Tying in with its Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2024 broadcast, Microsoft made a few surprise additions to Game Pass on Thursday: Vintage Square Enix role-playing games Legend of Mana and Trials of Mana, surrealist roll-em-up We Love Katamari, and an adorable and hilarious-looking new co-op game called All You Need is Help are all available now.
Additionally, it was revealed that the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, compiling the first six Final Fantasy games, is now available on Xbox at long last — but it’s not included in the Game Pass drops, you’ll have to buy it.
The picks of the new Game Pass additions are surely Legend of Mana and We Love Katamari — two wild back-catalog deep dives that deserve an immediate spot in your download queue.
Legend of Mana is a unique action-RPG from 1999. The fourth game in the Mana series, it has a boldly open-ended, non-linear structure that lets you generate the regions and quests as you play. Criticized at the time for not featuring as strong storytelling as the 1993 SNES classic Secret of Mana, it now looks far ahead of its time. It’s a fascinating curio that’s well worth sampling in this faithful 2D remaster, new to Xbox today.
Trials of Mana, which was previously never released outside of Japan, is the 1995 sequel to Secret of Mana — but the version added to Game Pass is the 3D remake from 2020, which received mixed reviews.
We Love Katamari comes to Game Pass in its remastered form: We Love Katmari Reroll + Royal Reverie, to give it its exhaustive full title. This is the 2005 sequel to Katamari Damacy, made — somewhat against his will — by original creator Keita Takahashi. But Takahashi’s ambivalence about the project comes through in the game in unexpected, self-referential, and delightful ways, as the Prince struggles to meet the clamoring demands of fans as he wanders the world, rolling up giant balls of stuff. If anything, We Love Katamari is even better than the indelible Katamari Damacy.
Finally, All You Need is Help is a new slapstick co-op puzzle game from Q-Games, developer of the PixelJunk series. It features four player-controlled fluffy cubes collaborating — or trying to, anyway — on things like assembling themselves into an arrangement of tetrominoes, or jostling a bunch of soccer balls into a goal. It looks really fun.
All these games are available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC via Game Pass — except We Love Katamari, which is on console Game Pass only.
