Secret of Mana

For Christmas, I got the Collection of Mana - a... collection of games from the "Mana" series, all playable on the Switch. Of these games, the only one I had ever played was Secret of Mana, the 1993 SNES release.

While it was, by that point, a few years old, one of my best friends and I used to play that game a great deal in Middle School (which was otherwise very much the N64 era.) What made the game great was that you could play it in co-op, so the two of us could fight our way through monsters and such together.

Given that I finished Middle School... 20 years ago (Jesus) it's been kind of fun to return to the game.

I hadn't ever really thought much about the context of the game's release. I generally consider it to be part of the Squaresoft Golden Age - grouping it with games like Final Fantasy VI (released as III in the US,) Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars. In fact, this predates all of those games.

Playing the game again, a few things strike me: First, the story is far more bare-bones than how I remembered it. Apparently the reason for this is that Secret of Mana was initially intended to be one of the first games to take advantage of a CD-ROM system for the SNES, which would have allowed it to be a much larger game. This system never came about (it wouldn't be until the Gamecube that Nintendo used optical disks) and that led to big upheaval in the middle of Secret of Mana's production.

In true classic video game fashion, one of the elements of the game has you traveling to various palaces where world-preserving Mana Seeds are kept, each tied to an element (with resident elementals that grant two of the three playable characters magic powers) and sealing the magical power of those seeds. While the first few of these have fairly involved stories and build-up, many of the latter ones fly by in a quick series of excursions, and this is apparently because of the massive changes that had to be made in the middle of production to account for less data capacity.

The script was also apparently all translated by one guy over the course of like a month (the translator, Ted Woolsey, has his own trope on TV Tropes) and elements like Squaresoft's choice of fonts meant he had to condense the dialogue significantly.

When I initially played the game, it was largely out of context. I didn't know, for example, that the game was part of a series (the first in the series was for the Gameboy, called Final Fantasy Adventure in the U.S. - which is also part of this collection.) I think there were also elements that didn't even occur to me - like the interpretation that the game's final boss, which is ultimately a sort of innocent manifestation of nature that could inadvertently bring about the apocalypse, might actually be your own trusted draconic companion who flies you around the world in the latter half of the game.

2018 saw a remake of the game that updated it with modern graphics and I believe expanded its storytelling, but I also recall that reviews for it were quite horrible, so I've never checked it out.

Secret of Mana's gameplay, of course, felt quite different from the usual turn-based combat of other Squaresoft classics. I do think some of the "roll to hit" mechanics you find in turn-based games can feel a little unsatisfying in a real-time action RPG - swinging your sword at certain enemies at certain levels in Secret of Mana sometimes just completely whiffs, and there is a little recovery meter that strongly encourages you to time your attacks rather than just spamming.

I'm really curious to see Trials of Mana, which is the last game in the collection, which has previously not seen a release in the U.S., as I'd like to see how they iterated on the game's formula.

I think it's always interesting to return to some old game. There's a bit of an uncanny feeling, sparks of recognition but also, often, discovering the sequence of the game isn't quite like you remember, or how, in your meandering style of play when you were a kid, you might have thought of certain locations as being central to the game, when in fact it was just a place you'd go to often.

Really, it's just funny to come back to this game, which feels sort of small and not terribly long (I played through the whole thing in a week) when it was such a big thing in my childhood. I think I appreciate different aspects of it than I did back then.