Ohhh, boy. It looks like I'm about to join the collective of hot takes surrounding one of the greatest games of all time. This is a place there's no coming back from, so first, let's at least try and be fair about it, and take a little time talking about what I liked about Secret of Mana:
The graphics! There was clearly an evolution of talent happening within Squaresoft around this point of time. The previous Squaresoft releases used these tinier, chibi-proportioned character sprites. By comparison, you can look at Secret of Mana, and think "Okay, yeah, this is where the Chrono Trigger art team had their roots." Everything is brimming with more detail here, and the characters were scaled up to match. Larger character sprites means that their ability to emote and strike poses is no longer as constrained too.
I imagine this sort of detail was made to get a good first impression going for the SNES-CD, the ill-fated Sony addon that Mana was initially being developed for. It must've been far from an easy task to condense all that work into the 2-megabyte SNES cartridge, but I think it makes it fascinating to perceive the final product as a bit of a "port", rather than the original version. Looking at it that way, Mana feels especially impressive in just how much graphical fidelity it managed to cram into its small space, even if that does mean the game's frame rate tends to struggle at times. Its flower-coated grassy plains, and fake water reflections must've set a pretty high standard for other developers to keep up in crafting worlds that felt as alive, and as nature-loving as this one.
And then you have the cover art. It's just an actual fucking painting, dude, this belongs in a gallery, not on an SNES box art. But I appreciate that the developers felt like the game deserved that much. "Chin down, eyes up" box arts, or any box art that tries to mimic the design of movie posters are a poison on the game industry's creativity, and they are never gonna sell me on your product if I see 20 more of them next to it. But seeing the size of this tree, lush forest, and the insignificance of humanity reflected in how tiny they are compared to it? Yeah, no, I wouldn't even need to look at the screenshots, I'd buy this the moment I'd see this art. This leaves a mark.
Next up, the music! There's something beautiful in many of the tracks found here. The composer found a great balance of atmosphere and catchy melody. A lot of it is owed to the softer selection of instruments, differing greatly from other Squaresoft titles that used trumpets to emphasize "adventure" as the primary feeling. Mana emphasizes something closer to melancholy, I'd say. It reflects the dying world around you (well, that's what the plot says is happening anyway), the desolate palaces that used to be populated with people, and your main character's status as an outcast who bore a responsibility heavy enough to put everyone else around them in danger. You don't feel like a hero, more like a boy who was forced into being one. The solemn nature of the music reflects that heavily.
After completing the game, I looked up a music album called "Secret of Mana+". The wiki cannot seem to make up its mind on whether it was released in 1993 or 1995, but it features remixed arrangements from both Secret of Mana, and the then-upcoming Trials of Mana, created by the original composer of both games. I already enjoyed Secret of Mana's soundtrack, but I think it was this album which really opened my eyes that Hiroki Kikuta is someone truly special. Imagining that this is the soundtrack we could've gotten if the SNES-CD came to pass, this feels like Kikuta without any technological restraints. He has a passion for breaking conventions on what a fantasy RPG could sound like, an unpredictability that makes each song a mystery to look forward to. Secret of Mana had this strange penchant for combining modern technology with its fantasy setting, something that I think this album leans into as well, and it's something that Squaresoft themselves would go on to increase the focus on for later Final Fantasies. In any case, having stepped into the rabbit hole that is Kikuta's effortless talent, I'm really excited to get to his later work now.
One thing, though. And this'll be the one problem I'll voice with Secret of Mana's soundtrack: This boss theme is really not good. In a soundtrack where about 60% of it could be mixed together with rain ambience, a boss theme with an intensity this dialed up does not belong here. On top of the lack of buildup, It's a jarring shift in tone everytime it happens, and takes you right out of whatever atmosphere the game has steeped into before. Literally anything more subtle could've improved things by a ton.
Okay, what else? Those co-op features are pretty cool! I mean, it's the big thing that Secret of Mana was known for, right? And unless you're playing MMO's, it seems like even to this day, the concept of multiplayer in an RPG is not one that's commonly explored. These big 30-hour RPG adventures tend to feel a little lonely when you have to pretend that your party members are real by naming them after your friends. Though, in the case of me and my friend who played this game together, we decided to name the girl character after Karl Marx, for some reason. There were times when we coordinated by taking turns to attack an enemy in order to stunlock it, and getting into that sense of rhythm felt quite conducive to the spirit of teamwork. And it must've been nice to be young in the 90's, to be able to experience a game with two or three people, sharing in your imaginations over what a world like Mana could still hold for you. At the age of 25, though...
Alright, I don't think I can hold this in any longer. Secret of Mana tried its best. But its best was not good enough to propel this gameplay. Everything about it is a complete and total fucking mess. I don't know if I can blame this on the programmer, but everytime I see "programmed by Nasir" on the front of a Squaresoft title screen, the phrase is like a curse that dooms whatever game has it into an oblivion of clunk, jank, and bugs. On the other hand, I have to consider that the Gameboy predecessor to Mana had its own share of jank to contend with. I thought it was because of Gameboy limitations impeding the ambition of the gameplay. Perhaps something similar is happening here, but worse. A game with the ambition of an SNES-CD title, that had to get squeezed into an SNES cartridge instead, is now actively struggling under its own weight.
How about that hit feedback, for starters? Do your attacks fail to connect because the hitboxes are utter nonsense, or is it because the enemy's evasion stat kicked in and caused them to dodge your attack? These are questions that never, ever went away throughout me and my friend's experience. And these are questions that could've easily been solved if there was a little "Miss!" piece of text that popped up if your attack missed. But there isn't one. If the attack connects, it feels pretty okay, better than what it used to feel like in the Gameboy Mana anyway. But when it doesn't (and you bet your ass it won't), you cannot fathom why. You are not told why. You do not know what to blame it on. You don't know whether the game is even working correctly, but one thing you DO come to know, is that your characters are woefully incompetent at combat. Like trying to chase down a rabbit in a dream, but your legs are made out of jelly, Secret of Mana's sluggish game feel makes you just as incapable of performing the most basic of tasks.
The enemies, though? Oh, one thing's for sure, they are far from incompetent. You know how this game's combat is referred to as being in real-time? I think that's just an illusion. I think that by modern standards, the implication of real-time combat is that you are in constant control of your actions. There will be times where the enemy takes control away to dish out a powerful attack, but those moments tend to be infrequent in modern RPG's. In Mana, those moments are relentless, and brutal.
It's like the enemies have been taught every trick that RPG players usually deploy to cheese their way through battles, except now you get to see how annoying it feels. Sleeping spells, petrifying spells, a series of attack spell combos that freeze you in place each time, flame spells that lock you in place for an upwards of 10 seconds, freeze spells that turn you into a snowman where you can't do anything, physical attacks that knock you unconscious. There is so much shit in this game that stunlocks you, and almost every enemy makes use of something like that. Don't forget the variant of stunlock where an enemy traps you against a corner, and unless you manage to kill them fast enough, you are about to be instantly killed yourself.
There's also a substantial amount of enemies that like to multiply themselves just when you think you've almost killed them. The one time we considered depleting our magic resources on them, there was not enough left for the boss, which turned it into an excruciatingly tedious war of attrition. Turns out, this led to the mentality that half this game's enemies were not fun, or worth fighting whatsoever, so we ran right past them. There were at least two dungeons where we did not feel like fighting even a single enemy. We Paper Mario Sticker Star-ing over here, playing an RPG where the act of fighting an enemy in an area predominantly dedicated to fighting enemies had zero appeal to it.
On our last session, I've realized why this was a problem for us. Our magic was underleveled. Even though we've tried focusing on a select few categories of spells that we thought would've been more useful, we were 3 hours away from the game's credits and none of our magic was doing enough to the regular enemies to make it worthwhile. We were too generous in thinking that the usefulness of the magic would naturally scale with the progression. But much like most other RPG's of its time, grinding was the only real solution to this issue.
And so the grinding commenced, and it's only then that I realized the egregious amount of grinding required to see your magic leveled up to a useful potency. At low levels, the grind is reasonable enough. Once you start getting halfway there? You would have to use these spells hundreds of times, far beyond the amount the game would naturally require of you. So the strategy is that you go to the cheapest Inn you can find, proceed to start spamming magic on yourself, and then rest everytime you're out. Rinse, repeat, until the magic levels are looking good enough. Using fast forward at a speed of 4.0x, this process took 2 hours. Without that, it would've been like, what, 5 to 6 hours? Of doing nothing but standing around in an Inn like a dumbass, and watching the same magic casting animation over and over.
The kicker to all this? You would probably think to yourself that there's no way that "Go to the nearest Inn and spam magic to level up" is what the developers actually intended you to do. And then you look at the official manual. And they tell you to do exactly that. That is an official recommended tip. And it shows! Because if you proceed to do this, offensive magic goes from mediocre to the most useful tool you'll have in the game. Using Magic Absorb to restore your MP for free, and then just dishing out the strongest spells becomes THE way to deal with every enemy, and every boss remaining.
But it's out of the frying pan and into the fire now, because this over-reliance on magic brings about a problem exclusive to the game's biggest selling feature: the co-op. Bear in mind, there is only one character that is proficient in dealing magic damage. And everytime you want to use magic or do anything in your menu, the game freezes and the other players are waiting until you finish making your choices. Soooo, when the moment comes that you rely on offensive magic more and more, the agency of the other players vanishes, because one player is constantly opening and reopening their magic menu to repeatedly spam magic attacks. All the others players can do is watch. In the case of my friend, while his character was standing around in a corner, he took his phone out and ordered some food while I was wailing on the final set of bosses. At that point, the co-op becomes a novelty. A little optional extra, but clearly one where the game was not designed around giving every player an equal amount of involvement.
Oh, right, speaking of the menus, this Ring Menu is a nifty little way of doing things, and it technically makes sense for a game with co-op in it. Only problem was, I'm in the middle of the final boss and I still can't fucking efficiently navigate this thing. I can't even count the amount of times I tripped up on selecting the wrong menu, or overshooting the menu I really wanted, or thinking the menu I want is one button press away, but oops, wrong way, should've pressed up instead of down! It's a nitpick, sure, but the seconds do add up when your friend has to watch you constantly select the wrong things, and when you observe them doing the same.
Even with a series of paragraphs that reads like a new chapter to the constitutional amendment, I still don't think I've expressed my feelings of disdain on this gameplay well enough. But just to sum it up: This does not feel like a real-time RPG. This feels like a turn-based RPG where enemies have thrice the amount of turns you have, and every one of those turns is designed to make your experience a tedious hell. AI partners get constantly stuck on corners, one time they went out of bounds and almost got me softlocked if it weren't for the nearby whippable spot... oh yeah, did I mention that the game did softlock during one of the room transitions? Oh, oh, and what about those 6 text box designs you can select from, none of which make reading the game's text any less of an eyesore? The art and sound design is hitting it out of the park. The people in charge of everything else, have fucked it up on so many levels.
Something still perplexes me. I mean, throughout my life, I've seen plenty of retrospective reviews that tout Secret of Mana's gameplay to be just as fun as it was back then. That this isn't called "one of the greatest games of all time" just because of its innovation and presentation, but because this game IS fun. All those things that I've complained about, the stunlocks and the magic spamming that enemies inflict on you, and the unruly and unclear evasion mechanics, is that just part of the intended experience? Is that what creates the push and pull for the people who do enjoy it? Most importantly, if I didn't come into this game with the expectation of combat being closer to something like Kingdom Hearts 1 or Crisis Core, would I have enjoyed it more? I can't help but feel, that maybe I'm not appreciating Secret of Mana's gameplay as much as I should, or that I "missed the point" of it.
But thinking about it from another perspective, I took a quick look on Backloggd's thoughts on Trials of Mana, and it looks like the people who didn't like Secret of Mana, enjoyed Trials way more. I get the feeling I'll be landing in the same boat as those people when I get around to that game. So what does that make Secret of Mana, if not a poorly aged wreck? A different game for a different audience? For a more patient audience? A nostalgic audience? An audience that acknowledges its flaws, but doesn't let them get in the way of the experience? I really don't understand the praise for this game, but I would really like to know. What is it about this gameplay that clicks with people not just back in the 90's, but to this very day?
Nonetheless, if you liked it, I'm glad you did. On top of a phenomenal atmosphere and soundtrack, you got a fun game out of it too. I wish I could share in the same feeling, but I can't lie to you. This was kinda horrendous. Not something I'd touch ever again without a major overhaul to its systems. I feel unsatisfied, but I'm not surprised. I already knew to keep my expectations low. Now if you'll excuse me, it is my duty as a girl, to become a giant fucking tree.
The graphics! There was clearly an evolution of talent happening within Squaresoft around this point of time. The previous Squaresoft releases used these tinier, chibi-proportioned character sprites. By comparison, you can look at Secret of Mana, and think "Okay, yeah, this is where the Chrono Trigger art team had their roots." Everything is brimming with more detail here, and the characters were scaled up to match. Larger character sprites means that their ability to emote and strike poses is no longer as constrained too.
I imagine this sort of detail was made to get a good first impression going for the SNES-CD, the ill-fated Sony addon that Mana was initially being developed for. It must've been far from an easy task to condense all that work into the 2-megabyte SNES cartridge, but I think it makes it fascinating to perceive the final product as a bit of a "port", rather than the original version. Looking at it that way, Mana feels especially impressive in just how much graphical fidelity it managed to cram into its small space, even if that does mean the game's frame rate tends to struggle at times. Its flower-coated grassy plains, and fake water reflections must've set a pretty high standard for other developers to keep up in crafting worlds that felt as alive, and as nature-loving as this one.
And then you have the cover art. It's just an actual fucking painting, dude, this belongs in a gallery, not on an SNES box art. But I appreciate that the developers felt like the game deserved that much. "Chin down, eyes up" box arts, or any box art that tries to mimic the design of movie posters are a poison on the game industry's creativity, and they are never gonna sell me on your product if I see 20 more of them next to it. But seeing the size of this tree, lush forest, and the insignificance of humanity reflected in how tiny they are compared to it? Yeah, no, I wouldn't even need to look at the screenshots, I'd buy this the moment I'd see this art. This leaves a mark.
Next up, the music! There's something beautiful in many of the tracks found here. The composer found a great balance of atmosphere and catchy melody. A lot of it is owed to the softer selection of instruments, differing greatly from other Squaresoft titles that used trumpets to emphasize "adventure" as the primary feeling. Mana emphasizes something closer to melancholy, I'd say. It reflects the dying world around you (well, that's what the plot says is happening anyway), the desolate palaces that used to be populated with people, and your main character's status as an outcast who bore a responsibility heavy enough to put everyone else around them in danger. You don't feel like a hero, more like a boy who was forced into being one. The solemn nature of the music reflects that heavily.
After completing the game, I looked up a music album called "Secret of Mana+". The wiki cannot seem to make up its mind on whether it was released in 1993 or 1995, but it features remixed arrangements from both Secret of Mana, and the then-upcoming Trials of Mana, created by the original composer of both games. I already enjoyed Secret of Mana's soundtrack, but I think it was this album which really opened my eyes that Hiroki Kikuta is someone truly special. Imagining that this is the soundtrack we could've gotten if the SNES-CD came to pass, this feels like Kikuta without any technological restraints. He has a passion for breaking conventions on what a fantasy RPG could sound like, an unpredictability that makes each song a mystery to look forward to. Secret of Mana had this strange penchant for combining modern technology with its fantasy setting, something that I think this album leans into as well, and it's something that Squaresoft themselves would go on to increase the focus on for later Final Fantasies. In any case, having stepped into the rabbit hole that is Kikuta's effortless talent, I'm really excited to get to his later work now.
One thing, though. And this'll be the one problem I'll voice with Secret of Mana's soundtrack: This boss theme is really not good. In a soundtrack where about 60% of it could be mixed together with rain ambience, a boss theme with an intensity this dialed up does not belong here. On top of the lack of buildup, It's a jarring shift in tone everytime it happens, and takes you right out of whatever atmosphere the game has steeped into before. Literally anything more subtle could've improved things by a ton.
Okay, what else? Those co-op features are pretty cool! I mean, it's the big thing that Secret of Mana was known for, right? And unless you're playing MMO's, it seems like even to this day, the concept of multiplayer in an RPG is not one that's commonly explored. These big 30-hour RPG adventures tend to feel a little lonely when you have to pretend that your party members are real by naming them after your friends. Though, in the case of me and my friend who played this game together, we decided to name the girl character after Karl Marx, for some reason. There were times when we coordinated by taking turns to attack an enemy in order to stunlock it, and getting into that sense of rhythm felt quite conducive to the spirit of teamwork. And it must've been nice to be young in the 90's, to be able to experience a game with two or three people, sharing in your imaginations over what a world like Mana could still hold for you. At the age of 25, though...
Alright, I don't think I can hold this in any longer. Secret of Mana tried its best. But its best was not good enough to propel this gameplay. Everything about it is a complete and total fucking mess. I don't know if I can blame this on the programmer, but everytime I see "programmed by Nasir" on the front of a Squaresoft title screen, the phrase is like a curse that dooms whatever game has it into an oblivion of clunk, jank, and bugs. On the other hand, I have to consider that the Gameboy predecessor to Mana had its own share of jank to contend with. I thought it was because of Gameboy limitations impeding the ambition of the gameplay. Perhaps something similar is happening here, but worse. A game with the ambition of an SNES-CD title, that had to get squeezed into an SNES cartridge instead, is now actively struggling under its own weight.
How about that hit feedback, for starters? Do your attacks fail to connect because the hitboxes are utter nonsense, or is it because the enemy's evasion stat kicked in and caused them to dodge your attack? These are questions that never, ever went away throughout me and my friend's experience. And these are questions that could've easily been solved if there was a little "Miss!" piece of text that popped up if your attack missed. But there isn't one. If the attack connects, it feels pretty okay, better than what it used to feel like in the Gameboy Mana anyway. But when it doesn't (and you bet your ass it won't), you cannot fathom why. You are not told why. You do not know what to blame it on. You don't know whether the game is even working correctly, but one thing you DO come to know, is that your characters are woefully incompetent at combat. Like trying to chase down a rabbit in a dream, but your legs are made out of jelly, Secret of Mana's sluggish game feel makes you just as incapable of performing the most basic of tasks.
The enemies, though? Oh, one thing's for sure, they are far from incompetent. You know how this game's combat is referred to as being in real-time? I think that's just an illusion. I think that by modern standards, the implication of real-time combat is that you are in constant control of your actions. There will be times where the enemy takes control away to dish out a powerful attack, but those moments tend to be infrequent in modern RPG's. In Mana, those moments are relentless, and brutal.
It's like the enemies have been taught every trick that RPG players usually deploy to cheese their way through battles, except now you get to see how annoying it feels. Sleeping spells, petrifying spells, a series of attack spell combos that freeze you in place each time, flame spells that lock you in place for an upwards of 10 seconds, freeze spells that turn you into a snowman where you can't do anything, physical attacks that knock you unconscious. There is so much shit in this game that stunlocks you, and almost every enemy makes use of something like that. Don't forget the variant of stunlock where an enemy traps you against a corner, and unless you manage to kill them fast enough, you are about to be instantly killed yourself.
There's also a substantial amount of enemies that like to multiply themselves just when you think you've almost killed them. The one time we considered depleting our magic resources on them, there was not enough left for the boss, which turned it into an excruciatingly tedious war of attrition. Turns out, this led to the mentality that half this game's enemies were not fun, or worth fighting whatsoever, so we ran right past them. There were at least two dungeons where we did not feel like fighting even a single enemy. We Paper Mario Sticker Star-ing over here, playing an RPG where the act of fighting an enemy in an area predominantly dedicated to fighting enemies had zero appeal to it.
On our last session, I've realized why this was a problem for us. Our magic was underleveled. Even though we've tried focusing on a select few categories of spells that we thought would've been more useful, we were 3 hours away from the game's credits and none of our magic was doing enough to the regular enemies to make it worthwhile. We were too generous in thinking that the usefulness of the magic would naturally scale with the progression. But much like most other RPG's of its time, grinding was the only real solution to this issue.
And so the grinding commenced, and it's only then that I realized the egregious amount of grinding required to see your magic leveled up to a useful potency. At low levels, the grind is reasonable enough. Once you start getting halfway there? You would have to use these spells hundreds of times, far beyond the amount the game would naturally require of you. So the strategy is that you go to the cheapest Inn you can find, proceed to start spamming magic on yourself, and then rest everytime you're out. Rinse, repeat, until the magic levels are looking good enough. Using fast forward at a speed of 4.0x, this process took 2 hours. Without that, it would've been like, what, 5 to 6 hours? Of doing nothing but standing around in an Inn like a dumbass, and watching the same magic casting animation over and over.
The kicker to all this? You would probably think to yourself that there's no way that "Go to the nearest Inn and spam magic to level up" is what the developers actually intended you to do. And then you look at the official manual. And they tell you to do exactly that. That is an official recommended tip. And it shows! Because if you proceed to do this, offensive magic goes from mediocre to the most useful tool you'll have in the game. Using Magic Absorb to restore your MP for free, and then just dishing out the strongest spells becomes THE way to deal with every enemy, and every boss remaining.
But it's out of the frying pan and into the fire now, because this over-reliance on magic brings about a problem exclusive to the game's biggest selling feature: the co-op. Bear in mind, there is only one character that is proficient in dealing magic damage. And everytime you want to use magic or do anything in your menu, the game freezes and the other players are waiting until you finish making your choices. Soooo, when the moment comes that you rely on offensive magic more and more, the agency of the other players vanishes, because one player is constantly opening and reopening their magic menu to repeatedly spam magic attacks. All the others players can do is watch. In the case of my friend, while his character was standing around in a corner, he took his phone out and ordered some food while I was wailing on the final set of bosses. At that point, the co-op becomes a novelty. A little optional extra, but clearly one where the game was not designed around giving every player an equal amount of involvement.
Oh, right, speaking of the menus, this Ring Menu is a nifty little way of doing things, and it technically makes sense for a game with co-op in it. Only problem was, I'm in the middle of the final boss and I still can't fucking efficiently navigate this thing. I can't even count the amount of times I tripped up on selecting the wrong menu, or overshooting the menu I really wanted, or thinking the menu I want is one button press away, but oops, wrong way, should've pressed up instead of down! It's a nitpick, sure, but the seconds do add up when your friend has to watch you constantly select the wrong things, and when you observe them doing the same.
Even with a series of paragraphs that reads like a new chapter to the constitutional amendment, I still don't think I've expressed my feelings of disdain on this gameplay well enough. But just to sum it up: This does not feel like a real-time RPG. This feels like a turn-based RPG where enemies have thrice the amount of turns you have, and every one of those turns is designed to make your experience a tedious hell. AI partners get constantly stuck on corners, one time they went out of bounds and almost got me softlocked if it weren't for the nearby whippable spot... oh yeah, did I mention that the game did softlock during one of the room transitions? Oh, oh, and what about those 6 text box designs you can select from, none of which make reading the game's text any less of an eyesore? The art and sound design is hitting it out of the park. The people in charge of everything else, have fucked it up on so many levels.
Something still perplexes me. I mean, throughout my life, I've seen plenty of retrospective reviews that tout Secret of Mana's gameplay to be just as fun as it was back then. That this isn't called "one of the greatest games of all time" just because of its innovation and presentation, but because this game IS fun. All those things that I've complained about, the stunlocks and the magic spamming that enemies inflict on you, and the unruly and unclear evasion mechanics, is that just part of the intended experience? Is that what creates the push and pull for the people who do enjoy it? Most importantly, if I didn't come into this game with the expectation of combat being closer to something like Kingdom Hearts 1 or Crisis Core, would I have enjoyed it more? I can't help but feel, that maybe I'm not appreciating Secret of Mana's gameplay as much as I should, or that I "missed the point" of it.
But thinking about it from another perspective, I took a quick look on Backloggd's thoughts on Trials of Mana, and it looks like the people who didn't like Secret of Mana, enjoyed Trials way more. I get the feeling I'll be landing in the same boat as those people when I get around to that game. So what does that make Secret of Mana, if not a poorly aged wreck? A different game for a different audience? For a more patient audience? A nostalgic audience? An audience that acknowledges its flaws, but doesn't let them get in the way of the experience? I really don't understand the praise for this game, but I would really like to know. What is it about this gameplay that clicks with people not just back in the 90's, but to this very day?
Nonetheless, if you liked it, I'm glad you did. On top of a phenomenal atmosphere and soundtrack, you got a fun game out of it too. I wish I could share in the same feeling, but I can't lie to you. This was kinda horrendous. Not something I'd touch ever again without a major overhaul to its systems. I feel unsatisfied, but I'm not surprised. I already knew to keep my expectations low. Now if you'll excuse me, it is my duty as a girl, to become a giant fucking tree.