there is no way for anyone else's opinion to ever be right about this... oh I may defend my position too but I do not come even close to your level of certainty that everyone agrees with me. It's totally ridiculous. Everyone doesn't.

Ooh, so you have to press two buttons and then spin through the weapons and then press one more instead of pressing one button multiple times... OH SO HARD I CAN'T HANDLE IT!!!!1111`!!!!!!11

Seriously, it's simple, quick, and the best it could possibly be. Complaining is really stupid.

Quote:Oh puhLEEZ, you're the biggest complainer in the universe! Believe me, I checked! It's a very big problem, and it's one of the main reasons the game has gotten lower than expected scores from everyone. You're in the minority on this one.