A look at the original Secret of Mana

So, I have been replaying Secret of Mana before the remake comes out for the sake of having a more accurate comparison for that review. And don't get me wrong, I do like Secret of Mana, but playing back through it again I have been reminded of the game's flaws, and they are not small.

For those unaware of the original, Secret of Mana was an action RPG that has you take control of a character chosen by the Mana Sword. In the past a hero using the Mana Sword was able to put a stop to the Mana Fortress, which in modern day is about to be revived by the Empire. Your goal is to try to prevent the revival of the Mana Fortress while restoring the power of the Mana Sword. With two A.I. Companions you find along the way, you use a variety of weapons and spells to advance.

Immediately an issue comes in with the games hit detection. It's not so much that hits that seem like they should register do or don't, it's more it's not always clear when you can or cannot hit an enemy. Usually, when an enemy is down there is a period of invincibility. But sometimes you'll get a kind of delayed damage that occurs. The enemy will get up, and whether you attacked while they were down or not, they react as though they got hit, taking damage and falling back down again. Your A.I. Partners seem to be able to cause this to happen, though it doesn't always seem to work when you do it yourself. Furthermore, you can end up wasting charged attacks by timing them for when the enemy gets up, only for that delayed damage effect to kick in unsuspectingly. It will even happen sometimes when no attacks are made when the enemy is down, but perhaps a few connect simultaneously when you and an ally hit it the first time. It's all something that can be adjusted too, but it does serve as a bit of a frustrating element to deal with.

That said, there is a lot of fun to be had with the different weapons you can use, eight in total. Each one handles differently enough and gives you a lot of options for how you want to fight. Even the charge effects of each weapon varies a lot. Throw in a decent variety of offensive, buff, debuff, and healing magic for the time the game came out it makes traversing the levels of the game a lot of fun despite the previous mentioned flaw.

Though dungeon crawling has a bit of an issue with the AI the game uses. See, if a character gets stuck behind something they may not be smart enough to move around the obstacle, so you have to switch control to that character to move around. Simple enough solution, but it is something that can happen frequently and becomes annoying fairly quickly.

And while you can get around that issue relatively easy and make the regular combat throughout the levels quite entertaining, you quickly come across a serious problem with the boss fights. After you unlock your magic, the Sprite character basically becomes the one man boss killer. All you do is have him cast a big offensive spell over and over as you stand there doing nothing, occasionally using the girl to heal. This is an obvious foolproof strategy that will see you through every boss fight in the game, barring the last one. Even a limited item pool that prevents you from recovering to much MP isn't much of an obstacle, as at most you'll use one fairy walnut to have enough MP to clear a boss anyway. Despite the cool designs and interesting abilities, magic just makes these fights boring.

You also have a bit of fun with being able to level up and upgrade your weapons. Every weapon orb allows you to upgrade the weapon, and killing enemies with the weapons lets you level them up so much based on how many times they've been upgraded. Damage is based on the upgrade, but raising the level gives you access to a higher rank you can charge your weapon to in order to unleash a powerful attack. Higher levels are a bit pointless, however, unless you choose to handicap yourself and not spam magic with the Sprite.

The story is pretty basic, and you don't really get any twists that feel relevant. The characters can all be pretty fun, and your trio does have some enjoyable dialogue. The game can even give you a few chuckles.

The thing that has probably aged the best is a lot of fantastic enemy designs. While not the best of the era, Secret of Mana was no slouch and you come across a lot of fantastic designs. A personal favorite being the Dark Lich boss that comes up near games end.

It's hard to see Secret of Mana as the great game I did when I was younger now that I have played through it again for the first time in so long. I'm not saying it's a bad game, but there are definitely aspects of the game that have aged exceptionally poorly when compared to other games of the era. The game is still a classic, and the influence it had is pretty clear, so despite the flaws, it's still worth checking out.