Virtual 100 – Game 27
I finally wrapped up my playthrough of Secret of Mana. Not the original SNES version, which I absolutely adored, but the 3D remake that was released in 2018. And man, it was… quite the experience. I’m not sure if it was the rose-colored glasses, but I remembered the SNES version being much better.
Not technically better, but just as an overall package, being the better experience. A weird thing happened with this transition to 3D, with its cutscenes and its voice-acted dialog. It lost its charm. For whatever reason, the characters just look generic and bland, and the game world looks extremely simple compared to the lovingly crafted pixel-art of the original.
This is obviously just personal preference, but I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else felt the same way. So I took a look at Metacritic and the average critic score was a 63 with an average user rating of 6.2. Just through a quick scan of the review summaries, the positive reviews were still a bit cautious, while the middling and negative reviews almost all recommended playing the original 16-bit version instead. So, I guess it’s not just me after all.
The move to 3D seemed to be the biggest complaint, in that yeah, it did look bland and uninspired. Not sure what we were all expecting, as it was originally just pixel art and I’m not sure what else they could have done with it. It’s not like the locations and characters aren’t recognizeable, but I do feel like their re-designs could have been better. The SNES sprite of the lead character— I forget what his default name was because I named him Shart— always looked older than what the story suggested. The locations looked alright, but a bit too… clean? Smooth? Again, I don’t even know how to describe it. In pixel art, you can put in all this tiny detail. All these little grainy pixels make the ground look rough, the grass look scraggly, etc. But when it’s all just a smooth texture on a piece of geometry, it loses a lot of that grit.
That’s not even my biggest gripe though. The thing that irritated me the most in this game was the combat. I remember the combat, and I’ve even booted up Secret of Mana SNES a few times to see if things were my imagination or not. The combat in Secret of Mana was always kind of weird. The characters had a cool down between attacks. After an attack, a counter goes from 0 to 100%. This is supposed to be the effectiveness of your attack. If you wait until it reaches 100, the attack will do full power. The trade-off is whether or not you want to attack frequently and do less damage, or be a little less aggressive and make each hit do as much damage as possible. On the flipside, the enemies you hit can be stunned, in which case they don’t move for a while. But while they’re stunned, they also don’t register getting hit again until the stun timer is up. What this resulted in was a hit-wait-hit-wait trade-off where the player just tries to time it just right and keep the enemy on the defensive. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
This was all expected. I remembered this from the SNES version and I groaned a little when I saw that they kept it for the remake. But whatever, I was willing to deal with it. What had me gritting my teeth and actually shouting aloud in frustration was that melee in this game is almost completely useless. They should have called the game MISS of Mana. Or Secret of MISS. Because you will see that word literally thousands and thousands of times. Every monster in this game has an extremely high evade rating, because even the dinkiest of enemies can take far too long to dispatch, simply because you might only land a hit once out of every three or four tries. This isn’t as big a deal for the magic users, but for Shart, who was purely a melee fighter, it is downright infuriating. And it NEVER GETS BETTER. Even toward the end of the game, with Shart’s stats saying his hit rating was 90%, it was still far lower than that. It got extremely aggravating trying to keep the two magic users alive later in the game when you can’t even get rid of one monster before it lands a devastating attack on someone.
That results in relying on the Sprite’s offensive magic spells almost exclusively. Even the weapons, which depend on usage to level up, were still at middling levels at the end of the game, because it was so difficult to actually land a hit. I don’t know if it was like this in the original game, but I definitely don’t remember being this frustrated.
On top of that, there are spells that are 100% useless. The buffs in the game, such as the elemental weapon buffs, last literally 15 seconds. A buff that boosts defensive capabilites? 15 seconds. In some cases the spell had already worn off before the monster even had a chance to pull off its next attack. Why even bother? On the flip-side though, the Wall spell, which reflects all spells back at the caster, lasts forever. Sooooo, if you have to cast Wall on your party to protect them from a boss’ magic attack, guess what… you can’t use a healing spell on your party members. The same goes for bosses. There are a few boss fights in the game, and one in particular that was aggravating as shit, where the boss casts Wall on themselves repeatedly. There is a Dispel magic that your party has, but it doesn’t work on Wall, which completely defeats the purpose of even having that fucking spell in the first place. So there was this boss, and he kept casting Wall. And I didn’t have any choice but to fight him with melee attacks, which he was also resistant to. But I can buff my melee weapons with magic! Oh, wait, the three attacks that I managed to get in before the buff wore off all MISSED. I chipped away at this boss, doing pathetically low damage, for a good 20 minutes before I finally defeated him.
I do NOT remember this frustration in the original. If it was present, I doubt I would have such fond memories of it. I probably would have beaten that game, said fuck it, and sold it at a yard sale or traded it to a friend for something else. But I remember playing through that game several times. And I loved it.
Granted, I’m a jaded old man now and I don’t have the time or patience for bullshit, but apparently nobody else does either, seeing the critic’s scores being so mixed.
Anyways, what else can I say about the game? They added cutscenes, which were fine I guess. And they did this thing when you stay at an Inn where they have a conversation around the dinner table. Which is neat, I suppose, but the problem is that they never really have anything interesting to say. They’re really just commenting on something that happened or a place they visited. I usually kinda like the campfire scenes in games where you just get to have conversations with other characters and hear things about them that wouldn’t otherwise fit into a conversation. I’m using this tactic in a story I’m personally writing, where the travelers’ small-talk is where I dig into personalities and character development, and maybe a little bit of world-building and exposition. I think it’s useful, and when done well, can be very effective, like the “skits” that the Tales Of series is known for.
But in Secret of Mana they just feel out of place. Sometimes you hop into an inn to just get a quick heal and a game save, and you have to sit through a meaningless conversation where they’re just yacking about how convenient cannon travel is, or how the desert was hot. It always seemed to happen when I was just trying to get in a save so I could go eat or leave the house and I would have to tap through it as quick as possible.
One thing that I never realized what just how linear the game is. Even though the world opens up once you get Flammie, there’s not really a whole lot to do. They technically use Flammie as a fast-travel excuse to get you to bounce around to collect the rest of the Mana Seeds and a few more elementals, but aside from that there are no real reasons to re-visit any of the places you were before (except for cheap hotel stays). There are some locations that seem to exist for no reason, like the lighthouse/tower thing out in the ocean. I went there multiple times throughout the story, once I had the ability to, and went all the way up the stairs to the top to talk to the guy, but he always said the same thing, and there was nothing else to do there. There weren’t much in the way of side quests or anything, and I’m convinced that if the combat was better and it didn’t take so long for me to kill simple monsters, the 24 hours I put into the game probably would have been cut in half. To be fair, I did a bit of grinding to get my weapon levels up. Not that it mattered.
So that’s all I have for Secret of Mana. I do own both the Trials of Mana remake and the brand new Visions of Mana, as well as some of the older Mana games. Not sure if I have the willpower to jump right into those just yet though. I might need a palette cleanser.
