The player takes the role of a young hero who, together with a heroine, tries to stop the Dark Lord of Glaive from destroying the Tree of Mana.

[4] In the smartphone versions of the game, the player controls the hero by using a customizable virtual joystick and button set.

There are also variants of each weapon type with bonus strengths, such as flame variations, which are effective against ice monsters.

[2] It is the second remake of Final Fantasy Adventure, the first being the Game Boy Advance game Sword of Mana, which had removed the connections to the Final Fantasy series in favor of being more connected to the rest of the Mana series.

[8] According to Adventures of Mana's producer, Masaru Oyamada, the development team focused on not upsetting what had made the original game good, while adding things that had not been possible to do in the original version due to hardware limitations; they also aimed to make the game more comfortable and intuitive to play:[2] for instance, switching armor and weapons and using items and magic was made easier, and shortcut commands were added.

[8] Kenji Ito, the composer for Final Fantasy Adventure, returned to create updated and more dramatic rearrangements for the remake.

[13] Responding to feedback, Square Enix's European branch said that the game's development team was examining the possibility of a Western release of the PlayStation Vita version;[14] the PlayStation Vita version was later released in North America, South America and Europe on June 28, 2016.

[18] Shaun Musgrave at TouchArcade felt that the sparse story set-up and lack of "supervision or training", while likely to "rub some people the wrong way", was refreshing; he liked the simplicity and "efficiency" of the game, and said that, as a remake, he was unsure if he could be any happier with it than he was.

[23] TouchArcade named Adventures of Mana as their "Game of the Week", calling it a "truly wonderful remake".

[24] Nadia Oxford at USgamer said that the game was "a very decent re-construction of Final Fantasy Adventure" and less tedious than Sword of Mana.

[6] Schreier found the touch controls to be "just fine", but thought that the game would work better with a D-pad and buttons.