Legend of Mana: How Square Built an RPG Around Player Freedom

When Legend of Mana begins, the player is given something unusual for a role-playing game. There is no great kingdom waiting to be crossed, no carefully drawn continent filled with towns and roads, and no obvious path toward a final destination. Much of the world of Fa’Diel is simply missing.

The player has to put it back.

Artifacts collected during the adventure can be placed onto the empty map, causing towns, forests, caves, deserts, ruins, and other locations to appear. Characters emerge with them. New quests become available. Stories that did not seem connected begin to overlap, while other events may remain hidden until the player discovers the right combination of places and people.

For players who came to the game expecting another Secret of Mana, the structure could be bewildering. Yet the unusual design was not an accident, nor was it a failed attempt to reproduce the earlier games in the series. Legend of Mana was built around a different question.

How much of an RPG could Square allow the player to define?

Released for the original PlayStation in Japan on July 15, 1999, Legend of Mana represented the fourth major entry in Square’s Seiken Densetsu series. It was the first built for Sony’s console and the first new Mana game that North American players had officially received since Secret of Mana six years earlier. Instead of simply translating the Super Nintendo formula into a new generation, director Koichi Ishii and his team used the opportunity to reconsider what a Mana game could be.

From SaGa Frontier to a New Kind of Mana

The origins of Legend of Mana reached into another of Square’s experimental role-playing series.

In the development roundtable published in the game’s 1999 Ultimania, Ishii explained that several of the ideas behind Legend of Mana had originated in concepts he proposed early in the development of SaGa Frontier. Among them were ideas called the World Make System, Monster Ecosystem System, and World Link System. Akihiko Matsui contributed the idea of using Artifacts as event items, another concept that eventually found its way into Legend of Mana.

At the same time, Ishii and battle chief Hiroshi Takai had been discussing what kind of game they wanted to make next. Their conversations kept returning to freedom. Rather than construct another RPG in which players followed a predetermined sequence, they imagined something closer to a box of toys. A player who wanted to fight could fight. Someone interested in forging weapons could devote time to forging. Another player might raise monsters, grow produce, explore towns, search for events, or experiment with the systems simply to see what happened.

That philosophy separated Legend of Mana from the conventional idea of an RPG sequel.

After work on SaGa Frontier, members of its staff divided between SaGa Frontier 2 and what became Legend of Mana. The connection remained visible. Ishii readily acknowledged the resemblance, describing the freedom to play however one wanted as something that could be associated with the philosophy of SaGa. Yet he also saw Mana and SaGa as different answers to the same larger question about what made games enjoyable.

In Legend of Mana, that answer began with letting the player create the world.

Building Fa’Diel One Artifact at a Time

The Land Make system became the clearest expression of the game’s philosophy.

The player begins with a home and gradually acquires Artifacts representing locations. Placing an Artifact on the map causes its corresponding Land to appear. The process is not merely a decorative world-map editor. Creating a new location introduces new characters and events, and those events can lead to additional Artifacts that expand Fa’Diel farther.

The result is an RPG in which exploration begins before the player even enters a dungeon. Choosing where to place something is itself part of constructing the adventure.

Ishii’s original plans were even more elaborate. The team considered allowing Artifacts to be placed onto existing Lands to add new institutions or features. Another idea would have allowed two Lands to be combined into something different. Those concepts were ultimately abandoned, but Ishii believed the finished Land Make system had only begun to explore what could be done with the idea.

The system also explains why Legend of Mana can initially feel so different from traditional role-playing games. A familiar RPG map usually establishes geography before the story begins. Mountains explain borders. Roads explain travel. Towns have fixed relationships with neighboring kingdoms.

Fa’Diel instead grows around the player.

The world becomes something remembered and reconstructed rather than simply discovered. The effect gives the game a dreamlike quality. Places can feel less like points on a conventional continent and more like illustrations being returned to a storybook one page at a time. Square Enix would later emphasize precisely this identity when describing the remastered game, presenting Land Make as the system through which Artifacts make towns, forests, people, and stories appear.

Sixty-Eight Stories Instead of One Long Quest

The world was not the only part of Legend of Mana broken into pieces.

Its story was built the same way.

According to the development team, production began with staff members writing relatively small stories rather than constructing one enormous central narrative. Several of those ideas expanded until three major story arcs formed the backbone of the game.

Nobuyuki Inoue’s storyline centered on Escad and the conflicts surrounding characters such as Daena, Matilda, and Irwin. Miwa Shoda developed the Jewel Thief story involving the Jumi, Elazul, Pearl, and Sandra. Masato Yagi developed the Dragon Killer storyline involving Larc, Sierra, and the dragons.

The writers were not trying to tell the same kind of story three times. Each arc explored different themes. Shoda remembered wanting the Jumi story to avoid reducing its conflict to one correct side, allowing characters to view justice from different perspectives. Yagi focused on bonds between characters in the Dragon Killer story. Other quests were allowed to be humorous, strange, melancholy, or almost completely detached from the larger conflicts.

The Mana Tree itself was not originally the organizing center of everything. The developers later realized that the game needed events more directly connected to the traditional Mana themes, so those elements were added to the expanding structure.

The developers had expected somewhere between forty and one hundred events.

The finished game contained sixty-eight.

Instead of one continuous epic, players encountered stories in fragments. A quest could begin, reach its own conclusion, and effectively close like a short tale before another appeared somewhere else in Fa’Diel. Major characters might dominate several hours and then disappear while the player became involved with merchants, musicians, pirates, students, monsters, or people whose problems seemed completely unrelated to the fate of the world.

For some players, this became the game’s greatest strength. For others, it became its greatest weakness.

Both reactions were understandable because the fragmentation was built into the foundation of the game.

Crafting a Game Around Things Other Than the Main Story

The development team’s fixation on freedom did not stop with Land Make and storytelling.

Legend of Mana contains weapon forging, armor creation, tempering, instrument making, magic, monster raising, produce growing, golem construction, special techniques, abilities, multiplayer elements, and other systems that can consume far more time than the central progression requires.

That abundance reflected an early rule within the project. The developers did not want these activities to feel like meaningless bonus features attached to the side of an RPG. They wanted the different pieces to feel as though they belonged to the same larger world.

The ambition quickly became enormous.

Early versions of the pet system envisioned monsters evolving into different forms depending on how they were raised. The orchard was considered for a more complicated agricultural system in which produce might deteriorate if neglected and players could improve crop yields through additional management. The team hoped to expand golems further as well.

Not all of it survived.

Even the battle design resisted some traditional RPG conventions. Takai explained that he disliked forcing players back to a save screen after death. The automatic recovery of health during combat came from a similar desire to keep players concentrating on movement and avoiding attacks rather than repeatedly stopping the action to heal.

The goal was not simply to make the game easier. It was to keep the player engaged with the act of playing.

Near the end of the Ultimania discussion, Takai summarized the philosophy particularly well. The team did not want the game to play the player. They wanted the player to play the game. Ishii compared the idea to people creating their own house rules for board games, hoping Legend of Mana would encourage players to discover their own style rather than merely follow instructions.

Painting Fa’Diel by Hand

The PlayStation era was rapidly pushing major games toward three-dimensional graphics, but Legend of Mana deliberately moved in another direction.

Its characters and monsters remained hand-drawn sprites moving across richly illustrated environments.

Ishii believed the PlayStation’s polygonal characters were not yet capable of expressing the emotional quality he wanted. For Legend of Mana, traditional art could make characters feel more alive. Designer Toshiaki Matsumoto agreed, particularly when considering expressive bosses whose faces and movements would lose detail if translated into the angular polygons available at the time.

The art team took advantage of that choice.

Matsumoto had previously worked on darker projects such as Final Fantasy Tactics and wanted an opportunity to create something brighter and more colorful. He also hoped to give monsters a richness of animation that reminded him of fighting games. Koji Tsuda created the game’s elaborate backgrounds, while Noriko Sasaki worked on regular monsters, pets, golems, and spirits.

The size of Fa’Diel still had to be reduced from the team’s early ambitions.

Tsuda recalled that twelve towns were originally planned. The workload eventually forced the number down to seven. Plans for additional caves and forests were also reduced, leaving surviving locations such as the White Forest and Jungle as traces of a much larger original plan.

Even the people inhabiting the world were shaped by an unusual design restriction.

Ishii did not want the team simply filling Fa’Diel with ordinary human beings. Designers were encouraged to make its inhabitants stranger. The result was a world of Sproutlings, Jumi, animal-like characters, unusual merchants, magical students, talking creatures, and figures who sometimes seem to belong more naturally in folklore than in a conventional fantasy kingdom.

It helped make Legend of Mana recognizable from a single screenshot.

Yoko Shimomura and the Sound of Fa’Diel

The visual world required music capable of holding together a game that constantly changed tone.

That task went to Yoko Shimomura.

By the time of Legend of Mana, Shimomura had already contributed to games including Street Fighter II, Super Mario RPG, Front Mission, and Parasite Eve. For Legend of Mana, she composed the game’s score and wrote the original lyrics for “Song of Mana.”

Her first instinct was to give the fantasy world a wistful and nostalgic musical identity.

Ishii occasionally pushed in unexpected directions. During the 1999 roundtable, Shimomura remembered being surprised when he wanted one boss theme to carry the energy of a professional wrestler’s entrance music. When she asked about music for part of the Escad story, Ishii even suggested enka.

The most unusual musical decision concerned the game’s vocal theme.

The team wanted a female voice but did not want the lyrics to be Japanese or English. They associated the landscapes and architecture of the Mana world with northern Europe and began searching for a language and vocalist that fit the atmosphere. They eventually chose Swedish.

Shimomura first wrote the lyrics in Japanese. They were then translated through English and finally into Swedish, with revisions made before recording.

The result helped separate Legend of Mana musically from Square’s other PlayStation RPGs. Quiet town melodies, melancholic character themes, energetic battles, and the Swedish vocals worked alongside the painted backgrounds to give Fa’Diel an identity that did not depend upon technical spectacle.

Square Enix’s official soundtrack release contains fifty-five tracks across two discs and continues to credit Shimomura’s music as one of the defining parts of the game. More than two decades later, the company would return to the score rather than replace it, arranging and remastering the music under Shimomura’s supervision for the 2021 release.

A PlayStation CD Filled Almost to the End

For a game about freedom, Legend of Mana repeatedly collided with physical limits.

The developers had entered the CD-ROM era expecting storage to be far less restrictive than the cartridges of earlier consoles. Then the project kept expanding.

Systems multiplied. Events multiplied. Characters multiplied. Monsters, backgrounds, music, animation, and items all demanded space.

By Ishii’s recollection, the team ultimately used nearly the entire disc, leaving only about two minutes of CD capacity unused.

That pressure explains the trail of abandoned ideas preserved in the development interviews.

Land Make was simplified. Combining Lands disappeared. Pets lost their planned evolutionary system. Orchard mechanics were reduced. Boss introduction sequences never materialized. An unused swamp reached the point of having graphical material prepared. Character options were reduced. Ideas for significantly more weapon types were scaled back.

The monster workload could have become particularly extreme. One proposal would have given monsters multiple evolutionary forms, potentially pushing the required designs into the hundreds.

The development history therefore reveals an interesting contradiction.

Legend of Mana feels enormous because so many systems survived, yet the game players received was already a reduced version of an even more ambitious plan.

The developers had not struggled to find enough ideas to fill Fa’Diel. They struggled to stop adding them.

Bringing Legend of Mana to North America

For North American Mana fans, the wait carried additional weight.

Secret of Mana had appeared on the Super Nintendo in 1993 in Japan and 1993 in North America, but Seiken Densetsu 3 never received an official North American release during the 16-bit era. By 2000, players had gone years without a new localized Mana game.

Square Electronic Arts originally planned Legend of Mana for later in June, then moved the release forward. RPGamer reported on May 25, 2000 that the game would arrive June 6 at a suggested retail price of $39.99 and emphasized that it was the first Mana release in North America in six years. Contemporary GameSpot sales reporting also identifies June 6 as the release date, although some modern databases list June 7.

The localization itself required translators to confront the same nonlinear structure that players would.

Brody Phillips, who later worked on Final Fantasy IX, remembered Legend of Mana as his first Square localization project. Because game text was organized according to the locations loaded into memory, translators could not simply work through the story from beginning to end. Dialogue had to be divided according to places and files, an awkward arrangement for a game already constructed from branching events.

Amanda Jun Katsurada, another member of the localization staff, later recalled playing through earlier Mana games while preparing for the project so that she could understand the series and the expectations surrounding its world. She also remembered the game’s randomized character-name list causing confusion because Square did not yet have the kind of comprehensive terminology records that modern localization teams might expect.

The localization therefore had to do more than convert Japanese sentences into English. It had to preserve relationships between names, concepts, locations, jokes, and scattered story events inside one of Square’s least linear RPGs.

The Reviews Were Almost as Fragmented as the Game

Japanese players encountered Legend of Mana first in the summer of 1999.

Contemporary reporting from Japan described heavy retail promotion around the launch, while Famitsu reviewers awarded scores of 8, 8, 8, and 7 for a total of 31 out of 40. Early import reviewers were immediately struck by the graphics and the freedom of its structure.

When the English version arrived in 2000, critical reaction exposed the central divide surrounding the game.

GameSpot’s Andrew Vestal gave Legend of Mana a 7 out of 10. He praised its elaborate two-dimensional presentation and music but argued that the Land Make system and sequence of miniquests made the world and storyline feel fragmented. The review also criticized its limited approach to multiplayer compared with the reputation established by earlier Mana games.

Other reviewers saw the same qualities and responded more positively.

RPGFan’s Cameron Hamm argued that players looking for a single focused epic might be disappointed but found much to enjoy in the unusual structure. Damian Thomas remembered being worried before release that the game would resemble SaGa Frontier because of its collection of smaller stories, yet ultimately viewed the experiment far more favorably. Andrew DeMario, reviewing the game for the same outlet, was considerably less enthusiastic.

The disagreement is revealing.

Critics were not usually arguing over whether Legend of Mana was unusual. Everyone could see that it was.

They were arguing over whether being unusual had made it better.

Sales, Awards, and a Fast Return to Store Shelves

Whatever disagreements existed among reviewers, Legend of Mana found a substantial audience.

Contemporary GameSpot reporting states that Square Electronic Arts announced the game as the best-selling PlayStation title in the United States for the week of June 4 through June 10, citing NPD retail information.

Its performance in Japan brought additional recognition.

Sony’s historical PlayStation Awards archive lists Legend of Mana among the Gold Prize recipients for 2000. At the Fourth Japan Game Awards, the game received the Graphics Award, recognition that fit particularly well with a title that had chosen elaborate hand-drawn imagery during an era increasingly fascinated with polygons.

Square also returned the game to Japanese stores quickly.

In September 2000, Legend of Mana became part of the Square Millennium Collection. The special package included miniature figures and a music box, making the game one of several prominent PlayStation-era Square titles selected for the commemorative line.

The experimental RPG had not become a forgotten side project.

It had become part of Square’s PlayStation identity.

The Mana Game That Returned in 2021

For years, however, Legend of Mana remained unusually difficult to experience outside Japan and North America.

The original game had never received a European release.

That history became one of the motivations behind Square Enix’s decision to revisit it. Mana series producer Masaru Oyamada later explained that part of his goal was to make the series available more broadly around the world. He had played Legend of Mana extensively as a student and remembered being overwhelmed by how much there was to discover. When he eventually became responsible for the remaster, the challenge was not reinventing the game but preserving what its devoted audience already loved.

The HD remaster arrived in 2021.

Background artwork was redrawn for higher resolutions, the original 4:3 presentation was adapted for wider screens, interface elements were updated, and players could switch between the original music and rearranged versions. Square Enix also restored Ring Ring Land, a mini-game associated with Sony’s PocketStation that had never previously been available to Western players.

Ring Ring Land itself had an appropriately strange development history.

Oyamada said Ishii had told him the PocketStation content was created extremely late, at a time when the master build was already behind schedule. More than twenty years later, something created under that last-minute pressure became part of the effort to preserve a more complete version of the game.

The remaster also marked the first official opportunity for many players outside Japan and North America to experience Legend of Mana. Square Enix openly highlighted that point when promoting the release.

Why Legend of Mana Still Feels Different

Looking back, Legend of Mana occupies an unusual place in Square’s PlayStation history.

It arrived during a period when the company was producing some of the most technically ambitious role-playing games in the industry, yet it deliberately embraced hand-drawn sprites and painted backgrounds. It belonged to one of Square’s best-known action RPG series, yet borrowed design thinking from the experimental freedom associated with SaGa. It offered dozens of stories instead of forcing every character into one epic narrative, and it handed part of the responsibility for creating the world itself to the player.

Those decisions made the game difficult to judge by the standards of Secret of Mana.

They also explain why it has endured.

Modern players live in an era filled with open worlds, crafting systems, player-directed progression, optional stories, customizable spaces, creature raising, and games designed to be approached in dramatically different ways. Legend of Mana did not invent all of those ideas, and its systems do not function like modern sandbox games, but the philosophy behind it feels remarkably familiar.

Ishii and his team were already asking what would happen if a role-playing game stopped insisting that everyone experience it in the same order.

Their answer was Fa’Diel.

It was a world assembled from Artifacts, short stories, strange characters, hand-painted landscapes, elaborate systems, melancholy music, abandoned ideas, and nearly every remaining minute of a PlayStation CD.

Some players found the result disjointed in 1999 and 2000. Others saw exactly what the developers had hoped they would see: a game that belonged partly to the people who made it and partly to the person holding the controller.

That tension is not something history has erased from Legend of Mana.

It is the reason the game remains interesting.

Sources & Further Reading

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“Legend of Mana: 1999 Developer Interview.” Shmuplations. Translation of the development roundtable originally published in Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana Ultimania, 1999. https://shmuplations.com/legendofmana/

Square. Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana. PlayStation. Tokyo: Square, 1999.

Square Electronic Arts. Legend of Mana Instruction Manual. PlayStation. Costa Mesa, CA: Square Electronic Arts, 2000. https://legendofmana.info/_assets/files/lom-manual.pdf

Famitsu Bros. Editorial Department. Seiken Densetsu Legend of Mana: Making of Mana. Tokyo: ASCII, 1999. https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-01-9784756131485

Square Enix. “Mana Series 30th Anniversary.” Creator-comment archive. 2021. https://www.jp.square-enix.com/mana30th/

Square Enix. “30 Years of Mana: Creators Talk Legend of Mana.” 2021. https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_EU/news/30-years-mana-masaru-oyamada-hiroshi-takai

Square Enix. “30 Years of Mana: Series Creator Koichi Ishii Looks Back on Three Decades of Magic.” June 28, 2021. https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_US/news/30-years-mana-koichi-ishii

Square Co. Securities Report for the Fiscal Year Ending March 2000. Tokyo: Square Co., 2000. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/jpn/pdf/fs_20000625_01.pdf

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SquareSoft. “Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana.” Advertisement. Play Online, no. 15, September 1999. https://www.kingpin.info/download/kingpin/media/magazine/Play_Online_Issue_015_%28Japanese%29_1999-09.pdf

Square Enix. Seiken Densetsu Legend of Mana Original Soundtrack. Music by Yoko Shimomura. Square Enix Music, 2004. https://www.jp.square-enix.com/music/en/lineup/item/SQEX-10036-37.html

Jeriaska. “Interview: Magical Planet: The Music of Hiroki Kikuta & Yoko Shimomura.” Game Developer, August 31, 2009. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/interview-magical-planet—the-music-of-hiroki-kikuta-yoko-shimomura

Kawazu, Akitoshi. Liner notes for Seiken Densetsu Music Complete Book. Translated by Video Game Music Online. https://vgmonline.net/seikendensetsuboxliners/

McFerran, Damien. “‘I Was Pretty Much Living in the Office’: Kingdom Hearts Translator on Chocobo Racing, Naming Tidus, and Vagrant Story.” Time Extension, 2026. Interview with Amanda Jun Katsurada. https://www.timeextension.com/features/interview-i-was-pretty-much-living-in-the-office-kingdom-hearts-translator-on-chocobo-racing-naming-tidus-and-vagrant-story

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Square Enix and QBist. Legend of Mana: The Art of Mana, 30th Anniversary Edition. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2026. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/817368/legend-of-mana-the-art-of-mana–30th-anniversary-edition-by-editing-writing-design-and-dtp-by-qbist-inc-with-planning-and-production-by-square-enix/

RPGamer. “Legend of Mana Japanese Date Set, Other News.” June 26, 1999. https://archive.rpgamer.com/news/Q2-1999/062699a.html

Kennedy, Sam. “Japan Prepares for Mana.” GameSpot, July 1999. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/japan-prepares-for-mana/1100-2450722/

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Weekly Famitsu. July 30, 1999. Postrelease Legend of Mana feature and strategy coverage. https://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/ZNON11442

Chu, Ken. “Legend of Mana.” Import review. RPGFan, August 20, 1999. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana-5/

Tan, Jeremy. “Legend of Mana.” Import review. RPGFan, December 25, 1999. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana-4/

Mattich, Ryan. “Legend of Mana.” Import review. RPGFan, January 23, 2000. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana-7/

RPGamer. “Legend of Mana Will Be Released Early.” May 25, 2000. https://archive.rpgamer.com/news/Q2-2000/052500b.html

Vestal, Andrew. “Legend of Mana Review.” GameSpot, June 7, 2000. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legend-of-mana-review/1900-2584020/

Bilyk, Andrew P. “Different Is Good.” RPGamer. Review of Legend of Mana. 2000. https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/sd/sd4/reviews/sd4strev1.html

Hamm, Cameron. “Legend of Mana.” RPGFan, June 20, 2000. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana-2/

Thomas, Damian. “Legend of Mana.” RPGFan, June 20, 2000. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana-3/

DeMario, Andrew. “Legend of Mana.” RPGFan, June 21, 2000. https://www.rpgfan.com/review/legend-of-mana/

GameSpot. “Legend of Mana Grabs Top Spot.” 2000. Contemporary report using NPD/TRST sales data for the June 2000 North American launch. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/legend-of-mana-grabs-top-spot/1100-2589650/

Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 133. “Legend of Mana.” August 2000, 149.

Reyes, Francesca. “Legend of Mana.” Next Generation, August 2000, 94.

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Day, Ashley. “The Secrets of Mana.” Retro Gamer, no. 85, February 2011, 24–31.

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RPGamer. “Square Millennium Collection 2 Revealed.” July 18, 2000. https://archive.rpgamer.com/news/Q3-2000/071800d.html

MobyGames. “Legend of Mana.” Game database and credits archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/4165/legend-of-mana/

MobyGames. “Legend of Mana: Promotional Materials.” Advertisement and promotional-material archive. https://www.mobygames.com/game/4165/legend-of-mana/promo/

National Diet Library. Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana: Amata no Chi, Amata no Hito. Bibliographic record. 2000. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000002935832

KADOKAWA. Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana manga publication record. https://www.kadokawa.co.jp/product/200700001652/

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