I'll toss in my hat since I'm about halfway done with it.
tl;dr: If you really want to replay a buggier SoM with PS2 era graphics, wait for it to drop to a price, or play with friends.
I'm playing on the PS4 and it crashes often. At least one crash required me to hard boot the PS4, which is a first for me. I was hoping for more QoL changes to the game, but it's just a reskin with some odd design decisions cobbled together. PurplePartyRobot is spot on regarding a lot of the things that were bothering me. The AI is really bad and your party gets stuck on things constantly. I'm not a fan of micromanaging the radial spell menu, menu controls, equipment management, slow menus, and near useless AI options. You can only map two spells to your shoulder buttons, and you can't change any of the controls. Odd.
Due to its strict faithfulness, you get a lot of weird clunky boss transitions that do make me laugh. You pretty much get swept away to perfectly squared boring boss arenas constantly. There's quite a few story scenes that also don't flow well and it wouldn't have hurt to bolster the narrative beyond tired "but thou must" and "muahaha because I'm evil!" structure/world building. Alexander O. Smith this is not. If you're okay with very simple plot points for the bulk of the game, you'll have no issues here.
It's been some time since I played OG Secret of Mana, so bare with me. The game needs some serious balancing. Fully charging your weapons as you collect orbs just do so little damage for how long it takes. I found Secret of Evermore to have better melee combat regarding this and that's saying something. I would have liked to see them add some meat to the game with a class system ala Seiken Densetsu 3 or some skill/stat customization; anything new would have been a nice injection to an old hat combat system you're stuck with for hours. Shit, even Chrono Trigger DS had more new content.
The english dubbing is what you expect. It's not great and there's maybe a handful of VAs for the whole game. Some odd line readings seem out of place, too. The reworked soundtrack is fine, nothing to write home about.
Honestly, one of the reasons I purchased it was to support SE in bringing back its older library of games or revisiting them as remakes. However this is a very lackluster approach to that practice, which is a shame, and has me questioning my purchase.
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