After playing/suffering through Secret of Mana a few weeks back, this was still nonetheless a game firmly on my radar. No matter who I talked to about it, this was a game basically universally agreed to be flat-out better than SoM. Where SoM is the experiment, Seiken Densetsu 3 (or “Trials of Mana” as it’s known these days) was the fully realized product, a capstone for the series at the tail end of the console generation. SoM was a game that I did not enjoy very much, to say the least, but there was just so much room for improvement, I couldn’t help but be curious about its immediate successor here. I played through Duran’s route (paired up with Angela and Charlotte), and it took me about 31-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Very similarly to the first two Seiken Densetsu games, SD3’s story revolves around the seeming end of the world. A long era of peace is coming to an end, and the forces of darkness gather. The Mana Tree has begun to wither, and the sword of mana at its base will decide the coming fate of the world. Unlike the previous two games, however, you have your choice of protagonist this time, and it really meaningfully changes the narrative depending on whom you choose. There are six choices, and there are three pairs among them of characters who have stories that relate to one another (for example in my run, Duran and Angela share a route, so there were extra story scenes for me between the two of them in addition to little glimpses of Charlotte’s route here and there). The overall content of the game doesn’t change super massively, but the final dungeon or two of the game as well as some earlier areas are affected by it, giving a neat incentive to replay the game for those who would be so inclined.

The actual narrative itself is sorta trying to do something interesting, but it ultimately falls a bit short. They’re trying to tell a story about how, at the end of everything, bad and selfish actors will nonetheless try to devour the corpse of the old order to try and come out as kings of a wasteland rather than try and fix things for the better. It’s interesting, especially how, depending on your route, which of these competing enemy factions comes out on top changes. However, the pacing of the story just doesn’t really allow the narrative to do much with this beyond having an interesting premise. While there are certainly attempts for character arcs too, they don’t super tie in with that larger premise very well, and the narrative is casting such a wide net that it struggles to really get very deep into anything. It’s not bad by any means, and it’s got some fun and well done moments for sure (like how much of Duran’s route is just Star Wars XD), but it falls quite short of other late-SFC SquareSoft games in terms of how well its put together.

The reason that it just doesn’t have time to craft much story is no doubt because this cartridge is PACKED with so much game otherwise. With over a dozen major areas and almost twenty dungeons (or like areas) with bosses to match and bunches of enemies too, this game has so much in terms of present graphics and mechanics that it’s no surprise there wasn’t much space to fit more story into things. That gameplay in question is absolute derived from Secret of Mana, and they’ve thankfully taken a lot of big strides forward in making the systems present work a lot better.

You’re still a group of three party members (who slowly accumulate over the first few hours, so if you’re trying to play with a buddy, they’ll be waiting a while for their turn to play still, unfortunately), and being able to choose your group of three at the start gives you a wide degree of choice of what your prospective party will look like. There are certainly good and bad choices to make (foregoing anyone with any kind of meaningful support or casting magic is probably a bad idea, for starters), and I chose my party on a recommendation that it generally made for the easiest of the three playthroughs, but it’s very cool that there are so many options for you to engage with here. They’ve also improved the camera and allied AI significantly. Now that the camera focuses on player 1 all the time and the other two party members don’t need to be on screen, the basic gameplay of things is SO much better that it’s easy to look past the game being bumped from 3 possible human players down to only 2 (though I played it alone, for the record).

Unfortunately, as much as things have been improved significantly, there is a LOT that is still meaningfully flawed, and in many ways I found this game to be meaningfully worse to play than Secret of Mana. For starters, there’s the normal melee combat. They’ve ditched the visual of power bar charging from SoM, but the whole “charged swing” mechanic is still present. You can no longer swing between full charges, but now you know that every swing you’ll do will always be at full power. Those charges also come more quickly, and the combat is a lot faster as a result. There’s even a super meter your normal attacks charge than you can unleash for a stronger tech attack after enough normal bashings. However, I found this to be a very painful double-edged sword.

While combat is faster, yes, it’s also far harder to parse. Your characters are a lot better at attacking what you want them to attack, sure, but this means there’s basically no reason not to mash the normal attack button constantly because you’re going to want to just be smashing stuff as fast as you can. I found combat to be even more boring than in SoM if only because it felt it was even more mindless now. There was no reason at all to think about anything other than just staying near the enemy, mashing the button, and keeping as much attention on your health as possible to heal when needed. You REALLY need to keep tabs on your health as well, as the faster combat and JUST how powerful enemy spells and attacks can be (not to mention how brutal the level curve is, but I’m getting ahead of myself there) make it so you can die VERY fast, and there were a good few game overs I got where I barely had any idea of when our health had even gotten that low.
Additionally, this button mashing combat ends up dismissing a lot of the mid-battle popups almost immediately. While most of these don’t ultimately matter, as it’s not like you can react to incoming enemy attacks anyhow, these popups are actually what determine a lot of the pace of combat given they’re the big limiter on when spells and techs can be used. Unlike Secret of Mana, where spell casting time was effectively non-existent, spells now have casting times of a sort. You’ll need to wait your turn until enemies are done casting their spells, sure, but you’ll also need to wait until the loads of status effect popups from various spells and attacks have gone past as well before you can finally do things. Not only does this make healing mid-fight harder, as you’ll often be ambushed by a much longer wait to your next very needed healing spell than you thought you would, you actually can’t even bring up the item/spell ring menu while one of these popups is on screen. You cannot pause the game in any sort of menu while one of these popups is on screen, in fact, and frantically mashing the X button hoping that you’ll by some miracle be able to heal eventually is a very common part of gameplay, particularly in the back half and when you’re under-leveled.

Being under-leveled is another very common thing in this game, frankly. Your overall character level now dictates your strength far more (for both melee and spells), and with how powerful magic is for your enemies, having the HP to tank their attacks and the physical strength to kill them quick are the main determiners of whether you’ll win or lose any given encounter. While they’ve thankfully gotten rid of the requirement to grind up individual types of magic, the experience curve is so awful that you’ll need to stop what you’re doing and start grinding very frequently once you hit about 25% or so through the game.

I joked at one point during my playthrough that the gameplay loop was roughly 1 to 2 hours of progression followed by 1 to 2 hours of grinding, though I quickly realized that my joke reflected the actual gameplay loop far more than I realized it had. Sure, not needing to grind spells anymore is nice, but this game still has SO much grinding in it that it’s really hard to say the grind as a whole has improved any. I’d reckon at least 10 of my 30-ish hours are grinding, and that number is honestly probably too low. Secret of Mana was at its absolute weakest when it was hard, and this game being by and large much harder is doing nothing to help cover up those weaknesses. The only real solution you have to overcome that is just more hours of grinding. Even then, you’re not getting to the point where you’re making the post-grind fighting more fun, you’re more so just making cumbersome, unsatisfying combat go by quicker and/or be possible to win in the first place.

Ultimately, this game still suffers very badly from the main issues that plagued Secret of Mana so much. We’ve combined a 2D Zelda-style action game with a turn-based RPG, but we’ve kept few of the best parts of either. All of the moving around and swinging your sword in combat feels meaningless after a while because so most attacks (both yours and theirs) just can’t be dodged in the first place. Your positioning on the field of battle is almost entirely performative, so the main gameplay mechanics are just mashing the attack button, casting spells as soon as you can (though this game still suffers from lacking enough MP to get much use out of magic for more than half of the time you even have magic), and keeping as high a tab on your health/status effects as possible so you don’t get insta-mulched. Combat consistently struggles to be fun as a result, and bosses even more so.

Just like back in Secret of Mana, bosses are the worst excesses and features of normal combat’s issues magnified, but now it’s even worse because this game is so much harder. Where SoM’s bosses were either pushovers or arduous slogs (though both were always boring), now we have almost entirely arduous slogs even when they’re not too hard. You’re always on the lookout for a boss or even normal enemy with a move that auto-counters techs or spells leaving you instantly dead after two-chained powerful spells you have no way of surviving or healing between, and that’s an even worse gameplay loop once you factor in the popup problem before AND how bosses often slow down the game so badly that your button input reactions are even less responsive and difficult to access than they already were. Even if the final boss that took me 40 minutes to kill is a big exception, bosses being something I basically never enjoyed and always dreaded reaching was absolutely not an exception. Struggling to find the fun is a very persistent aspect of playing this game, especially when there’s effectively nothing to do but the horrible slog of combat.

While most games (RPGs, adventure games, or otherwise) from this era have very little in the realm of side content, this game genuinely has virtually nothing to do outside of story progression. Even something as simple as chests full of fun or valuable loot, or any loot at all, are something almost totally absent from this game (I counted maybe six total chests or findable items between all towns and dungeons I went through, and they always had normal consumables in them). Sure, it’s great that you can carry WAY more normal consumables now instead of SoM’s limit of 4, and it’s also great that the chests normal enemies drop no longer drop nearly such hilariously lethal traps, but we’re still left with the fact that there’s really never any need to explore in this game beyond just looking for the path forward.

The lack of side content wouldn’t be such a bad thing in a vacuum, but with just how badly combat struggles to be enjoyable paired along with an often not terribly present or engaging story means that combat being effectively the ONLY thing to do makes this game wear out its welcome far sooner than it otherwise might’ve. While the findable (and missable) weapon upgrades in SoM were a badly thought out mechanic, the lack of even anything as simple as that to hunt or explore for does not do this game much of a service. If you don’t love the cruddy, plodding combat, there’s sage little else here worth sticking around for, at least mechanically.

Aesthetically, this game does its SquareSoft lineage proud, at least. Just as you’d expect from a SquareSoft game from ’95, the music is excellent and so are the graphics. This game is made up of an incredible amount of environments and very well animated characters, enemies, and especially bosses (even if they can slow down the game an annoying amount sometimes). While there’s a lot mixed or negative you can say about this game, the graphics and music are absolutely not one of them.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While, on paper, this game may seem like a significant improvement over its predecessor, in practice I found it to be a game I enjoyed just about as much if not even less. If nothing else, this game did a lot to convince me that Secret of Mana’s whole thing of “2D Zelda-type game with turn-based RPG combat mechanics” isn’t simply something SoM gets wrong, and instead it’s just a fairly weak premise for an action-RPG full stop. It’s got a lot of neat ideas and features, and it’s certainly beautiful, but it just doesn’t come together into a fun gameplay experience. If you LOVE Secret of Mana, you might well enjoy this, but if you were skeptical of either game or didn’t SUPER love SoM, this is one to stay far, far away from.

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Ahhh, the famous Seiken Densetsu 3. Calling this game “Secret of Mana 2″ in front of the romhacking “scene” elite will earn you a QUICK correction, let me tell you something. Just think, all the newbies just take it for granted that SD3 is in English. You guys didn't have to endure the sheer pain that came before. The dull, empty VOID. Such is the way of all translations, I suppose.

So yeah, this is Seiken Densetsu 3, which is (still) to date the only game in the series to not make it overseas. (editor's note: not anymore) It's a damned shame too, because this installment is unquestionably the best. Sure, Secret of Mana may give it some competition, but I couldn't stand SoM for some reason. And the less said about Sword of Mana the better.

SD3 uses the old Squaresoft crutch of multiple playable characters within the same timeframe (see: Rudra, RS3). The whole “see the same events from a different perspective” thing works out really well here, it turns out. I seem to say that about every game, though. As far as gameplay, if you've played Secret of Mana you know what to expect. If you've played the others in the series, like Legend of Mana or Final Fantasy Adventure… well, you still know what to expect: run around and hit things with your sword. In realtime. It's like Zelda, Squareified, for a complete lack of a better comparison.

Hiroki Kikuta returns (I think) to compose the music in SD3. The end result is GORGEOUS. The game comes highly recommended, but play the game for its music, if nothing else.