Partridge Senpai's 2023 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023* indicates a repeat
1.
Terranigma (SFC)
2.
Eastward (PC)
3.
Pulse (PC)
4.
Lost Ruins (PC)
5.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6.
Dropsy (PC)
7.
Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8.
Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
This is a game I’d heard a lot about as a kid, and I even bought it on the Wii Virtual Console well over a decade ago. I played a bit of it, but found it too awkward and difficult, so I put it down and never ended up returning to it. I’ve tried it once or twice again since then, but it’s never really gelled with me, and I’d grown quite the negative impression of it over the years. Listening to some friends talk about their experience with the Mana series convinced me, though. I’d owned this game long enough, and I was going to sit down and finally finish this thing! Playing on my Super Famicom Mini, it took me around 19 hours to beat the Japanese version game without abusing save states (though sometimes using a walkthrough).
Secret of Mana follows the story of a young boy who, when playing in the forbidden area behind his tiny village, discovers a mysterious sword calling to him. Pulling it from its place in the ground, he finds the world around him suddenly filled with monsters! After fighting his way back to his village, the villagers accuse him of inadvertently starting the end of the world by pulling the blade from its place, and they quickly banish him forever. So starts the journey of our intrepid young hero who soon meets both a young girl and a strange fairy who also come along for the journey.
Secret of Mana’s English story is a further truncated version of an already very cut down story (as this game had quite a hectic development cycle). The original Japanese version that I played does have a bit more character to the dialogue and certain details are a little more fleshed out, but it still bears the scars of the some 40% of the story they allegedly needed to cut to get this final product out the door. There are a few themes or interesting (or even surprisingly heavy) plot beats here and there, such as how the empire ends up falling or how all three of our protagonists are missing parental figures in their lives.
There are some very strange parts here too, such as the “Republic” only having a king as its government, or some NPCs complaining about how the empire used to be so good and peaceful until the war 15 years ago despite an empire, by its very nature, being a political entity founded upon an idea of inherent supremacy above subjugated groups (and there’s very little to suggest that these NPCs are being ironic or speaking from misguided viewpoints). Regardless, by the halfway point, it all just feels like a rush to the finish as nothing is really dwelt on enough to form much of any larger cohesive messaging. The story isn’t bad, per se, but it’s certainly nothing special, and unlike a lot of other SquareSoft games from this time, the story really isn’t a big reason to come to this game.
The gameplay is part turn-based RPG, part 2D top-down Zelda game, and it frankly manages to miss most of the fun aspects of both. The gameplay as a whole is what I found the most difficult aspect of the game to tolerate, and this was quite the slog for most of the game, even after I’d gotten more to grips with the combat past the few several hours. Your melee attacks function via a charge system, and you’ll need to wait several seconds between strikes if you want your attacks to have any power at all. However, just hitting the enemy isn’t enough to land a strike. For both you and the enemy, you have innate hit and dodge percent chances, so it’s actually a dice roll behind the scenes that dictates whether a well aimed and charged melee attack will hit. On top of that, enemies (especially bosses) have very unclear hit boxes, dodge animations, and invincibility frames in between their animations and attacks, so combat is often a very messy rinse and repeat exercise of slowly pummeling an enemy in between periods where they happen to be invincible. It makes for a really unsatisfying combat experience that makes every fight feel like an endless waiting game until you can get lucky enough to kill your opponent, and that’s especially frustrating for the enemies that continuously spawn full-health copies of themselves.
While the boy can only use melee attacks, the girl has defense and support magic, and the fairy has attacking and debuff spells. Sure, magic attacks (both yours and the enemy's) never miss, but it takes so long to cast them and the enemy is invincible during them that most of what they do is just slow the already dull combat down to an awful crawl. Additionally, your own reserves of MP are very limited for a large chunk of the game, so this makes using it to fight normal enemies a very unwise choice, especially with how invaluable magic so often is for fighting the very annoying to hit bosses. Even when you have the MP to actually use spells effectively without worrying about running out of juice, you need to spend time grinding up spells levels to make them actually effective. While your normal attacks and stats increase just by killing enemies, and the level and money curves of the game are pretty reasonable as long as you just kill most things you see, magic only levels up by repeatedly using that specific type of spell a bunch of times. You’ll REALLY want things like your ice and moon spells at max power as much as you can, so that means going to an inn, resting, going to a battle area to spam you spells until you run out of MP, and then doing it all over again until the spells you want are maxed out. It cumulatively takes hours, and there’s just nothing fun about it for how necessary a part of the gameplay loop it is.
Weird design choices like this abound in this game. On the lower end, you have annoyances like how necessary armor is, so should you miss a merchant (or should a merchant be hidden from you in an out of the way location) and you miss the next armor upgrade, you’ll start getting absolutely mulched with just how tough the next area’s enemies are. Then you have your consumable items, which you can only carry four of at a time, so your healing and such are really reliant on your magic because you just don’t have the pockets to carry around large amounts of healing candy. That in and of itself isn’t much of a problem, balancing-wise, and you can always find more items in chests dropped by enemies. These chests, however, THEY are where the problem lies, as they are just so vindictively mean as to be pointless.
Whether you have space for the item inside or not, a chest disappears once you open it. You’re likely going to be conserving your items anyhow, so most chests will have useless stuff you need to throw away anyhow or just useless equipment you out-leveled ages ago. A lot of the time, however, chests are trapped! This can range from a little punch to the face, to health-bar shredding poison effects (particularly nasty in the first half of the game), or even instant death for the character who opened the chest! You only can carry four revive items at a time, remember, and you don’t get the revive spell until almost the very end of the game. This makes opening chests dropped from monsters a proposition so dangerous as to be pointless. Anything not harmful from them is almost certainly useless, and anything harmful from them is SO bad as to be a potential catastrophe. Outside of messing with the player, it is totally beyond me why the trapped chests are in the game at all, and they feel like a very half-baked mechanic.
One of the most annoying mechanics, however, are your AI party members. Your party members don’t *have* to be AI controlled, granted, and if you’ve got some friends, they can hop in and take control of the other characters. You can even press Select and switch between them on the fly if you’d like. However, there are SO many compromises to the rest of the gameplay to accommodate these party members that I frequently found myself wishing that they weren’t there at all, and I simply had one character who had all of these spells and such.
On the level of outright compromises, there’s first the camera. The game needs to accommodate two or three people potentially playing the game at once, so it can’t just focus on one character all the time. As a result, you need to get VERY close to the edge of the screen to actually scroll it, meaning you’re quite vulnerable to enemies just off screen “seeing” you first and working in a cheap shot before you can react to it. This makes the already slow, plodding combat and exploration even more slow as you’re force to very frequently tiptoe forward lest you get ganked by an unlucky enemy placement. On top of all of that, your AI allies have some very mixed pathing abilities. This means you’ll very frequently be swapping control to them or going back and forth as you try to un-stick them from whatever pillar or bush they’ve decided to take the wrong path around.
While I do appreciate how you can adjust their AI on scales of how aggressive you want them to be as well as the distance they should keep from enemies, I found that I was nonetheless babysitting them constantly while I tried to get them close enough to actually aggro on enemies (or pull them away from things they’d decided needing to be killed at once). Sure, you can go into their respective AI menus and swap which preset they’re fixed to depending on what you’re fighting or where you’re exploring, but that involves going into the tedious menu system. To facilitate the simultaneous RPG multiplayer, you’ve got an unconventional menu UI where a ring appears around each player. You can press Y for the one of the player you’re controlling or X for one of the AI’s menus, and there is nothing quick or simple about going through these things. It’s not the worst thing in the world, sure, but it’s very quickly a huge pain in the butt to have to constantly change their AI behaviors, so I usually didn’t bother.
This even extends to just changing your own weapon as well. The game has eight different weapons you can use, find upgrades for, and level up in proficiency in, but you NEED to go into your respective ring menus if you want to change which weapon you’re using. This wouldn’t be such a huge annoyance if you didn’t need to switch between the sword, axe, and whip so often to cut down particular barriers or cross certain whip-able gaps. Given that not one but *both* shoulder buttons are completely unused for normal gameplay, it is absolutely beyond me why they didn’t just let you hot-swap between weapons using R and L. If I had to guess, it’s probably down to some programming hurdle that couldn’t be overcome, but no matter what the actual reason is, it doesn’t make switching weapons any less annoying.
The gameplay experience of Secret of Mana isn’t a particularly difficult one most of the time, but good gods is it boring. Mechanic upon mechanic piles up to make an experience that feels as unrewarding as it is frustrating. The only times it feels particularly great is when things have gotten *so* simple that you can just breeze through enemies because you don’t need to deal with the most annoying design decisions at this particular moment.
The aesthetics of the game are decent enough for 1993, but they’re nothing special, and as is also the case with the writing, they certainly bear the scars of something that was in development for so long. Sprites are relatively nice looking, but animations are often very simple for both players and enemies alike. Despite this, the game still gets quite bad slowdown problems, and only 3 enemies can ever be on screen at a time lest the game slow down to an impossible crawl. That can even turn into commands for your AI allies to use spells getting eaten while their AI and the gameplay action catch up from whatever was happening at the inopportune moment you decided to fire. The music is at least pretty good. That’s one area where even a much rougher gameplay experience like this doesn’t let you forget that it’s a SquareSoft game. It’s a nice silver lining to a very dark cloud.
Verdict: Not Recommended. There were times where I was enjoying this game okay, but those times felt more like happy accidents than actual high points of design. The general pieces of the experience of Secret of Mana make for a consistently boring and frustrating gameplay loop that is very hard to recommend to really anyone. Like Shining Force that I played a couple years back, this is one I can kinda see why people may’ve enjoyed it back then, but even still, the problems it has are so great that it’s kinda hard to believe it didn’t have more detractors back then. Even if it was great back in its day, Secret of Mana is a game that has aged like milk in the sun, and it’s one you’re far better off avoiding in favor of one of the better games in its series.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Maybe it's just a fact that many platformers have a lot of similar stages and themes.
