Stumbling my way through this via the Collection of Mana...er...collection.
It's...it's really good! I mean, oh god is it janky. I never swing a weapon with any confidence it'll hit, you're constantly juggling spells and items in the menu, and occasionally you hit a puzzle like opening the desert dungeon that almost certainly had kids dialing the help line on the back of the Game Boy.
But!
It's good! I like it.
I didn't even realize that I technically already had this game, in Adventures of Mana on the Vita. Fired that up for a bit, and it seems like that's probably the ideal way of playing this game. But I'm stubborn! I'm gonna finish the original!