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This is a website dedicated to archiving material from Mana games that are no longer playable, and translating material that was only released in Japan.

Updates

  • New Friends of Mana Information from seesaawiki.jp

    In celebration of our long awaited one week anniversary, I have six new seesaawiki.jp webpage translations for you! This site has been a very insightful source of information so far, and has had many of the richer and more comprehensive pages I’ve translated. For today’s batch I chose the handful of pages that I thought were most interesting, and also avoided repeating too much of the information from wikiwiki.jp.

    What is FoM : This first page gives a general overview of the game including what sorts of elements make appearances from other games in the series, so it’s good for getting a very general sense of the game if you’re new to these
    Extras : For anybody interested in Friends of Mana’s relationship to Legend of Mana, this page has some good information. It also has info on the demo version of the game that came preinstalled on some softbank phones
    Competitive Puzzles : This page describes a competitive minigame, which is good insight into the sorts of online activities Friends of Mana offered
    Friends : Speaking of online activities, here’s the first thorough look we’ve gotten at online interaction with friends and other players, so it’s very much worth checking out as that was clearly a pivotal piece of the experience
    Time and Weekdays : This page describes the effects of time and the game’s week cycle, which is another important mechanic that we’ve been left largely to speculate on until now
    Music : Apparently Friends of Mana’s soundtrack consists of music from Legend of Mana. Some of the choices are a bit odd though, so it’s interesting to learn a bit about how they put that game’s soundtrack to use

    For anybody who hasn’t yet taken the time to look at the webpage translations, there’s a treasure trove of information on Friends of Mana waiting for you, including the entire contents of the Friends of Mana wiki at wikiwiki.jp. These pages cover everything from major characters to the various different types of wood that make an appearance, so I encourage you to take a trip to the Webpage Translations if this wacky old piece of Mana history has managed to pique your curiosity even a little.

  • Archive of Mana Official Launch

    Welcome to Archive of Mana! As it says on the home page, this is a website dedicated to archiving material from Mana games that are no longer playable, and translating material that was only released in Japan. This project has been in the works for a long time and we’re super excited to finally share it with Mana fans.

    This project came about by a mutual interest in Friends of Mana, a yearning to know more about it, and a yearning to share our findings with other fans. Up until now there has been so little information about this game in the west; all I knew of it for years was just a few screenshots and a very brief description of the game. For years I was under the assumption that it was a throwaway mobile game and not really a proper entry in the series. But as I started digging more and more I discovered that it had its own unique story and unique characters (in addition to some familiar faces), and some pretty robust gameplay systems. We felt that it was a crime that this game was just lost to time, and so we set out to paint as complete of a picture of the game as possible for English-speaking fans. We scoured the internet and compiled a gallery of over 150 images including screenshots, artwork and promotional material, archived the official flash website from back when the game was still active, compiled every Japanese website we could find that had information on the game, and then translated all of that.

    There’s a lot of other Mana material that’s on our bucket list to cover eventually (Ultimanias/Kaitai Shinshos, Rise of Mana, and Princess of Mana to name a few), but for now Friends of Mana is the meat of the website. We hope you enjoy discovering and learning about this game as much as we did.

    If you have any material that we are missing on the site, or if you’d like to help with translations, please reach out to us! You can find us in the Mana series discord: https://discord.gg/FdHPTeN6TJ

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