Set in a high fantasy universe, Heroes of Mana follows a young soldier, Roget, as he journeys to defend several nations from the ruthless aggression of his own country in a series of battles.

Composed of a series of strategic battles, the player gathers resources, constructs buildings and units, and fights enemy forces to achieve objectives on fixed isometric grid maps.

[2] Heroes of Mana features a local multiplayer option, where players can battle against each other using the progress they have made in the single-player game.

After crash-landing in a forest and getting separated, Roget and Yurchael fight their way back to the rest of the group through the Ferolian army before running into the Peddan military.

They soon learn that the king of Pedda and Roget's childhood friend, Inath, has been driven mad and is launching Operation Psi with the aim of taking over the world.

Roget and Yerchael join forces with Belgar, the Oracle of Shadows from the holy city of Wendel, who discovers that Anise is hoping to use the dark energy from the mirrors to turn herself into a goddess.

Roget and his allies journey to the Mirage Castle to confront Anise, only for her to finish pulling the dark energy from the mirrors before they can stop her.

The dark energy kills Inath and the Mirage Bishop, and Anise combines her form with a possessed Peddan general to create the Goddess of Doom.

In 2003, Square Enix began developing "polymorphic content", a marketing and sales strategy to "[provide] well-known properties on several platforms, allowing exposure of the products to as wide an audience as possible".

[6] The first of these was the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and Square Enix intended to have campaigns for other series whereby multiple games in different genres would be developed simultaneously.

[8][9] Heroes of Mana was produced by series creator Koichi Ishii, directed by Takeo Oin, and written by Masato Kato.

The Nintendo DS was chosen as the platform partially due to the system's multiplayer potential as well as giving the sensation of touching the game.

The album Seiken Densetsu: Heroes of Mana Original Soundtrack collects 49 tracks from the game on 2 discs and is nearly two and a half hours long.

[23] Initial sales were lower than those for Children of Mana, the other Nintendo DS title in the series released one year earlier.

[16][17] Reviewers praised Heroes of Mana's graphics and visual style; IGN's Bozon praised the "classic character art" and "hand-painted backdrops", GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd noted the colorful graphics and "overflowing" animations, and Eurogamer's Simon Parkin said that the "fantastic presentation and artwork" "sugar-coated" the game.

[1][2][19][20] VanOrd termed it "the worst, most broken system of unit pathfinding ever devised", and Gann felt it was so bad that it showed that the developers "had no idea what they were doing" in making an RTS.

[1][19] Juba and the GamePro reviewer felt that the restrictions necessary to fit an RTS on a system the size of the DS made the game too simple and easy.