And by only focusing on one of those stories, The Teardrop Crystal fails to make the world feel so alive. The beauty of Legend of Mana is how alive the world feels, no singular story is the main focus of the game and instead there is always something small going on for you to discover.

I liked the story of the Jumi arc a lot in the game, but when you remove all the other smaller stories surrounding it and turn the Jumi arc into the central story of a 12 episode anime, it really starts to show its weakness. The anime staff didn't know what they're doing.Įven after cutting out the vast majority of the game's story and characters, The Teardrop Crystal's attempt at turning this into a linear story is mediocre at best. If the anime staff knows what they're doing then this could turn into something really special. Cutting out huge portions of a game's story and only adapting one arc of it sounds like it would be a bad idea, but as I said, it's important for video game adaptations to take as many liberties as possible, and maybe only adapting the Jumi arc is the best way to go if you want to turn Legend of Mana into an anime. The solution the anime's staff came up with was to only adapt the Jumi storyline (hence the subtitle The Teardrop Crystal) and ignore every quest that's not directly related to it. If you simply adapt a video game directly to anime you are going to end up with a complete mess, a good adaptation of a video game needs to take as many liberties as possible to fit into the different medium.

Not only that, but anime and video games are very different mediums, and even for a linear video game story, adapting it into an anime is extremely difficult. and seeing how everything eventually connects to each other, so turning it into an anime with a linear story would completely remove a huge part of what made the game so special for me. When the anime was announced I couldn't help but wonder, how on earth are they going to turn such a non-linear game into an anime? I love Legend of Mana's story for its non-linearity Eventually some of these side quests start to form into three distinct branches: the Jumi arc, the Faerie arc and the Dragon arc, and these three arcs form the core of the game's story.

However it is also a very unconventional game, where instead of following a linear story, it consists of multiple unrelated side quests that you complete in a mostly non-linear order.

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