I thought I liked this game for the longest time until some youtuber I don't remember who finally set me straight.

A top-down action game should never have an accuracy gauge for its characters, first of all. When you walk up to an enemy and swing your sword at an enemy it should 100% hit that enemy.

Also, you can tell me all you like that it’s the first ever two-player rpg, but if boss fights are impossible unless you have to sit there and cast your elemental spells over and over until it powers up to a level where bosses are then laughably easy, I really doubt your friend is going to sit there and watch you for very long.

Aside from that, story kind of sucks, music and graphics are kind of good, and I’ll never ever ever forget the moment you rescue Santa Claus from the corrupting power of the mana seeds. The mana seeds are a hell of a drug

Was the SNES ready for action RPGs? Not really, honestly. They did this anyway. It's beautiful, it's soulful, it sounds good, it plays good, it looks amazing.

... HOWEVER.........
The way you grind in this is insane even for a game of the eastern variety. The sheer amount of pointless time spent literally firing spells into nothing nearly just for the game to finally say I've done it enough to "be good at it" really should not be several hours. It's counter-intuitive, because the actual melee combat requires some skill and is fun to engage with, but to beat basically anything you need to giga-invest in levelling magic, which is point and click and consists of watching an animation play. A beautiful animation, yes! And I love some turn based bullshit menu combat! But it feels weird to give the pointy stick mechanic so many flourishes only to invest all the gameplay time in ol' faithful giant spell animation, and then tie any progress whatsoever to watching 40 giant spell animations in a row. At least in ATB I can grind efficiently and have the non-efficient big blast fireball power up from it, but in Secret of Mana I instead fuck myself in the ass.

Also you know the drill old rpg obscure ass questline yadda yadda where do I go lol inflated gametime muh fucking map take the hint from villager #9 and go to the poopoo castle to progress (stuck for 1 hour)

Anyway I still enjoyed it. If me and my brother had this as kids we would have loved playing it multiplayer and probably also hated playing it multiplayer and also hated eachother while playing it multiplayer. But not as much as I hate the NPCs. Probably.

I don't know what has possessed me to give this game shot after shot over the years. I think I was just convinced on some level that I must be playing the game wrong, because so many people I've trusted have told me how this is one of Square's best games, but every time I play it I get frustrated with the combat design and fall off after a couple hours.

This time around I was determined to finally understand Secret of Mana and engage with it completely on its own terms. I read guides, learned every little perfunctory mechanic, grinded to make sure I was on level with the content I was engaging with, and surprise surprise it still sucks. I see the bones here of an action RPG that aspires to play more like a turn based RPG than the other action RPGs of the time (Zelda, Ys, etc.), and I think that is a really phenomenal idea to take the menu driven JRPG systems of Final Fantasy and put them in an action context. In the last couple of decades we've seen the birth of the Kingdom Hearts franchise as well as Final Fantasy VII Remake which both prove that this idea has merit, and when executed on by masters of their craft can make for some of the best video games ever made. Secret of Mana was not executed even a quarter as well as the worst Kingdom Hearts game. I think a huge portion of this comes down to what I originally billed as poor hit detection, but have come to realize is a hit%/dodge% stat built into the game that seems to serve no other purpose than to make the game feel like shit. I see the idea behind carrying over those stats from traditional RPGs into your action system, but in an era of the snappy swordplay of Link to the Past it just comes off as sluggish at best and at worst extremely frustrating. This is without even getting into how the charge system slows the combat down to a crawl or how the game is so extraordinary balanced in favor of magic that at a certain point it feels like one of your party members is just tagging along for the ride.

I truly hope that the unbelievably gorgeous cover art by Hiroo Isono never honeypots me into giving this one another shot. This is one of the few cases where I went against my gut on a game time and time again and I should've just trusted my 7 year old self bouncing off of this.

Unlike the vast majority of Square's SNES-era releases, this game aged like milk. No doubt it was a technical marvel for its time, but there was so much frustration.

Just to zoom in on one aspect: the hit detection. Some enemies were large but had small hitboxes, it was possible to hit the hitbox but have the RNG decide that you missed, and (worst of all) sometimes enemies would experience a delayed reaction to your attack, where the damage numbers would appear several seconds after you attacked. This meant that you would often swing at an enemy for no visible effect, but you would have no idea if:
- you hit the wrong part
- you hit the right part but the RNG decided you missed
- you actually did damage but it wasn't displayed or displayed late.

In addition, thanks to the bizarre "waiting" mechanic of having to charge up your weapons, you would often end up charging your weapon for over 10 seconds, only to have the attack most likely miss anyway.

Levelling up your spells did make the game much easier, but 1) it was needlessly grindy and 2) if the most viable strategy is to select a spell off the menu to spam then you're better off playing a menu-based RPG instead.

I've played a bunch of SNES games and this was always that one title that I never got around to. I'd always hear great things about Secret of Mana, and how it's one of the greatest games on the system. Being a fan of Square for a large portion of my life, playing this one was a no-brainer. I am shocked at the quality of this game, to say the least. I know I shouldn't be judging media off public reception so heavily, but man, this was disappointing.

This is the worst translation I have experienced in any video game. After finishing earlier today I have more questions than answers about the story. Conversations feel extremely robotic and not enough context is given about the world and the mysteries surrounding it. The story isn't anything crazy either but I feel like I would have at least cared for it a little bit if it was told properly.

The gameplay is atrocious. Almost everything about it is horrible and is what makes this game so bad. The game sports a charge system where you will have to wait a few seconds to do full damage, which you need to do if you want to do significant damage. This isn't an issue, but the rest makes it one. I genuinely cannot tell what the hell is wrong with the hit detection in this game. The hit boxes are horrible, and there is what I believe to be a chance of missing your attack, but, there is no indicator telling you that it missed. When enemies are toppled and you attack them, sometimes the attack will register a few seconds after you hit them, so it feels really weird. The AI is also dog shit at following you. My party members were constantly getting stuck on pieces of the environment and I had to constantly backtrack to get them to follow me properly. The games FPS constantly lowers too. The game can't seem to hold a proper framerate when there's any enemies on screen. Everything about the gameplay just feels gross to play. It's a simple game in nature, but everything just feels like it's working against you. All the boss fights are also really abusable because you can just spam the Sprite's magic in quick succession.

I'm shocked this game was also released in the state it's in. This game is really buggy. The biggest bug that I have encountered was party members getting stuck in walls. You can't progress on screen if your characters are not always in the vicinity of each other, so, it just left me soft locked in most cases. It even happened to me in the final dungeon once which really pissed me off. Other than that, it's usually just visual bugs.

The best thing about this game is the soundtrack, which quickly became one of my favorites on the system. It's so good that it made me think I was enjoying the game a few times.

This is one of those games where props have to be given for molding the genre, but, it really does not hold up in the slightest.

The real secret of Mana is that it's not very good.

[Crowd boos, starts throwing chairs]

Ahaha... and what's the deal with Sonic Spinball? More like Sonic Stinkball, pee-yew!

[Gets snared around the neck by a vaudeville hook and pulled off stage]



The cover for Secret of Mana has always captivated me, moreso than any other piece of artwork produced for a game, new or old. I feel so strongly about it that I'd probably have a hard time explaining why in a way that doesn't associate an undue amount of pretension to the piece itself, but it most strongly evokes in me a sense of mystery and insignificance, yet there's something very gentle and calming about it as well. Would love to get a print of it one day, frame it up real nice. I probably feel far more passionately about this painting done for a freaking 1993 Super Nintendo game than I should but whatever, I'm weird as shit. You know this.

Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed that Secret of Mana wasn't able to live up to the expectations its excellent cover art created for it. Perhaps it was never really fair of me to judge a game by its cover, but well, even if I hadn't I don't think the gameplay in Mana is anything to write home about. It's a top-down action RPG, so combat is something you'd really want to focus on making feel good. Instead, Mana is dragged down by really wonky hitboxes, dice rolls that rob the player of their agency in battle, and delays in attack animations and damage accrual. It don't feel no good!

The story is also just... kinda dull? By the time I got to the Mana Tree, I realized I had become so uninvested in the narrative that this big grand moment - so important that it's used for the cover of the game, which as we've established I love - completely fell flat. The stakes never feel palpable enough, I never found myself swept up in the plot's urgency, and the characters all just feel very generic.

I can't help but wonder if some of my dissatisfaction comes from setting unrealistic expectations that any rational person would know Mana couldn't live up to. Expecting a very self-serious and thoughtful RPG that has something to say is just a really weird thing to project onto an early 90s Square game, and I understand that. At least it has a pretty good soundtrack, I really like the cut version of Danger from the remake, and I think the sprite art is pretty good! And I mean, there's worse 90's action-RPGs to play, some of them are even by Square, so it's not all negative.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've actually set up an appointment to view the original Mana Tree painting and I have a flight to catch...

In 2021 and 2022 I made a project out of finishing every game I play, writing about every game I finish, and specifically reaching backwards for the games I was seeking out, trying to fill in some gaps in my knowledge and experience at the same time as I wanted to better my critical ability. I think I was more or less successful and this year I’m letting myself off the hook. I am still gonna play a lot of old stuff because I’ve found that I like all kinds of games, but I’m not gonna write about everything and most relevant to Secret of Mana I’m not going to force myself to get through everything just for the sake of completionism. I do like all my little series retrospectives and I find them educational and often fun projects, but goddamn. I don’t like Secret of Mana! Why would I do this to myself.

This is a big shock to me because I was absolutely enchanted by the first Mana game, a relatively simple but hugely dynamic work with a great central gimmick and just enough melodrama to match the restrictions of its platform. So for Secret of Mana to repel me so thoroughly that I gave it up after what a walkthrough would later tell me was only about a third of the game, a lot of stuff would have to really go wrong here.

These frictions are certainly not to be found in the presentation here – Hiroki Kikuta’s score suits the need for every moment and does it really well. It excels in the pensive bits but I didn’t hear a bad track in my time with the game. We’re really rockin’ it visually too, Square is famous for pretty much always bringing the heat on the SNES, and this game’s shared origin with Chrono Trigger isn’t just evident in its character designs but particularly its sprite work. The way people are built, the way their limbs flop, their emote animations, all hit the same notes that the sprites in that game do, and as cool as I am on Chrono Trigger as an experience you will never hear me say a single thing bad about how it LOOKS. Same thing here. Beautiful game to behold.

WHY is it LIKE THAT in my HANDS then?

Why does everything feel so sticky? Combat that once felt fluid and natural becoming awkward and stiff. The emphasis on dexterity in movement that was so valuable to the first game isn’t gone here but it’s so deemphasized by a doubled down emphasis on magic that is poisonous to the experience. It’s impossible to fully communicate how completely disastrous it feels to me to emphasize a system that fully pauses all of the action for five to ten seconds constantly to trigger effects that often also just remove characters from the fight for further periods of time. What are we doing. Why are the menus like that. I understand that they’re cute but they’re also a chore to navigate and more importantly the game is structured so that you have to juggle weapons and spells between three characters nigh constantly, so you’re constantly pausing to go through these awful menus on top of all the other ways the game slows itself to a crawl. Which is extra grating because THE Final Fantasy Adventure is a game I generally regard as like, extremely thoughtful about the way it implements items and menus. Perhaps the biggest indignity is that the attack bar fills SO slowly bro what’s up with that the gameboy game made that thing fill up faster as you progressed but that hasn’t evidently happened across several hours with this bad boy.

Not helping matters is that Secret of Mana, at least the way it was localized, does appear to be a game for like literal seven year olds in terms of the scope of its story and characters and the way it tries to deliver these things, which was just not true of its predecessor, which was on a hardware that limited both text and imagery and also made ample use of archetypal fairy tale aesthetics in its early goings but like very clearly was not so babying the way this game comes off as. And it’s COMPLETELY possible that Secret is waiting to spring some of the melancholy and starkness about how sometimes we have to live with the irreparable harm our fathers have done to us and to the world and that even despite this the world is worth investing in even as it must be mourned. But I think a lot of that sauce came from one really important guy on the FFA team and that guy was Yoshinori Kitase and when the SOUP that eventually spawned the projects that became Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV put Kitase in charge of one of those it was NOT THIS ONE and I think that’s like, immediately evident. My gut tells me that Secret doesn’t have a Marcie up its sleeve.

So that’s it. Secret of Mana broke my spell. I still like to do my lil projects but I’m not making myself do shit I don’t wanna do anymore and I’m not forcing myself to write about everything, life’s too short, you couldn’t pay me to write about every trails game are kidding me I would die. I sound mad but I’m not mad at Secret of Mana, I am only a hater. I don’t wanna take it away from anybody. But I DO wanna whine about how much I didn’t like the famous classic to my friends in private. Which I will continue to do. That’s kind of my last thought here I hope Legend of Mana is good lol

I think the most bewildered I've ever been about an average rating on this site is Mega Man 8 being .2 below Mega Man 7.

That might not seem like much but consider how vast the disparity is between these two games. One is this gorgeous, wonderful attempt at revitalizing classic Mega Man for a new generation without compromising on the key elements that made the series so beloved in the first place. The other is Mega Man 7, a game thrown together in three months that (while miraculously stable) was rendered dull and downright messy for it. At no point playing Mega Man 7 did I think Capcom was doing anything notable or worthwhile with the formula to justify it being an SNES game, not that rushing it to market would afford the team enough space to innovate anyway. Mega Man 8 has a soccer ball. You couldn't do that on old consoles!

Alright, I'm being somewhat facetious, but I'm not kidding when I say Mega Man 7 and Mega Man 8 represent the classic series at its wort and best, respectively. Not that I always felt that way. When I first played this game on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection way back in 2004, I hated it. I was filtered out by "jump jump, slide slide" and am adult enough now to admit it, but I was also one of those people who was very dismissive over the game due to its cutscenes. I was 16 and stuck in a sad state of mind where all the media I enjoyed - including Mega Man - had to be treated with enough self-seriousness as to not embarrass me by proxy. It's taken me almost 20 years, but I now find stuff like "doctah whywee" to be very silly and fun and part of the appeal of Mega Man 8, and to correct that with a more competent dub would be akin to stealing Mega Man's soul.

Even if you still hold some animosity towards the goofy cutscenes or the jump/slide levels (which I beat first try on four hours of sleep and energized by a single can of NOS, which means they can't be that bad), I still feel that the rest of the game is a brilliant refinement of what Mega Man was up to that point. Everything just feels better than it ever has here. You have more control over Mega Man, levels are intricate and their aesthetic design is vibrant and imaginative, and robot masters are at their peak both in terms of visual and mechanical design.

I think weapon powers in Mega Man games are at their best when they also provide distinct utility for navigation, and that basically describes every weapon in Mega Man 8. Flash Bombs can light up dark areas, Tornado Hold effectively replaces R. Coil, Thunder Claw can be used as a grappling hook, and Astro Crush serves as a powerful screen-clearer, to name a few. I paid some lip to it earlier, but I also love the soccer ball power-up. For the most part it's not terribly useful, which is kind of appropriate considering how soon you get it, but it's fun kicking that thing around and watching it ricochet all over a room and take out smaller enemies. In general, I think the weapon powers just feel really good to use against enemies, especially bosses. Tangling Clown Man up with his own limbs thanks to a well-timed Tornado Hold, or annihilating Dr.Wily's Dr. Whywee's ship with a cluster of Flash Bombs results in some pretty good feedback.

My only real complaint is with the item shop, and it's barely a complaint so much as it's a matter of personal preference. You can buy items between levels using bolts, which are few and far between and generally require some ingenuity to obtain, meaning you'll likely only be able to afford so much. Some of the ways you can augment your arm cannon are cool and upgrades to the amount of weapon energy and health you're able to recover are invaluable, but I find scouring levels for bolts to be less engaging than Mega Man X's system of locating armor parts. Not only do I feel Mega Man X is better about incentivizing exploration, but having the armor pieces reflect Mega Man's growth is more interesting visually than dropping a new icon on the second page of the inventory screen.

Honorable mention to the robot master contest submissions being shown during the end credits. It's really cute and something I wish was present in the other games, though hardware limitations understandably made that impossible or at least too difficult/compromised to be worth it. It's neat seeing them side-by-side with their final designs, which of course had to drop certain elements in order to achieve a more unified design, but they're still undeniably the same characters, and I can't imagine how cool it must've been for these kids to see their robot masters in the actual game. At the risk of treading old ground, I think it's such a shame you could never do a contest like this again.

My journey back through the classic Mega Man series is nearly over. I'm going to take a brief detour into the two fighting games included in the Anniversary collection and then wrap up with Mega Man 11, and I might give the Sega Saturn version of Mega Man 8 a shot at some point in the near future, too. I hear Tengu Man's stage is totally different and it adds two previous robot masters, and I just plain like MM8 enough to do a second playthrough just to experience those small changes.

Great game. Better than Mega Man 7. Shouldn't even be up for debate. I want to confiscate and immolate every copy of that game in existence and then subject everyone to the Mega Man 8 draft and force them to play this until they like it, and if they don't then it's straight to prison!