I've been a devoted fan of the Square Enix's Mana series for a long time and I have no trouble admitting that Secret of Mana is one of my favorites video games of all time. For this reason I was quite exciting to find out (this was months ago) that Square was releasing one of the last games to hit the PS2, Dawn of Mana. Being a late game it was exciting not only because I have a PS2 but because the developers would be able to really take advantage of the hardware. Throw in Havoc physics and some killer graphics, and you have yourself a great game, right? Once again we learn that the answer is "Not so much...". What Square has been trying to do with other not-so-great titles like Heroes of Mana and Children of Mana is to make the World of Mana games into another big series for them, one that can counterbalance Final Fantasy. To do this they have been pumping out Mana games like crazy for every system available, in hopes that the series will catch on and people like myself, who have liked some of the games in the past will become rabid fans. Well, it's not happening. The new Mana games, namely Children of Mana for the DS and Dawn of Mana for the PS2 are definitely worth skipping, even if you loved Secret of Mana. And I don't even mean don't buy them (like I did), I mean go ahead and play something else. I'm not going to get into a long review for either one, as I originally intended, but I would feel remiss if I did not take a few minutes to voice my displeasure. Dawn of Mana is an action RPG, as you would expect from Mana, but moves to a 3D style with a lot of interaction with the environment. The game is beautiful, but the gameplay is terrible. After a few hours of playing the game I was still not used to the controls and found it practically impossible to master the commands. I was very impressed with how the game looks, but the action is all about knocking enemies into one another so as to scare them, so there is so much reliance on the physics of knocking enemies together and rolling rocks and logs (etc.) into them that almost all of the good action is lost. The game ended up being a mess of hectic action where you spend entirely too much time swinging around a vine from your arm and searching around for powerups to replenish your magic supply. Children of Mana is a DS game that looks just like you would expect a Mana game to. It is, in almost all aspects, not bad, but it is not great either. The game is tedious and extremely repetitive and after getting through less than half of the game I felt no reason to keep on playing. I did keep plugging away at it, just because I had spent about $30 on the game, but it was not enough to keep me interested. In the end the game was a simple dungeon crawler with a few cool weapons (the hammer is awesome), but really unimpressive magic capabilities and a plot that is not worth following. There was very little feeling of building up to anything and all you can do is keep playing until it's over. I like the gem system of powerups, but this is not nearly enough to salvage this unexceptional game. I would recommend that Mana fans check out this http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Podcasts/Retronauts/051007.mp3%20" target="_blank">Retronauts podcast, it goes over a lot of my thoughts and has some very interesting retro-gaming discussion (though it's really long). Metacritic sums things up well (Dawn of Mana / Children of Mana) and I think the respective scores of 56 and 66 are right on the money.  That's really all there is to say- Dawn of Mana was not looking great, but I let myself get excited about it, despite what everyone said,  and I was totally let down. In Children of Mana I was hoping for something entertaining to pass the time while commuting, but it ended up being unexciting and I would have been better off if I had kept on playing Advance Wars.