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

Reviewed on Apr 27, 2023


8 Comments


11 months ago

kitase well and truly is That Bitch

11 months ago

YESSSS ABANDON GAMES

FREE YOURSELF IF YOU'RE NOT VIBING

SUCH IS THE PATH TO GAMING ENLIGHTENMENT

11 months ago

Welcome back, queen 👑

11 months ago

Someone needed to say this shit. I do not think you're missing anything super interesting plotwise from my memory but I do think you're going to have a better time with Legend if I know you

11 months ago

Fuck 'em up!

You're not missing anything by skipping the rest of the game, my recollection of it is that it's pretty consistent in quality throughout. I didn't gel with this one either even though I really wanted to, but unlike you I forced myself to get through it. Was not worth it, has not made me better as a person for it.

11 months ago

I love the Mana series but Secret is very frustrating and clunky. I really dont know why people like it so much actually, its horrible to play. Trials for me improved on what Secret was trying to do, and Legend is one of my favorite games of all time. I hope you enjoy that one if you end up checking it out... good on you for quitting a game you don't like, games shouldn't be a chore [:

11 months ago

“Yes I completely agree that games shouldn’t be a chore” I say on the same night that I grumpily slap two stars onto my 70 hour SECOND playthrough of trails of cold steel 2

But yes my enthusiasm for the first mana game and how interesting basically every future one looks definitely keeps me on the hook with these even if I bounced off this one extremely hard

11 months ago

I'll never get why they put this one on the SNES Classic instead of something like Chrono Trigger or Terranigma.