Aspect Analysis - A Lack of Impact in Secret of Mana

Having played through the recent remake of Secret of Mana, as well as the original a few weeks prior, I can safely say that in a lot of ways Secret of Mana has not aged as well as other RPG's from the SNES. While I do still like the game, I'm going to be looking at one of the worst aspects of the game, and that is the games inability to make the enemy feel threatening, or even to leave an impact in regards to its plot.

We should start with the games actual plot. We have an evil empire that is seeking to revive the Mana Fortress, an ancient weapon, and you are destined to pull the Mana Sword and save the world. You know about the plans of the Empire before ever actually meeting anyone from the Empire. And we quickly enter the first problem, and that is a complete lack of presence the Empire has no matter where you go. Occasionally you run into a member of the Empire, and you certainly here a lot about them, but aside from a brief bit at the beginning with Pandora, you never actually feel the effects of their global reaching tyranny. Even the joke antagonists, The Scorpion Army, at least stole a Mana Seed you had to recover, and you got to break up one of their scams where they stole away the elemental Salamando.

Compare that with even games that came out on the same system. I had my whole write up earlier on Breath of Fire II, Final Fantasy VI and seeing Kefka poison an entire Kingdom, or the constant presence of the Empire in South Figaro. And lets not even look that late into the systems life cycle, go back to Final Fantasy IV where in the beginning you actually take part in the evil plan as you slay a bunch of wizards who don't so much as fight back. So Secret of Mana isn't really a product of it's time in this regard, games that preceded it showed you could do a lot to give your antagonists a presence.

There is a 'twist' building up that it's really Thanatos whose pulling the strings behind the Empires world domination plans, but it's one of those twists that doesn't really matter. Whether it was Thanatos or not, the result is the exact same. The Mana Fortress revives, and the Mana Beast appears to destroy it. The point of Thanatos is largely in relation to the next part of the game I'd like to touch on.

The characters just aren't that interesting, and your party doesn't really feel like much of a team. The Remake tried to remedy this by adding scenes whenever you rest at an inn, but they are all pretty clique and unoriginal. It quickly becomes hard to care about their personal issues, and that brings us to Dyluck.

One of your characters, Primm, is on the quest to save her love Dyluck, who has been captured by Thanatos. Now you really never get a chance to meet Dyluck, and know about him purely from the viewpoint of other characters, and he is just this super awesome soldier with a heart of gold that everyone loves and I think you are starting to see the problem here. He just doesn't feel like a real person, and the extended scenes of the Remake just make it worse with how much Primm dotes on him.

So come games end, to prevent Thanatos from being able to prolong his life, he sacrifices himself before his body can be possessed. So we have the death of a character that we knew nothing about and that hardly felt like an actual character, and the person he had the strongest connection too suffered from just not being that interesting or having much of a personality (A problem with the whole cast to be honest), it's not a sacrifice that had any weight to it.

It's not a game that was ever able to really build an atmosphere, despite the solid art and music the game boasted. It's kind of odd how playing back through it I realized how very little of the game I could actually remember and how little of an impact the game's story telling left on me.