means toward this end. Although Ishii has said the games in the series are only thematically connected, he has also asserted in an interview that Children is set ten years after the 2007 game Dawn of Mana, which depicts the events of the cataclysm. Music The score for Children of Mana was composed by Kenji Ito, Masaharu Iwata, and Takayuki Aihara. Ito had previously composed the music for the first game in the Mana series, Final Fantasy Adventure (1991), as well as its 2003 remake Sword of Mana, which was the most recent game in the series prior to Children. This was the first soundtrack in the Mana series to feature work by Iwata and Aihara, though Iwata had previously worked for Square Enix on many other titles. The music of the game covers a range of styles, including rock, jazz, and classical. Due to the limitations of the Nintendo DS hardware, Chris Greening of Square Enix Music Online said not all the synthesized instruments are "especially aesthetic or realistic". The album Seiken Densetsu DS: Children of Mana Original Soundtrack collects 33 tracks from Children of Mana on two discs and is nearly an hour and a half in length. It was published by Square Enix on May 9, 2006, on the Japanese iTunes Store, but has not been released as a stand-alone physical album. Reception Children of Mana sold almost 103,000 units in its first three days in Japan—between March2 and March5—which was considered below expectations and partially blamed on product shortages of the Nintendo DS. According to Enterbrain, by the end of 2006 Children of Mana had sold just over 281,000 copies in Japan. It received mixed reviews from critics, with numerical scores from 58 to 90 out of a hundred. The game's presentation was praised, especially its graphics; Greg Mueller of GameSpot said "the saving grace of Children of Mana is the appealing visual style of the game." Raymond Padilla of GamesRadar praised the "beautiful and unique art style", and 1UP.com's Jeremy Parish said the graphics are "almost painfully cute". IGN's Mark Bozon and RPGFan's Neal Chandran compared the game to a painting and a storybook. The music was also praised; Bozon called it "pretty stunning", Chandran called it "quite good", and Mueller said it "fits the tone of the game very well". Critics such as Mueller were generally more negative about the gameplay, finding it repetitive.