LogFAQs > #980818263

#19. Secret of Mana (1993)
Total Points: 22
List Appearances: 11
First Place Votes: 1
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Write-up provided by azuarc
I don't declare favorites. I hate when people ask me "what is your favorite XXX?" It's paralyzing. Even if I think of an answer I think might be my favorite, how can I be certain it's my absolute #1? Maybe there's something I'm forgetting. Maybe there are two flavors of ice cream I really like and you're making me try to figure out which one I like more. How does anyone ever possibly decide what is genuinely their favorite anything?

And yet, if you ask me what my favorite game is, I will tell you Secret of Mana.

Is it the best game ever? No. Does it have some issues? Oh, you bet. But did I love the crap out of it as a kid, the way they talk about a toy being "loved" in Toy Story? Absolutely. Secret of Mana was a beautiful, vibrant game, debatably the first game of its kind by blending JRPG mechanics with real-time fighting, and had a musical score that I could not get out of my head 30 years later.

The story is nothing to write home about. It was created in an era when story took a back seat even for RPGs. Other Square SNES titles were starting to change that, but at the time that bar was set by Final Fantasy IV. So just like many other games limited by memory restrictions, SoM's story was very pared down. In fact, the game was originally intended to be far more ambitious, with Square originally developing it for the SNES-CD hardware that never came to fruition. Angry with Nintendo, Square stripped this game down and entire chunks of the late stages of the game never got properly implemented, which is why so much of the second half of the game feels so rushed. The reason Chrono Trigger exists is largely because Secret of Mana was never properly completed, and many of the assets and ideas were transferred over.

But the gameplay experience was where this game thrived, particularly in the graphics and sound department. The art is vibrant, the animations fluid, and the music amazing. They hard-carried a game whose moment-to-moment combat could be incredibly frustrating.

Look, I'll concede this game has issues. Waiting for your meter to 100% to attack again feels abnormal. Your companions get stuck constantly. Attacks miss without explanation. Magic is jank and OP. Leveling magic is awful because the second half of the game is rushed. The Spikey Tiger fight and the werewolf encounter in the forest are atrocious introductions to the game. And I had no idea what was happening in the story beyond "Empire bad, Republic good; get the 8 MacGuffins."

However, when the game wasn't going out of its way to frustrate you, it was incredible. Would it hold up today? Absolutely not. I'm afraid to go back and play it, and smash my rose-tinted glasses. But for someone transitioning to this from Dragon Warrior 1-4, where grinding was the norm and the focus was on making numbers go up? Secret of Mana felt like it was grabbing you by the ear and rushing you along. You could grind, and you could level your weapon skills and wait to acquire the best armor for sale in the area -- which I did -- but it was possible to trudge ahead, too, if you wanted a challenge.

And the world itself was interesting. Non-sensical, but interesting. People traveled by cannon. You got to fly on the back of a white dragon where the view shifted to over the shoulder and you legitimately flew around on the world map. The environments were varied in a way that feels normal or even blase today, but was new to action games in the early 90s.

Perhaps the final item to note because it was an action game was that unlike the JRPGs of the day, when you visited a friend's house, you didn't have to just sit there watching them hit the attack button four times -- you could actually join in on the action. The game supported multiplayer and even 3-player multiplayer if you had a multitap. While I always played the game in single player, this was for many people the defining reason why they loved Secret of Mana -- it allowed them to experience a long sprawling adventure together. How many games long enough to come with battery save systems could say that?

It's a shame that Seiken Densetsu 3 was never brought to the west. It took all the same ideas, finished the full game, expanded on the story with branching narratives and a choice of characters, and improved on a lot of the aspects of Secret that people rag on. Yet, in spite of that, I still enjoy Secret more. I played the fan-translated rom of its sequel, and it never felt as smooth to me. Kikuta's music didn't hit the same highs for me. The amount of time you have to go without healing magic -- a drought that was painful in both games -- extends far longer if you don't pick Carly. The class change system feels clunky for someone who didn't have documentation on how it worked. Even the graphics of the backgrounds and enemy sprites don't feel as well developed to me. I dunno, maybe that's bias speaking. After all, it was being compared against my favorite game.