Workout Gamer Cast: Trials of Mana and at Home Workout Videos

How's it going, everyone? Welcome back to the Workout Gamer cast. I am the Workout Gamer. Let's go ahead and talk about a few things, because we've got quite the show today. First, we're going to talk about Trials of Mana, the SNES port, not the new HD remake. This one you can get in the Collection of Mana video game, where you not only get Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana, but you also get Trials of Mana, the SNES version, which is available on Switch and also, I believe, on PlayStation as well. We're going to talk about that today. I recently finished it. And we're going to talk about home workout videos. You know, we've had workout videos, DVDs, YouTube workout videos. We're going to kind of dive into that world and kind of discuss which one's appropriate for you. Are they good? Are they bad? The pros and cons of this world. And if you like everything you hear today, go ahead and follow me on YouTube at The Workout Gamer. At least The Workout Gamer 1. I have to recheck that. I'm on TikTok at The Workout Gamer. I'm also on Instagram at The Workout Gamer. And I'm on Twitch. I'm going to be building a computer soon, so I can start live streaming. I'm at Twitch slash Workout Gamer. It's been a while since I've been on there, but now that I'm going to get some equipment, I'm going to be able to get some stuff ready for you guys to get ready for you guys to help me out. Cool. We're going to be going very soon. All right. So let's go ahead and start with The Trials of Mana. This is the third game. I don't know the Japanese name for it. This is the sequel to Secret of Mana. And this game was never released in America until of recent. I think this year or last year with the collection, Mana collection. And The Trials of Mana was also remade into HD remake. That's amazing. It's available on Switch and PlayStation. So for some of you, you've heard about my last encounter with Secret of Mana. I was I was OK with it. I wasn't the biggest fan. It was like a six, seven out of ten. But if you've played The Trials of Mana, Trials of Mana is far superior than Secret of Mana. It is a shame this never came out in America. During the time now, I'm not sure what, how, what year it came out, but I'm pretty sure it's probably when the PlayStation was on the rise, the N64, it was probably on the later end. But wow, this game was amazing. And I think this is like one of the first positive reviews I've given the game on my on my podcast. The premise is there's six different characters and there's at least three different storylines. Or like main bad guy storylines and six different stories you can go through. You essentially have the base premise of, all right, you're going to go through these different levels, but you have these reasons and this adversary to do so. Some uniqueness within each playthrough. There's a lot of customization and there's a lot of different classes you can play. I rolled the dice, kind of see which character is going to play. Sure enough, I rolled on the fighter. It's funny. I rolled on. Nothing but fighters. So I really got to use magic. I use magic a little bit. And there was the fighter during you start off in the tournament of the red, the Crimson Resort comes in and he causes havoc in hell. And your job's to not come back to your village until you can stop him and bring back honor, which is funny because you could visit the village again. This game is ambitious. This is a lot of fun. I mean, Octopath Traveler, which is a more recent game, had like eight different characters and eight different stories. This did that way before Octopath did. And sure, it's like, like I looked it up and everything because there's no guide to how to play this game. So it's kind of good luck. Here's the best we could find online unless you play because, like a lot of stuff like walkthrough stuff you have. It's based off of the game. It's based off the new remake. It's very hard to find the SNES version for like a walkthrough or like, what are the stats? What are this or that? So you're kind of going into this game blind, which is very interesting. Very cool because it's a it's a relatively undiscovered game. I mean, I'm sure it has its following because of all the mana collection and whatnot. But it's really this. It's it's a game that like like a Final Fantasy had a game that. No one's ever played like, oh, by the way, this is the the true Final Fantasy, whatever. Well, we we never heard of this one. Well, you could have something to expect. The story is a lot more engaging than Secret of Mana, and I'm going to be I'm going to be comparing Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana just because I love this game way more. I feel Secret of Mana was more simplistic. We're like, OK, you have the fighter. You have the spell. Castor, you have the healer. Their story kind of matters. Here you go. In this one, each character, depending on who's on your team and depending who you face and whatnot, they get special dialogue. I had Kevin, the grappler, who at one boss, he had his own little cinematic like, oh, what's this? And then there's also, oh, you're you actually have race. The the queen who. Is undercover trying to reclaim her kingdom and stuff like that. And yeah, the total six characters. And each time you play, I can see like more replay value. Like, oh, I chose these three. And like, I can see myself replaying this game. The battle is way more engaging when you fight. Because in the other one, yeah. The weight, like, you know, like a little weight to a hundred percentage goes all the way up so you can attack again. This one. Oh, it's a free for all that. Your AI companions are a lot smarter. It's easier to set them up. We're like, OK, attack whoever the closest to you or I want you to back up this person whenever you're in the fight. When I'm not controlling you, this is who you are going to help. And that's that's so great. That's so like is in the other game. If you're not within a certain range. Depending on how you set it up. You're in secret matter. Yeah, your characters are just stand there, do nothing. I've had experiences with that in this one. Not as much, though. I mean, it's like, oh, well, if I just attack first. Oh, OK. It sets them off and they begin fighting. And yeah, the the AI is going to be a lot better at fighting than you are because there are times where I was just like, oh, am I hitting? No, is my are my companion sitting? Yep. Cool. I'm not completely screwed here. The menus are better dealt with and that's a godsend. Secret of Mana, you know, you had to go press a menu, then they have to circle through to find what I'm looking for. Oh, I have to tag on equipment to find the equipment. And, you know, it's a bit of a jumble and mess. There's two in Trials of Mana. There's two menu buttons. One kind of like the overall like, OK, the like equip your characters. What spells there are. Attributes and all that stuff. And then there's also your item slash magic, which doesn't necessarily slow the game as much. I mean, you still got to throw up a menu, but it does. It makes it a lot easier. Like, cool. I don't have to cycle through so many just to find a healing item or where my magic is. And you can make it easier by like, OK, it highlights who's on the menu. So, OK, as I need this person to cast this healing. I need this person to just continue. It makes it so much. It flows so well. It's phenomenal. The game took me about 20 hours to beat. And one of the greatest things is is the classes, the fighter. You start as a fighter and then you have your options. You can either go light or dark and they'll kind of determine what abilities and what you have. So the first the tier two class I chose, I went. The light route, I think, was the Paladin and I was able to heal because I didn't have any healers, which. A little bit a little difficult. And then after that, yet the farm for certain items just to get the final tier like, OK, I farmed enough and I got item cool. They get the final the final class, which gives you a little bit more abilities. And the cool thing is you also have a special you have this little special middle special meter. Wow. That you could build up through attacks, taking damage and it unleashes like a super move. When you first start out, it's not, you know, it's like a like a heavy hit. The second one, you get a little cinematic and the third one does like like uber damage or whatnot. And it's super cool. And again, I'm just flabbergasted that this game never made it. Not sure how well. Man, it was was was kind of how well it did in America. because a lot of people talk about yeah oh secret man i love it i love it play trials of mana it's far better and i'm going to take my time like if i ever go back to it i'll probably play some different characters um so a lot of the good things i uh i talked a lot of the good things some of the bad things i would say is um the grinding to find um to find the seeds to get you the last class because it gets to a point where um if it gets to a point where you have to go on like the the grind forever something and the drops aren't the greatest uh like oh i found the seed crap it's not the one i need crap it's not the one and then not only that you have to take those seeds you have to go plant them and grow them it only takes like a few seconds but it's like nope none of these characters can benefit it nope nope nope and try again um you , i mean every rpg has some kind of grinding thing but when you want to finish the game it's like come on um traveling the overworld is a lot better especially because when you get to fly um it actually tells you what village this is where you are it makes it a lot easier i again i'm i'm always the thing with old rpgs and why doesn't it give me a functional map i just want to know where i am this one is less of a headache than um secret of mana because secret manna's map is just complete garbage um while this one yeah you're like you're flying around oh here's the the capital i need to go to here's where this item is i need to go here here here traveling uh around the world is so much easier so much simplistic and yeah you can find this game um and the one big thing that i know that's a big difference between the hd remake and this is there's like additional episodes like an additional thing afterwards where you can get a tier four class thing i don't know too much about it so i can't really speak on it but yeah very easy to pick up game there is some legit challenge to it too and it is a lot of fun the story is a little bit more engaging versus the secret of manna and you know there is different storylines so the replay value like replay value so much is so great here you know a lot of games nowadays or back then if you're gonna just replay the same game it's like okay like uh you go to final fantasy you know you could change the out out uh how you play like oh i'm gonna have these characters in here i'm only gonna have my favorite characters but in this one it's like hey you have six different stories whose story do you want to go through oh last time you played as the uh light paladin uh let's try going dark on this one or that so and man there's so many choices for a game back then games today you know with rpgs sometimes they're like 50 to hundreds of hours and this is like i don't want to replay this um but this one it's definitely give it a shot uh trials of manna uh there's the hd version or you can get the hd version of the hd version of the hd version of the collection of manna that also gives you the secret of manna and also the final fantasy adventures uh it's your choice give it a shot it's a lot of fun very it's it's such a hidden gem that you know wasn't released until recent so give it a shot a lot of fun i highly recommend it all right so let's go ahead and talk about home workout videos so when i mean about this you know you got your workout dvds your workout videotapes your uh youtubers who or instagram uh fitness influencers who post workouts and whatnot and here's kind of my take on that so when i growing up you know my aunts had had the workout videos the ones uh we had a bunch of them i'm sure i can still find them if i ever go visit my grandparents house um but like the ones i remember there's like taibo like oh yeah taibo let's go let's go put this in let's go work out to it and then um eventually down the line we got p90x and then i had insanity for a little bit i lost that one and then someone and there's all these different things out there and eventually you know you got some big ones like uh oh man back in the day um mike chang with uh six-pack shortcuts i think that that one's still around and you know there's a lot of people online instagram people youtubers who putting out a lot of content out there so is it good is it bad should i follow it what are the pros and cons for starters all workout programs are not created equal um and that should be a given but at the same time you know what does what do the infomercials say like uh p90x was the biggest one um that i remember watching all the time and i actually like watching infomercial it's pretty cool um and the biggest thing was like you know follow this workout for 90 days there's also a meal plan um it was like a meal plan and do this for nine days and you're just gonna get shredded and ripped and they show people like yeah i did this for 90 days i stuck to it here i am awesome that's cool and you know of course that's gonna be enticing like oh yeah i'm totally gonna buy that yeah let's do it and then when you do it holy shit it's hard it's not an easy thing of course i'm not expecting it to but like uh like the the chest i don't know it's like chest and back day there's like all these different dvds like all right let's do chest and back day all right you can do all these push ups then you do some pull-ups all right you can do these variations of push-ups and back and forth back and forth and okay cool i get to rest what's tomorrow plyometrics oh man what's that yoga that can't be too hard um like the two-hour yoga which is super killer it's and like if you happen to make it to the fourth day and so on and so forth so and this goes into like youtube uh youtubers who have workout plans that you can buy and everything sometimes they're a little too intense for the common person because if you think about who who's who's the target audience to buy these obviously it's the person the average person maybe someone you know a little overweight maybe someone who you know someone who's obese that doesn't want to go to a gym because one they don't know what to do or two they they may be embarrassed to be at the gym and you know yeah that's it's a great cause to look at these but sometimes you look at some of these workouts and it's like you expect me to work out for six days in a row I barely made it to the second day how am I going to do this it gets a little discouraging and all of a sudden now you have the cds the dvds the workout plans kind of just sitting there and again it's not because the workouts are bad it's just sometimes some of the workouts we want to do are just not within our reach some of the ones I've been doing recently um I have ddp yoga 2.0 I am a level one ddp yoga instructor and for me you know it's just one of the things where it's low impact I have so many injuries I actually have an injury right now um I have so many injuries that like I don't need like a jumping heavy and intensive thing I actually hate it because I usually live I live in an apartment and I can't be bouncing around um my apartment echoes uh and for me I get self-conscious because I'm wondering can people hear me? and doing this and I like working out at home I have I like it and with ddp yoga it's cool it's simple just turn on the dvd just follow along and everything's kind of smooth sailing from there um and you know there's different levels it has the same thing oh uh I want to have you work out four or five times a week here's the here's the plan here's what you can do here's your days off and it shows you different levels like oh you intermediate do it this many times a week you advance beginner and that's cool that's something that's um kind of gets underlooked a couple of times that like you know hey maybe you need something softer maybe see it from this you'll still get some great results it's just a different method um I liked p90x I used to do it all the time I used to do it every day but for me now I know like I wouldn't do the plyometrics day just because you know I don't want to jump around my knees my feet you probably just can't take the the brunt of it anymore but it doesn't make it bad and you know I've also bought some some uh people's uh workout pamphlets whatever they got you know their their books and stuff uh some of them are good I like looking at the uh what they call uh buff dudes they have a youtube channel their dumbbell workout home plan solid perfect because um they have like oh the first three weeks do this one this one's simple and then after three weeks we add in another day and then we change it up change it up change it up um I mean they also have some where it's like oh yeah workout like this six times a day it's sometimes a week and it's like yeah I'm not gonna do that and there's some where it's like you know those ripped uh bodybuilder type people like yeah we do chest monday then we do legs this day then our biceps triceps and you know by the time you reach the end of the week like all right you get one day off and we do it all again wait what and honestly it's and these things can be beneficial at the same time they can be hurtful because you know it can break someone down because maybe i can't afford a trainer but this is the next best thing and honestly home workout videos are great there's also some that are very misleading um like you you'll see some like oh you want to get a nice uh butt and some nice legs do this workout but then you look at the person who's doing it they just have really strong legs a really nice butt but then like no upper body uh muscles vice versa you'll see these ripped dudes with the chicken legs who are like yeah i'm super jacked and everything but like your legs are like toothpicks dude and you know and some of those can like on youtube like i've never seen one person uh she's great she's very good in the shape i'm not gonna mention the names but uh like one of the things i'm like who the fuck is gonna be able to do that workout like on average i mean yeah there's people who do that i'm like you like jumped you did like five burpees and then did like a split squat what what the hell um i'm just being exaggerating uh like there's a target audience for that like oh yeah this is a killer workout um but i'm like yeah that's a killer workout but at the same time like if i was a beginner this wasn't for me and ideally the again that it's very subjective who these workouts are for and there's some out there where like uh like i gotta say this you cannot spot reduce so people like yeah if you do this you'll get if you do all these ab workouts for the next 30 days yeah you're gonna get a six pack it's a lot more complicated than that i mean it's not just working out the abs it's working out all the other muscles your nutrition your sleep habits your hydration and a little bit genetics that plays along the way too and some of my favorite youtube videos the workout videos to kind of laugh at is when um when trainers and also this is at like gyms too when trainers try to add quote unquote boxing into their workouts i'm a martial artist i've done boxing i've do muay thai um i've done mma for a couple years and you know i i can i can i know my role when it comes to all right we're gonna do we're gonna do some boxing we're going this this slip but at the whole time when i'm training people i'm like no you need to fix your stance do it again do it again i'm not gonna have you do it for the sake of doing it that's why i hate those cardio kickboxing classes you see at gyms because holy shit it like just seeing some of these people punch it's grotesque it's it's like oh my god you're gonna pop your shoulder out of your socket you're gonna hyper extend your elbow and it's funny when i see it's because i'm like first off you're not a boxer or you're not a fighter second you're gonna lead to a lot of people um getting hurt and it again you know and that leads to another thing when it comes to workout videos you don't have someone to truly guide you through it um because you know they might be doing all right you can do lunges and then squats what if you're not doing it correctly that's kind of a con of um workout videos sometimes they will explain how to do it but at the same time it's like well i'm doing it just to keep up with the video uh and there's more and more but in the end honestly if you can find stuff that's really good and you know talk to a trainer talk to people see if you know there's all these communities out there i mean obviously beachbody their uh their beachbody app phenomenal there's also like facebook communities i know nerd fitness has them as well and you can kind of see who has a good community because they'll like talk to each other and they're like hey um is there alternatives who has trouble with this and all that stuff and that's where you can get some help uh and that's some of the great things you can have with workout at home workout videos whether you have to pay for something like a dvd set or um or like it's an online group you might find some like a dvd set or um or like it's an online group you might find some like like like-minded people and be able to like work it out like hey i can't do some jumps what's some alternatives oh great here's some right here and you know then with all the good and the bad honestly it's finding a good one you know what if you like if you like martial arts sure i'm sure there's like a boxing one out there i'm sure there's uh like a kickboxing one please for the love of god hopefully they teach you correct form and stance maybe you like yoga yoga i love ddp yoga i constantly do that and it's a lot of fun uh teaching or maybe you need something more like uh like you know what i want to dance maybe i like dancing cool find a find a dance uh videos or dance uh apps where they can have you dance and work out the world's your oyster do what you can find what you love and and keep doing it i mean there's no correct answer to fitness well scratch that there's no there's no correct way to you know live your life happy if while being healthy if you love hiking go hiking find hiking groups uh if you like dance if there's no local dance communities you can join yeah get a dance uh dvd set yoga weightlifting you name it it's all out there so in the end i'd say you know i'm i'm actually okay with some uh i'm okay with uh workout at home at home workout videos just because some of them are really good again just kind of do your research um and know who you are if you feel oh that's that's too hard you know look for another thing look for alternatives if you feel like you know if you can truly commit to not only the workouts but also the meal planning and all that stuff you're gonna you're gonna see some results a lot of good stuff here well that was my time uh this has been the workout gamer uh the workout gamer cast find me on uh i do post this i do have a facebook page uh the workout gamer i uh my youtube page the workout gamer one that's the number one twitch uh twitch workout gamer instagram and uh tiktok at the workout gamer follow along if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me if you happen to find this on facebook or anchor i think it's on facebook would be easier uh where you can want to drop down some nerdy or fitness questions by all means drop them down i'll be more than happy to answer them all right all of you take care thank you for listening see y'all next time