It's a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.
I'd recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren't Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you'll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.
That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they'll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.
They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.
I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don't think there's any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn't shape it up into a product worthy of attention.
Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it's not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can't imagine why you'd choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that'd put this back at the head of the pack.
Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they're doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.
So much talk about "what makes a Mana game" in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I've been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.
Call me crazy, but the series hasn't been great (it's still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they'd get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.
If there aren't legit more Nintendo Switch games than there were PS2 games right now, I imagine that the Switch will just trample the PS2 before its end.