As I watched my little Rabite happily hopping from a resource-laden tree back to my ship, I marveled at what developer Brownie Brown had achieved with Heroes of Mana. Taking the resource-gathering/unit-building gameplay of an RTS away from its natural habitat on the PC is tricky enough, but somehow cramming it into the diminutive DS without losing depth is no small feat. So enraptured was I by the deeper implications of my fuzzy minion’s efforts that I failed to realize my entire party was being slaughtered somewhere off screen. Oops.

Heroes of Mana takes the mechanics of a typical real time strategy game and wraps them in the pleasingly adorable aesthetic of the Mana universe. Everything and everyone is so cheek-pinchingly precious that it wouldn’t surprise me to see a post about Heroes wind up on Cute Overload someday. As Roget, you and your band of merry men wind up in the thick of a fight between your home nation of Pedda and the aggressive Beastmen, but that’s just the start of a twisty turny plot that won’t exactly have J.K. Rowling worried about her future, but is pretty darn satisfying just the same.

Your crew travels in the Nightswan, an airship that not only transports you from Point A to Point B, but also serves as factory for your units. To create units, you’ll first have to find, and then gather resources from the play field which is kind of a drag but at least it gives you a reason to bust out the bunnylike Rabites.

Although interacting with many real time strategy games requires navigating through a seemingly endless string of menus, Heroes of Mana is blessedly intuitive and easy to learn. Creating units and factories requires just a few quick taps, as does issuing commands. The game takes advantage of both screens by including a “swap screens” feature, giving you access to double the information in a neatly organized and organic fashion. The amount of stats and figures can be somewhat overwhelming, but even RTS rookies will feel perfectly at home with the interface after just a few skirmishes.

Getting into a fight is as simple as selecting your desired units, then tapping where you would like them to go. To command all of one kind of unit, tap its icon at the bottom of the screen. You can also draw a circle around the units you want to direct, making it fairly easy to move large groups quickly. For battle, just select your fighters, then tap the enemy you’d like them to attack…which might take a while, because you apparently have been saddled with some of the dumbest fighters in all of Pedda. Units will frequently get stuck or take oddly circuitous routes to get where they’re going, which can completely undo your battle plans.

Complicating matters is that a unit that’s en route to a fight is in “attack” mode, and will take a whack at anything that happens to cross its path, whether it has a chance of surviving the fight or not. You’ll frequently wonder where your units have got to, only to find that they’ve been wiped out after getting lost and attacking stronger fighters.

Complicating matters further is the game’s quick pace and the DS’ small screen. Battles happen in real time, so while your attention is focused on one section of the map, you can’t see what’s happening anywhere else. Battlefields tend to be fairly large, and although the first few levels of the game are relatively calm and manageable, the action ramps up fairly quickly. RTS pros should have no trouble keeping track of their combatants, but newcomers may feel flustered trying to monitor the various pockets of warfare.

Oh, and did I mention that some of the missions are timed? Yeah.

Sadly, Heroes of Mana doesn’t take full advantage of the DS’ WiFi capabilities; you can’t play online, but you can at least play locally with a pal who has a copy of the game. It works well enough, but there’s really just no excuse for not being able to play online.

Issues aside, Heroes of Mana delivers a surprisingly deep RTS experience in a portable format, with easy to learn controls and lovely visuals. I can’t help wishing it had been turned-based, though; it would’ve kept the action manageable no matter what the skill level of the player might be. As it is, those experienced with real time strategy titles will find it to be solid and deep, offering challenging gameplay in a refreshingly different style than their usual RTS fare, but anyone else may find the game’s fast action too overwhelming and frustrating.