Is anybody playing this? What's your hot take? I know ppl really like the original but the remake looked low budget and kind of limp.

Let me know, thanks!

It's...okay.

I think the artstyle actually works fairly well but the trimmings around it do feel really cheap. Cutscenes aren't well animated, UI is kind of garbage. All of the terrible AI and pathfinding problems of the original still exist in this version which was a bummer. New soundtrack has its moments but mostly just sounds super weird, you can swap between new and old though if you like.

i somehow have never played the original, even though i loved all those other snes jrpgs. should i go back and play the original, or go with this one?

Not good by the sounds of it from other websites.The silence of this website about it from the community + staff kinda amazes me too.

Has anyone heard anything about a quick look for this or any mention of it on a bombcast?

I quickly considered this. Then was sad it wasnt on Switch.

Then i realised i have a SNES classic sitting on my shelf doing nothing, so i might give the original a go as ive never played it

It's middling. There is a faithfulness to the original, but with slightly improved graphics and minor, unimportant changes that are 'meh' at best.

I honestly see no reason to prefer this version, except if you NEED mid-tier polygon graphics. Might as well go with the original.

* Granted I have only played a bit of the game in demo booths, and watched streamers play the game. Maybe it grows on you.

At least the playstation theme is really nice.

This game needed the HD sprite treatment if any fucking game did. And keep the original music which is amazing and/or use the orchestrated versions.

I'm still tempted because (my nostalgia tells me) I love this game so much, but maaaan...

Maybe I can't say as I haven't played it, but this could have been so good.

e: the main theme still sends shivers down my spine/starts up the waterworks.

e2: by HD of course I mean Hand Drawn.

@rabincrabmink: I loved the original. It was an amazing co-op action RPG. I last messed with it a year ago and it holds up well.

I have zero interest in the new one based on the art style alone.

I completely forgot it's on there. Now there's even less of a chance of me playing this new one.

You can switch the music between the new version and the old so it's still there.

For the 3D remake, (SPOILER WARNING!) is the ending where protagonist's pet dies as devastating as the original?

The price point is kind of crazy. It's almost a full-priced game, but looks like it could have been released on the PSP. At 20$ It would have been a must-buy for me.. but with what people have been saying about it, I just can't make the plunge. I'll play through the original again, it still holds up today.

I have no nostalgia for the original and, apart from viewing portions of a Let's Play, don't know all that much about it.

And I think this looks and sounds bad. Really bad. The camera also needs to be zoomed out quite a bit more than it is, it looks like it's been zoomed in even closer than the original's.

Yeah, I'd rather play the SNES version of this.

Having a hard time thinking of what this could be referring to.

I really only remember this franchise getting sad with Seiken 3.

Loved playing the SNES original when I was a kid, bought the PC version.

I have mixed feelings about this game. The combat system remains the same with little changes here and there, for better and for worse. Enemies still do their hit reactions but that can lead into situations where if you floor an enemy, they don't get up for like a solid minute for whatever reason, making them invulnerable to physical attacks the entire time.Your AI-controlled party members can be set to attack your target, attack a target different than you, or assist another character instead of the action grid in the original. As a result your AI-controlled teammates will just stand there and do nothing from time to time. The ring command system now sits dead center on the screen and the only way to tell who it applies to is the color of the cursor crosshair which makes it confusing if you're looking for magic from a specific character or giving a character a specific weapon.

The English voice acting is largely pretty bad and the remake soundtrack has both really cool and abhorrent renditions of the source music.

As far as good new things go, I think the added inn dialogue between party members is a neat way to add characterization to the three protagonists without trying to shoehorn it into the story (but the way the game queues it up, if you don't use inns often the characters will talk about events that happened a good while ago). The script largely remains the same but now goes a little bit into the motives of the antagonists.

Also the PC version suffered crashes on a regular basis. Thankfully, the remake has a checkpoint save slot. I've also come across a bug related to the crashes where the checkpoint save has the game clock kicked up around 1000 hours after loading back in from a crash. This happened twice and now the game time for my end game save is around 2052 hours, or 85.5 days.

I don't think this game is worth $40.

@purplepartyrobot: Unlike the original you can still continue to wail on something that has been knocked down which feels like something of a balancing problem but I wouldn't want to wait either..

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.

It feels like it was rushed or the team was less experienced/didn't have enough time to complete it. I hesitate to say out and out that it is a lazy job because game dev is complicated, but it isn't all it could be. Apart from the random crashes, the new UI is pretty ugly and the character ring menus aren't as intuitive. There has been work on some cutscene and exposition scripts for character movement in particular that have had some effort put into them but others seem to merely use the original game's scripts and look very awkward in 3D, as if they only had time to smooth out some scenes and not others.

It might sound like the game is a trainwreck from the above criticisms but the issue is mainly that the game is at times too faithful where it could have been smoothed out and some changed parts are just not that well executed. It's like a warts-and-all graphical upgrade that adds some new warts. It's not entirely without merit, since essentially it is still the SoM you remember with some pretty minor changes, but it's a tough sell for the price.

The real heinous crime of the remake is that they didn't bother to remake the classic mode-7 cannon-firing scenes for when you use cannon transports, which is in my mind one of the most iconic SoM scenes. Given the fantastic new world map design they had a chance to really hit it out of the park in terms of nostalgia, but the scene is completely absent, which is baffling to me.