Legend of Mana is infamous for its strange leveling and character upgrading systems. While this game is, in many opinions, one of the best of the Mana series, it isn't an easy game to master. The abilities system is probably one of the most unique and the most challenging.
What are Abilities in Legend of Mana?
While Legend of Mana is originally an SNES title, Nintendo Switch owners can pick up this older title and others from the Mana series in the Collection of Mana. This 21-year-old title will offer players a unique story, interesting challenges, and one of the most unintuitive abilities systems of all time. Abilities are move actions that characters can use, and players can equip two abilities on any character at a time. These can be used in combat and also used to unlock special moves for character's weapons.
How to Learn New Abilities
Oddly enough, new abilities in Legend of Mana for the Nintendo Switch and the SNES are learned by equipping combinations of certain abilities on during combat. The required abilities have to be on the character for about 20 battles or so, then it will unlock the new ability that combines the two previous ones. Players start out with eight abilities at the beginning of the game, and they can be combined together in a variety of ways.
However, the abilities continue to level even if they are not equipped together. Therefore if a player has high enough level of unequipped Ability A and gain enough experience to earn a high enough level of Ability B, even if they are not equipped together on the character at the time, the new ability will still be learned. This is true whether players dusted off their SNES to play Legend of Mana or have it in the Collection of Mana for the Switch.
List of Abilities and How to Unlock Them
Players start with the first eight basic abilities, which are:
- Jump
- Defend
- Retreat
- Lunge
- Crouch
- Cheer
- Spin
- Push
In order to unlock the rest, players will need to combine the basic movements and level each of them up.
- Jump + Lunge = Somersault
- Jump + Retreat = Back-roll
- Jump  + Crouch = High-jump
- Jump  + High-jump = Double-jump
- Defend  + Push = Grapple
- Defend  + Lunge = Defensive Lunge
- Grapple  + Spin = Whirl
- Push  + Whirl = Bash
- Push  + Lunge = Tackle
- Back-roll  + High-jump = Back-flip
- High-jump  + Somersault = Moonsault
- Retreat  + Lunge = Evade
- Bash  + Crouch = Toss
- Back-roll  + Back-flip = Flip-kick
- Cheer  +  Retreat = Taunt
- Crouch  + Lunge = Slide
There are also two abilities that only require one single ability to be leveled, and these two are:
- Leveling Defend = Counterattack
- Leveling Counterattack = Counterstrike
All these great remakes of older games bode well for Sea of Stars and other Mana-like titles, and hopefully there will be many more to come later on to be utterly confused by.
Legend of Mana is available for PC, PS4, and Switch.
Source: GameSkinny
