Mantra (video game)

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A Freeware Action RPG, by a group of high school-aged developers from Maine, USA called Syzygy Cult, originally released in 1995 for Mac OS. It plays similar to Crystalis, or to a 2D Zelda game with the addition of RPG Elements. There is also a sequel, Mantra II.

An open source version of the first game was released in 2010, written for the cross-platform game library Allegro. Builds for Windows and Mac OS X, and also the source code, can be downloaded from Sourceforge; also, the developers have a website. The original Mac OS version is available for download here (and the sequel here).

Not to be confused with the comic book of the same name.

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• Almost-Dead Guy -- The guy that gives you the first weapon.
• Anticlimax Boss -- The Final Boss, Balther, is pretty easy to defeat. Basically, if you buy enough HP recovery and stamina recovery items and use them, you'll win.
• Chest Monster -- One town has NPCs that look like any others, but if you get too close to them, they attack you. They're extremely fast and take lots of hits, also. It's not entirely unexpected, though, because some NPCs tell you that the town is on Balther's side.
• Contested Sequel -- Mantra II does not even come close to the level of quality of the original, with weak music and marginal-at-best cartoon graphics.
  • According to the developers: "To be frank, we all pretty well agree that Mantra II was nowhere near as good as Mantra. We just didn’t have the resources to throw at it at the time, and it wasn’t as polished."
• Crowning Music of Awesome -- Note that the game is only 694k as a compressed StuffIt archive; the music is sample-based.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors -- Enemies are vulnerable / invulnerable to different weapons, including the 5 Mantras as well as swords. There are also rings that give you protection from various things.
• Healing Spring
• Good Bad Bugs -- The closed doors are supposed to be opened using Interchangeable Antimatter Keys; however, in the original version, it's possible to attack and "kill" them instead. (The open source version doesn't allow this.) Doing this makes some Sequence Breaking possible.
• Mook Maker -- Some of the blob monsters can spawn more blobs of their own type, and the giant blobs spawn regular-sized ones at a faster rate. One dungeon has a room where spiders get spawned continously, apparently out of nowhere. Also, the final boss spawns beetles.
• Respawning Enemies
• Shout-Out -- "Godot is coming. Please wait."
  • "We don't need no stinking badgers!"
• Smart Bomb -- The Mantra of Force
• Sword of Plot Advancement -- The 5 Mantras.
• Treacherous Advisor -- The ambassador is actually Balther, and he wants you to gather the Mantras so he can kill you and take them for himself.
• Vaporware -- Mantra 3 was supposed to come out in 2000.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential -- You can kill the NPCs in towns. (They just respawn like enemies do.)
• You All Look Familiar -- The NPCs in towns.