You’ll notice that while I covered the first character spotlight trailer that introduced Angela and Duran, I didn’t put up anything for the second trailer with Charlotte and Kevin. That wasn’t a mistake; I find both of them so insufferable that I’ve never been able to make it more than an hour with either, and the addition of cringe-inducing voice acting hasn’t done anything to improve my opinion of them. Trials of Mana‘s third and final character spotlight trailer highlights desert thief Hawkeye and mountain princess Riesz, both party members I’ve gone with almost unerringly. I don’t like Riesz’s personality quite as much as Angela’s (though I’ve heard that she’s hugely popular in Japan for whatever reason), so she’s the first one to go whenever I try and fail to incorporate someone else into the party, but my party is usually made up of Hawkeye, Angela, and Riesz.

So! Let’s talk about the voice acting, which is a thing. A terrible, terrible thing. I miss the days of the Super Nintendo when most games didn’t have voice acting of any kind—yes, Star Ocean, Tales of Phantasia, and a few other games technically had voice acting to a limited degree, but most couldn’t find the space for anything like that—and had to communicate each character’s unique tone without being wordy. Voice acting in Japanese games is especially hit or miss, and Trials of Mana‘s voice acting is immediately a “miss.” I don’t know what they were thinking or why every Japanese developer insists on making their characters sound like generic anime characters/robots who have just barely learned how to communicate in English and speak each line in a vacuum devoid of previous lines’ context. There’s so little originality that it hurts my soul.

The combat looks a little floaty in this video, too, but that’s ultimately forgivable. The combat has always been one of the weakest elements of Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3. It’s mostly there to be suffered through to get to the latter’s interesting intersecting storylines, gorgeously creative pixel art/ambiance, and memorable soundtrack. I’ve never actually finished Secret of Mana because it doesn’t share those things with its sequel. At the very least, the combat still looks better than the fighting in the original game. That’s pretty much where I’m at with Trials of Mana in general: yes, the voice acting is terrible and the mechanics might be a little floaty, but it looks like it retains all of the interesting elements of the original game that count. The art looks decent (outside of being a little plastic-y), the class changes with permanent visual changes to the characters and encounters against large bosses can both be seen in the TGS 2019 trailer, and the music in the character spotlight trailer is so true to the original instrumentation that I have a lot of hope for the soundtrack despite Square-Enix’s track record of screwing up remakes.

Trials of Mana‘s third character spotlight shows off Hawkeye and Riesz first appeared on Killa Penguin