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Which three characters to choose?
One of the questions you’ll likely have when you start the game, whether it’s the demo or the actual game, or whether it’s the remake or the original version of the game, is which three characters do you choose?
You have six characters to choose from, but only three slots!
This simple choice you make at the beginning of the game actually does have a significant impact on the entire game! In both terms of gameplay and in terms of story and dialogue changes.
Choose the character based on which gameplay you like!
The easy answer is that you should select the three characters you’d feel the most comfortable playing as. That means you would need to restart the intro a few times until you get to gameplay sections, and see how you like playing as that character.
The reason for this is that you can switch between the three party members on-the-fly using L2 or LT on Playstation and Xbox controllers, so you might as well choose the three characters you like playing as the most.
You don’t get everything unlocked from the beginning though; later in the game you’ll get new abilities and multiple branching class changes.
There’s a branching class change later in the game where you choose light or dark, then another branching class change where you choose light or dark again. But, the order of the class changes does matter; for example, light-dark promotion is different than dark-light promotion.
Without over-complicating things, it would be ideal to have a “balanced” party.
To summarize quickly if you don’t want to spend a significant amount of time playing the intro to see how each character plays:
- Duran is a swordfighter
- Charlotte is a healer
- Angela is an offensive mage
- Riesz uses a spear with buffs/debuffs
- Kevin is a physical attacker, when the game time turns to night he can turn into a beast
- Hawk is a thief.
In general, Riesz and Hawk are a little trickier and not as straightforward to play as.
If you fill your party with only attackers from the above list, you’d need to buy more healing items in exchange so you’d needed to have grinded extra money; whereas, if you only have magical party members, your party may be a bit squishy and susceptible to physical attackers. You could end up with a “glass cannon” situation.
The characters you choose WILL change the story and dialogue!
Although I focused earlier on choosing the three characters purely on a gameplay perspective, the plot and story structure will change based on the three characters you choose, especially the first character you choose in particular.
If you haven’t played Trials of Mana, the introduction to the game is somewhat similar to the Dragon Age: Origins characters intro, where all of the playable characters each have their intro.
If you’re not familiar with the original Dragon Age, you select a race, gender, and affluence, which are basically broken down into six “origins“, twelve if you include gender variants of each “origin”, and the game will give you a unique hour-long introductory quest before going into the same general game.
Trials of Mana is like that, you will get a unique introduction to the game for the primary character you choose before the plot eventually goes into the same general plot you’d get regardless of the character you chose to play as.
The general game is the same, but there be a few instances of unique dialogue and slightly different quest structures and choices based on the characteristics you chose for your protagonist.
You will explore the entire world and all cities and dungeons regardless of the main character you choose! Content is generally not cut out depending on your character selection, it’s just romance, dialogues, and maybe a few unique cutscenes you will miss out.
Yes, you will miss out on some unique cutscenes, but you can’t avoid that. You are given the options to see and play the unique introductions for the supporting two characters you chose when you meet them in the game.
The other three characters you didn’t choose will still appear in the games as NPC’s you can talk to, but of course their dialogue will be different than if they were actually selected to be in your party.
Note that some of the dialogue and some of the final plot is changed depending on the character you selected.
There are multiple antagonists in the game. The antagonists are linked to certain characters from the introductory cutscenes. The character you choose will face off against their particular antagonist last so that the initial cutscene you saw makes more sense.
Choosing characters can increase the difficulty?!
In the original Trials of Mana, the characters you chose would actually change the dungeons and bosses, resulting in certain combinations of character choices resulting in a harder game.
BUT, from playing the Trials of Mana Remake demo earlier last month, the game is much easier than the original and has many quality of life improvements since the game is being significantly remade, with many people even being vocal on forums about the easiness of the remake. Truthfully, the original game wasn’t hard per-say, but it is archaic to today’s games and did require some grinding at times.
We wouldn’t worry about the game being significantly harder based on the characters you chose in the beginning, but in general Hawk and Riesz will have a slightly harder endgame based on the original game.
You actually want to choose certain pairs of characters!
There are six characters, but only three antagonists because each antagonist is linked to the plots of two characters.
This means that the plot would be more interesting if you chose two characters who are hunting down the same antagonist.
It is by no means mandatory at all, but it is well-known you will get a few extra lines of unique dialogue if you choose certain pairings. Without spoilers, certain pairings may have romance scenes as well in their unique dialogue.
These pairings include:
- Duran and Angela
- Charlotte and Kevin
- Riesz and Hawk
If you want to choose one of these pairings, you can then select whichever third character you want.
I’m stressed, BAI, please choose the best characters for me!
If you don’t know who to choose and you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything we just told you, no worries, the game is huge and although the game is one of our favorite’s and is very replayable, it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea to replay the game several times to notice all the variations in dialogue and such.
If you’re unsure, just go with Duran, Angela, and Charlotte.
Duran and Angela share the same antagonist and plot and in terms of gameplay they compliment each other well.
You can main Duran and just keep slashing your sword at enemies, Angel is an offensive mage, and Charlotte is a healing mage who will save you stress from having to buy medicine all the time.
From a gameplay perspective, they’re a well-balanced team. Duran and Angela will also get a lot of unique dialogue as well from being together.