Legend of Mana

Legend of Mana, originally released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana, is a 1999 action role-playing game developed and published by Square (now Square Enix) for the PlayStation. It is the fourth game in the Mana series, following 1995's Seiken Densetsu 3. Set in a high fantasy universe, the game follows an unnamed hero as they restore the land of Fa'Diel by creating the world around them and completing a number of interrelated quests in order to restore the Tree of Mana.

While incorporating action role-playing elements from the prior games in the series, such as real-time battles, Legend of Mana has its own distinct style of gameplay. Most notably, it gives the player the ability to shape the world's structure through the Land Make system, generating regions and quests in a non-linear gameplay system rather than a strong main plotline. Legend of Mana was directed by series creator Koichi Ishii, designed by Akihiko Matsui, and produced by veteran Square director and producer Akitoshi Kawazu.

Yoko Shimomura

Yoko Shimomura (下村 陽子, Shimomura Yōko, born October 19, 1967) is a Japanese video game composer and pianist. Shimomura has worked in the video game industry ever since graduating from the Osaka College of Music in 1988. From then until 1993, she worked for Capcom, where she composed wholly or in part the scores for 16 games, including Final Fight and Street Fighter II: The World Warrior.

From 1993 until 2002, Shimomura worked for Square, where she composed for a further eight games. While working for Square, she was best known for her work on the soundtrack for Kingdom Hearts, which was her last game for the company before leaving. Starting with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga in 2003, she began working as an active freelancer.

Her works have gained a great deal of popularity, and have been performed in multiple video game music concerts, including one, Sinfonia Drammatica, that was focused half on her "greatest hits" album, Drammatica: The Very Best of Yoko Shimomura, and half on the music of a previous concert. Music from several of her games have been published as arranged albums, or as piano scores.

Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts (Japanese: キングダム ハーツ, Hepburn: Kingudamu Hātsu) is a series of crossover action role-playing games developed and published by Square Enix (originally by Square). It is a collaboration between Square Enix and Disney Interactive Studios, and is under the direction of Tetsuya Nomura, a longtime Square Enix character designer. Kingdom Hearts is a crossover of various Disney settings based in a universe made specifically for the series. The series centers on the main character Sora and his search for his friends and encounters with Disney, Final Fantasy, and The World Ends with You characters on their worlds.

The series consists of seven games across multiple video game consoles, and future titles are planned. Most of the games in the series have been both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, As of October 2013, the Kingdom Hearts series has sold over 25 million copies worldwide. A wide variety of related merchandise has been released along with the games, including soundtracks, figurines, companion books, novels and manga series.

Legend

A legend (Latin, legenda, "things to be read") is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants includes no happenings that are outside the realm of "possibility" but which may include miracles. Legends may be transformed over time, in order to keep it fresh and vital, and realistic. Many legends operate within the realm of uncertainty, never being entirely believed by the participants, but also never being resolutely doubted.

The Brothers Grimm defined legend as folktale historically grounded. A modern folklorist's professional definition of legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:

Etymology and origin

Legend is a loanword from Old French that entered English usage circa 1340. The Old French noun legende derives from the Medieval Latin legenda. In its early English-language usage, the word indicated a narrative of an event.

Mana

Mana is a word found in Austronesian languages meaning "power, effectiveness, prestige," where in most cases the power is understood to be supernatural. The exact semantics depends on the language. The concept is a major one in Polynesian cultures. It is part of contemporary Pacific Islander culture. The term came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the islands. Its study was included in the topic of cultural anthropology, specifically in the anthropology of religion. Links were seen between it and an earlier phase of western religion, animism at first, then pre-animism.

Etymology

In recent decades the staple method of reconstructing a proto-language, or ancestor of a group of languages that seem related because of their similarities, in the tree model of historical linguistics; that is, the comparative method, has been enhanced by the application of phylogenetic method. In it, as applied to linguistics, linguistic features take the place of molecular sequences. In biology, the goal of comparing genetic sequences is to determine a percentage of similarity between the chromosomes of two species, which may then be hypothesized to have branched from each other in the tree at a time that is consistent with the rate of change of each. In linguistic "phylogenetic" comparisons (which have nothing to do with genes), the desired result is percentages of similarity between languages, from which a tree structure may be reconstructed. Each branch may be termed a "level" and represents a proto-language.