Back when gray and white was the pinnacle of videogame display technology and thoughts of Sony entering the console race would have been branded as ludicrous, a little title from Squaresoft, now Square Enix, came out bearing the Final Fantasy moniker. However this game, Final Fantasy Adventures, would develop into its own series, known in Japan as the Seiken Densetsu.

Sword of Mana is a remake of Final Fantasy Adventure. The plot is fairly simple, though not devoid of choices, such as the gender of the main character. At the beginning players can choose either to go through the game as the Hero or Heroine. The story is very easy to follow so choosing one or the other will not hinder the experience.

After selecting one, you are brought up to speed with a quick history lesson of what has been going on in the world since the creation period, the life of your selected avatar and the current state of affairs. All in all, it isn't that pretty. That's where you come in, because through various twist and turns you'll be stuck - whether you like it as not - as the lone hope for the world.

To add some content to a story most role-playing game connoisseurs would consider light, side quests appear quite often. While some are very short, like being a bill collector for a friendly shop keep, others will take sometime to complete, such as delivering a certain delicacy to a relative of a loved one. This at least extends the gameplay, adding a few hours to a rather short title. While great amounts of time are not expected for a Game Boy Advance role-playing game, needing only 17 hours to complete the game can make you feel a little miffed, wondering why it wasn't longer.

Thankfully, Sword of Mana does quite well with the time you are playing it, offering a solid gameplay experience. The somewhat frantic pace of battles is offset once your character possesses the ability to use Spirits, which make most parts of the game fairly easy.

From time to time there is some slowdown when multitudes of enemy hordes appear on screen, but those times are far less frequent than the persistently sluggish battle animations. This is often found when the Hero enters his battle stance, slashing his sword across his body leaving a trail of something in the air. Whatever it is, it lingers far too long to be diced air.

Though this isn't as bad as the NPC who follows you around, tending to get stuck and die quite frequently. They lack the ability to serve as anything other than human shields in battle, which isn't too bad, actually, since those are always needed.

For the rest of this otherwise beautiful adventure, only few more problems make themselves evident, such as the item system, weapon system and the ebb and rise of difficulty. The weapon system suffers from requiring too much to forge new items. You'll need some rare type of random animal hide or metal to fashion one of your many weapons, from fail to spear to sword. Throw in tempering the weapons, which requires vegetables, and it's just another headache.

This lack of use is beat only by the item system, which seems to be devoid of a purpose. After getting the ability to heal with magic and sit to regenerate your magic points (mp), there's no need to use items for the most part. Status anomalies don't last long enough to really spend time digging through the item menu for what you want.

The main concern I had was the way in which the difficulty quickly switches in the game. For the first few hours there isn't too much in terms of puzzling puzzles to confuse the seasoned gamer, but later some boss fights turn out to be a complete pain because of the lack of damage you can do to that particular enemy. There is a definite lack of balance in difficulty, which could serve well to develop gamers, but that doesn't seem like the intention, if there was any behind these extreme swaps.

Sword of Mana is a game that stands above a fair amount of Game Boy Advance titles, but is still forced to bow to the ruling titles in terms of quality. The game is very fun, but some mistakes and lack of fine-tuning for certain elements keep it from what it could have been. The best thing that Sword of Mana accomplishes, other than providing around 17 hours of solid entertainment, is the setting of a stage for possible Game Boy Advance ports of the other titles in the Mana lineup.