Secret of Mana

  The Mana series from Squaresoft, now SquareEnix, is much maligned, and rightfully so.   The majority of the games in this series are for the most part awful that do not control particularly well.   Over the years that games have had an increasingly childlike aspect to the art design; eyes have gotten bigger and enemies less menacing.   I do not feel that the publisher has any idea what they are doing with that franchise.   There is no direction and the last few games were not the best way to occupy your limited hours on this Earth.   If fact checking wasn’t for pussies, I would look up on Giant Bomb whether the games on the Game Boy styled as Final Fantasy legends were the first in the Sengoku Destsu or the Saga series (I’d probably also check to see if that this the correct romanji spelling for the original Mana games).   But it is, so I will proceed with this review, confident that Secret of Mana is the first of the Mana series and things went downhill from there.   On the list of things that has stuck in my mind over the years is my memory of the premise of the story.   The story starts out with a tale of a powerful and very advanced civilization that eventually destroys all life on earth.   Then time flows like a river, and things tend to repeat themselves.   I take this memorable line to mean that life revolves from nothing and eventually we are brought to the story of our protagonist.   A young, nameless boy who has a valiant heart and waiting for his destiny to unfurl.   Early in the game the boy falls into a hole and finds an ancient sword to start the unfurling process.   While a cliché amongst Japanese Role Playing games, this device does allow the player to insert himself directly into the blank hero that is the main character.   That’s right, himself.   Girls would have to wait until they recruited the princess wearing pink Princess Jasmine pants.   The genderly-indecisive, could put their subjective perception of self into with a pixie that looks like a midget with either ears or horns popping out of a massive head of pinkish-purple hair that goes both up high above his head and down to the floor.   Apparently Morticia’s cousin discovered hair dye and hair clips at mall’s Hot Topic   There is a great threat to the world, and it is up to our heroes to stop it.   The game is linear: town, dungeon, boss, town, dungeon, boss, repeat till last set of bosses, but the order in which players recruit the two secondary heroes is not set in stone.   To be fair, was something of a revelation in freedom for an SNES RPG.   Along the way the party will encounter a series of elemental spirits to help them on their quest.   These spirits serve as the means by which new spells are gained.   Along the way they are forced to confront a military force that has discovered and hopes to fully adapted technology from the civilization that had existed in the ancient past.   This draws out the main theme of the game, the forces of nature versus technology.   While interesting for a theme, it is more interesting because it allows people armed with swords and magic to fight people on jet bikes.   When I hear the term “Action RPG,” I think Secret of Mana.   Unlike in other Square joints, you don’t press the attack button and wait for your chosen party member to step forward and swing a sword into the air and watch numbers appear on the enemy.   In this product you have to position your character next to an enemy and press the attack button to make numbers appear on the enemy.   If players time their actions correctly, they might even be able to dodge an enemy’s attack if they see an attack animation starting, or are just far enough away to begin with.   Standard attacks will come out almost as fast as the button can be depressed, but they do far less damage than waiting a few second for a meter by the health bar to recharge before attacking.   Attacks can also be charged up by holding down the attack button for several seconds, causing the chosen hero to hold his, her or its weapon like a home run derby contestant, then releasing for massive damage.   There are up to nine different levels of charge for each of the games many kinds of weapons that are gained throughout the game.   This will cause things as plain a 360 spin with an sword held out, to an impressive spear attack where the wielder jumps forward, spear first, delivers a flurry of blows, spins around and then does a massive thrust.   Attacks that can even do an untold of 999 damage!   If they hit.   If not released at the right time, against a big enough enemy, that impressive attack could slice air.   This will also leave the character vulnerable as there is no way to stop the animation.   This is best aspect of the game as it forces players to weight the pros and cons of charging a massive attack against a nimble enemy.     There’s also magic to use when not attacking.   Types of magic relate to the elemental spirits that have been rescued/recruited.   While essential to survival, none of the spells are very impressive, even in the 90s.   The spirit sprite shows up on screen and then rocks fall on enemies or the party glows for a second and is healed.   Travel is accomplished by walking, riding the back of a dragon thing that is called with a child’s toy, and cannon.   Yes, your party, should they have enough gold, can pay a merchant to shoot them from a giant cannon into another town.   It is a unique teleporter and proof that people in this game are not affected by falling damage as they are perfectly fine when they bounce of the earth after being shot out of a cannon 100 miles away.   It is also proof that this guild of cannon men are amazing shots.   The player only controls one character at a time and the other two are controlled by the AI which does a fine job of controlling the action.   To be honest, I rarely noticed what the other characters were doing anything except the few times they attacked the same enemy I was on.   Background action at best.   The game does support two player co-op action, so a friend can plug into port two and control one of the other party members directly.   Which leads to experiences that are often more frustrating than fun as one player, who owns the game, is excepting the same level of competence from another, who does not.   At the time, this was more of a novelty than a draw.   If this game were rereleased today on anything but the Wii, it would be a failure if there was no online co-op.   The graphics of the game are what one would except for a SNES Squaresoft game.   Anime made sprite.   The style of this game is more colorful than most Squaresoft SNES era games.    The ultimate extension of this is a rich town that is literally made of gold.   One would imagine that such a place would kill every person that set foot into it after it had been baking in the sun for an hour, but it does not.   Although the prices at the local shops are expensive.   The RPG tradition of palette swapping enemies is well in place here.    Even bosses are not immune to this treatment.   The music is great.   Soothing town tones let you know that you can’t kill anything, but also that nothing can kill you.   Serene forest music makes one forget that their staring at a television screen with an expensive plastic toy coming between the cable company and your set.   I could almost imagine myself walking through the tress with my companions, slaughtering every misshaped rabbit to get at the gold they all seem to have inside of them.   But the most memorable track by far is the boss theme.   Every time there was a boss, I knew about it.   Rapid scale descents made it known that there was a powerful enemy about, and it sought my digital blood.   It instilled a sense of panic that is not present in encounters with most bosses.     At the end of the review, it should be noted that today the Secret of Mana may not hold a lot of sway with most players, and it shouldn’t.   There are many games that have taken the ball that is the Action RPG genre and run with it faster and further.   However, when it came out there were not many games with this visual style for any of the 16 bit consoles.   Even if one were to think about role playing video games in general, on any platform and not just ones that only look like Japanese cartoons, there were not nearly as many options as there are today.   Secret of Mana had many of the trappings of a role playing game, was colorful, and set itself apart from the crowd because the action took place in real time.   Back then was enough to give the game a perfect score, but now, looking back with the wisdom of time, there was some gank.   Goals are not always particularly clear, enemy designs are reused frequently, and the action is repetitive.   But, if you want to play the Japanese Diablo, this is it.