LogFAQs > #986831318

37. Secret of Mana
Created by SquareSoft
Release year: 1993
Platform: SNES
Guesstimated playtime: ~120 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpbSFMxyODU

Talking about Secret of Mana is such a weird sensation for me. It's a game I have such incredibly *fond memories* of, and yet I know that there are some extreme limitations in the gameplay that would mean I'd be unable to view it the same way if I ever played again. This will be the only SNES game to make the list on original hardware because my friend lent me his Super Nintendo for like a week and I did nothing but play SoM. Not only did I grind the crap out of the magic system, but I've done multiple playthroughs, so I think this hour count is about fair. I couldn't conscionably place it higher, though, even if it's the game that I casually tell people is my favorite game of all-time so I don't have to try to actually decide what my favorite game is. (Picking favorites is hard, okay?)

I mentioned earlier that I subscribed to Nintendo Power. NP made a BIG deal out of Secret of Mana, spreading its coverage of the game across three issues. And it looked phenomenal to me. There was some particular alchemy of the art, music, animation and all the promise held in those pages of the magazine that made me fall in love with it. When my friend got it, we played in co-op together for part of his run. Sadly, he didn't wait for me to continue each day. But I'd eventually start a playthrough of my own. And even if poison really sucked and getting chain stunned by green jellies was obnoxious, the game was magical up until hitting Elinee's Castle. The werewolf fight to get the girl and then the Spikey Tiger fight at the end wound up being the two hardest parts of the entire game and they were both in the first 20% of the story. The one thing I found incredible is that they made you play that far into the game without any healing magic. (Hi, Seiken Densetsu 3. Yeah, I see you over there, not giving any healing spells until the first class change.)

But I generally loved the rest of the game, even if I took grinding to an unnecessary level and I found running around the Upper Lands incredibly frustrating. Seriously, the amount of grinding you can do on this game increases with quartic scaling because each new magic you get also raises the cap on your spells, they take longer to raise, AND you get them stupidly fast in the endgame. It really is a shame we never got to see the original vision of this game as it would have appeared on a hypothetical SNES CD drive. All you Chrono Trigger fans can thank this for happening, though.

One of my favorite parts of Secret of Mana is the soundtrack. With a few notable exceptions (Danger), I love the whole OST and I was absolutely infuriated when the remake came out in 2018 due to how completely irreverent it was with the original. I've generally not been a fan of how Square handles the music of its ports and remakes, but this was a whole new level of awful.

The last thing that I think is important to talk about with SoM, and easily forgotten today, is how innovative and different it was at the time. I had never played an action RPG that had party members. I had certainly never played a *co-op* action RPG (unless River City Ransom counts?) People like to bitch about the menus, but it only took me a minute to learn, and was extremely effective at managing all the different game systems. Some of the choices they made were easily seen as a mistake in hindsight, like the charge-up mechanic of weapon attacks or freezing targets in place when a spell is cast, though the latter was probably also a hardware limitation. It could have also done with a bit more in the storytelling department, but they were really strapped for cartridge space. They did an awful lot with what they had to work with, even if the last third of the game basically went "okay and then they did all the things and killed the final boss and lived happily ever after the end."

Related titles: I was shocked when I played this game for the first time, and everything in the story seemed to bear passing resemblance to Final Fantasy Adventure, my first game on the Gameboy. Of course, I know now that they're part of the same series, renamed in the west from Seiken Densetsu, which ultimately became known here as the Mana series. But, importantly, we didn't get Seiken Densetsu 3 for two decades until Trials of Mana got an official release. In the meanwhile, I had played the fan translation, and SD3 does some really cool things with its story and characters. The fact that you get six different character choices, each with their own unique introduction and some additional unique story beats later on is something I wouldn't see again until Dragon Age: Origins.

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Up next: The picture next to "power fantasy" in the dictionary.