Topic: 2025/07: Legend Of Mana (PlayStation) - mechaskrom

[JonLeung]

Legend Of Mana

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to mechaskrom's Legend Of Mana (PlayStation) maps.

This is the 250th time we have recognized a set of maps as "Maps Of The Month"!  That's a quarter of a thousand beautiful games with great maps!  (If you include the five April Fool's jokes from 2005-2009, that makes this #255, but that's also a milestone number... in hexadecimal.)  A complete and fully-labelled map set for a truly gorgeous game would be ideal for the 250th selection, and we got that in mechaskrom's recent submission of maps for Legend Of Mana!

In the world of Fa'Diel, the Mana Tree is the giver of mana and life.  Recovering from an ancient war, the Mana Tree currently sleeps.  The hero - which is you - will set out for adventure, collecting artifacts that magically contain various lands and their residents.  By recovering and restoring these areas, you can freely shape Fa'Diel however you like, so venture out into your creation in this open-ended action-RPG in the acclaimed Mana series by Square.

Legend Of Mana is a visual feast, with beautifully-crafted 2D graphics (pixels placed perfectly, and this is on the original PlayStation, a platform that preferred to push polygons).  It's one of the best-looking games in a series already known for being stunning.  Shout-out to art director Kōji Tsuda and the many Square artists!  There are a couple dozen settings with varied environments, like the lush White Forest, the cozy Lumina, the cluttered Junkyard, the harsh Norn Peaks, and many others.  Longtime mapper mechaskrom has captured every pixel of every room and, while some areas do have a fair bit of repetition, that's all the more reason we need these maps!  While labelling treasure chests and room connections are essential for any good RPG map, mechaskrom made sure not to cover up any of the in-game graphics, so we can fully appreciate the magnificent pixel art.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping this incredibly beautiful action-RPG, mechaskrom's Legend Of Mana (PlayStation) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for July 2025.

[mechaskrom]

Thank you! 

Legend of Mana is a game I always wanted to play, but never got around to until last year. I thought it was pretty boring to play (too cryptic and unrewarding), but the graphics and music are amazing so I just had to map it.

It took me almost a year, which is the longest I've ever spent mapping a single game. Much of that time was actually spent just playing through the game multiple times and checking multiple guides to make sure I didn't miss anything (which I probably did anyway).

It's probably my biggest project too. I checked its folder and it contains 1662 png images and 399 paint net projects (mostly for dealing with layers). It was a lot of work, but I'm very happy with how the maps turned out.

The junkyard map is one of my favorites. That place is really confusing to navigate and in dire need of a map. It wasn't until I started mapping it that I realised it had two intertwined "sides" of similar rooms. A really clever and simple way to turn a place into a maze. I've never seen that construction before in any other game. Does anyone know of another game with a similar design?

There are many more 2D RPGs that I would like to map, but knowing how long time they take is daunting. 

[JonLeung]

Happy 26th birthday to Legend Of Mana!

It came out on this day (July 15) in 1999 in Japan.

I guess since Japan is 15 hours ahead of where I am, it's already past 4 AM on July 16 right now... oops.  Happy belated!

[eishiya]

Most Mana games aren't very satisfying to map because the "rooms" are disjoint (of course a Metroidvania map enthusiast would think that xP), so kudos for putting in all that work and making something interesting and useful!

I do have one tiny complaint though - the extra grey pixels in the text that were presumably added to smooth the font out for use at 2x size make it look blurry, and I kept checking if I was viewing the image at the correct zoom ): I think it would've looked better as just a straight Nearest Neighbor upscale without any smoothing. Or maybe even just 1x - the text is more legible large, but the maps are still at 1x and many details are hard to see without zooming in anyway, so the larger text doesn't have much benefit.

As for the Junkyard - that's interesting, and I don't think I've seen anything like that either. I think I've seen games with similar-looking sections, sometimes designed to be deliberately confusing, but nothing where some aspects (like the treasure chests) are shared between the "copies".

[mechaskrom]

Most Mana games aren't very satisfying to map because the "rooms" are disjoint (of course a Metroidvania map enthusiast would think that xP), so kudos for putting in all that work and making something interesting and useful!

Almost all the games I've mapped are "disjoint". It's a challenge to find good map layouts for them, but I kind of like that part in mapping projects. It's like putting together a puzzle with weird pieces that don't quite fit  .

I'm pretty happy with the layout of most of the LoM maps except Flames and Jungle. Theirs are really messy, but it was the best I could come up with after spending days trying out many different layouts.

I do have one tiny complaint though - the extra grey pixels in the text that were presumably added to smooth the font out for use at 2x size make it look blurry, and I kept checking if I was viewing the image at the correct zoom ): I think it would've looked better as just a straight Nearest Neighbor upscale without any smoothing. Or maybe even just 1x - the text is more legible large, but the maps are still at 1x and many details are hard to see without zooming in anyway, so the larger text doesn't have much benefit.

I only added grey pixels to the "thin" parts of characters. This made texts more legible when zoomed out (helps with downsampling fine shapes). I prefer maps that can be zoom fitted to the screen and still be used/read while playing the game so I don't have to constantly zoom in/out.

Doubling the font size was necessary to make texts readable even when zoomed out. A 1x font would've been way too small. 1x is what I use in the map title cards if people want to get an idea of just how small LoM's font is at its original size.

I don't find the 2x font with extra grey pixels to be distracting, blurry or too large even at 100% zoom, so for me it's only beneficial to the maps as texts are legible even when zoomed out a lot. Thanks for the feedback though, I'll keep it in mind for future mapping projects.

I've gotten some complaints over the years and almost all of them were about the maps' font: it's too small, too big, too blocky or too blurry. Oh well, it's hard to please everyone.