Tales' Story Contents is progressing nicely, a few previews of Chapter 0 (Prelude) have been shown in Tales of Mana's Discord Server
As players have seen from these previews, the chapter 0's protagonist is Seiya Garans.
Seiya is a young guardian with the task to protect the Mana Tree, but of course they aren't alone managing that task.
Leon is Seiya's best friend and the one responsible for tasking Seiya to protect the Mana Tree.
There's more that meets the eye concerning Leon but we will let you see later on.
A quick note on this is Seiya's gender is dependant of the player's choice at character creation.
Though regardless of gender, Seiya is still Seiya.
On some other notes, this is a topic that was spoken post-Demo concerning gear system with other members of Team Mana:
As you all know, the gear level was based on the player's Weapon, Armor and Hand gears.
Accessories were not included due to other utilities and Capacity Cores just being its own system.
On that note, the gear system got reworked a bit in order to adjust better gear customization.
So what do I mean by "Gear Customization" you may ask?
For those who had played the game demo, you realized that sometimes enemies be dropping shards and those shards could be fit into a gear's shard slots.
Shards can increase a gear's stat(s) and this is a system that allow players to freely attribute different stats to their gears to perform better.
It's cool for players to feel unique how they do their gears' stats.
So now that I told you guys about "Gear Customization", you are probably wondering where I am going with this, since Shards can't only be about stats right?
Well bingo! Shard System is expanding by having Ability Shards that be equipped into Gears and this will lead to more customization options to players.
But in order to do this, we had to rework something and that rework was about Accessories.
Accessories were "Ability Gears" in a sense they didn't offer much nor could they be leveled up compared to Weapons, Armors and Hands equipment.
You wanted a resistance to Earth attacks? Equip a Earth Cape and there you have 50% resistance to earth damage and that's it.
That felt lackluster overtime so it was time to do a change if Ability Shards become a thing.
SO! Accessories have been reworked and now works similarly like its equipment counterparts: They can be leveled up and their cap level is dependant of their rarity. No more "Ability Gears" Accessories but with Ability Shards on the way, I guess "Ability Gears" Accessories will still exist in a way but will also have "Ability Gears" Weapons, Armor and Hands included and all that dependant to the player's customization choices.
Gear level now accounts four equipment types: Weapon, Armor, Hand and Accessory
One may ponder if there's a limit on how many abilities a gear can have or a gimmick of sort?
Actually, there is: As gears' rarity is crucial for how many shard slots they may have, there be a limit on how many ability shards can be equipped on one gear itself and also not all abilities shards will have a stack effect so there's a chance of having dud abilities cause another gear already had that ability. But that is the fun of building your own gears as you learn throughout the game.
For the limit of ability shards on a gear, that will be told on another dev note, I can't be rambling too much!
Till then, stay tuned for the next Dev Note!
