After 16 hours of playtime (maybe 8 or 9ish for the actual story) and 39 of the 40 achievements earned, I feel I can offer my opinion of the game that helped define me growing up.
Secret of Mana was first launched in 1993 on the Super Nintendo as the first title under the Mana series, aka Seiken Densetsu in Japan. The first title was released in the west as 'Final Fantasy Adventure' in hopes of gaining some additional sales by capitalizing on the increasingly popular Final Fantasy series.
In 2019, Square-Enix popped in out of nowhere one morning with an announcement that Secret of Mana was going receive the remake treatment in the same way its predecessor did on Mobile and Vita. It was going to see the world realized in 3D albeit still from the top-down view, with more fleshed-out characters via additional voice-acted cutscenes and a better translation. On top of that, Hiroki Kikuta was going to return to the helm as the musical supervisor/composer, along with a host of guest composers to... remaster and remix the original soundtrack.
They're serviceable. They'll never stand the test of time like the original game's graphics will, nor will they impress anyone with their detail or their animations. Like Adventures of Mana that came before it, the remake visuals have that Mobile look and feel to them that come off as cheap, especially when compared to the remake that would follow.
What I found intriguing about the visuals though, having played the original game 30+ times throughout my life and knowing every little detail inside and out, is just getting to see all of these locales, characters and creatures in a new light. Some monsters had seen a complete redesign, with the most notable being the Tomato and Eggplant Man (which was none too surprising, honestly).
Overall, I was satisfied with the graphical representation of everything, though I wish the game had received a bigger budget given its significance in the overall series. Having had the world fully realized in 3D like Trials of Mana years later would have been amazing, but alas it is what it is, and what it is is passable at best.
I'm going to speak from behind not a pair of nostalgia goggles, but an entire fortress of nostalgia and bias: I LOVED the way the original game played; The stamina meter, the wonky hitboxes, the ability to spam magic (if needed/wanted) and the difficulty.
I want to first touch on the few gameplay improvements that this has over the original.
That said, there were some gripes with the original game that could sometimes cause soft locks, such as Purim or Popoi getting stuck at the corner of a screen and being unable to maneuver back to where the player character stood. That is no longer an issue here as your AI-controlled party members can freely leave the screen with no hindrance to your progression through an area.
Secondly, the ability to assign the L and R buttons to magic or weapons so that one no longer needs to traverse the ring menu each time greatly sped things up in battle.
And, uh, well that's about it as far as the improvements to the overall gameplay were for me.
Enemies, particularly the Chobins species early on, could get your party in stun lock, and with the revised way that damage is handled and delivered, you could get a game over before you realized you were even taking damage. It definitely made traversing the forest path to Elinee's castle more annoying than it was in the original as you didn't have that lag or any sort of heavy audio or visual indicator that you were taking damage.
Bosses have also become considerably easier all around if one wishes to fight them strictly with weapons and forgo the (still) overpowered magic. Their hitboxes are considerably larger now, making weapon-only runs less tedious, therefore less fun and interesting. The golem bosses still require a specific area to be attacked in order to be damaged, but that is more a design choice than a bug or fault in the coding.
I really do not know what the thought process was behind the new compositions, but holy cow is the soundtrack all over the place! Far too much for me to go over in a small review like this, but the stylistic approach to certain tracks was so weird and unlistenable to me. Like a bunch of amateurs were given free rein to do what they thought sounded cool with Kikuta's music and then turned in a bunch of weird sounds that vaguely paid homage to the original track that inspired it.
Okay, that's quite a bit of exaggeration on my part, but the majority of the remade soundtrack sounds awful at worse, "Okay" at best.
Secret of Mana still stands as an enjoyable experience, and while I will always choose the original over the remake if I was going to tell someone today to play the game, I'd probably direct them to the Steam/PS4 version for the more refined mechanics and quality of life changes. For me personally, the changes made only detracted from the experience that the original conjured and a lot of the whimsical atmosphere that Kikuta's score helped to create was missing in the new soundtrack, but that is something that can be toggled, thankfully.
Welcome to the first entry in a series of (sometimes longwinded) blog entries detailing my history with many subjects ranging from video games and movies to music and toys. I love to reminisce and nostalgia, rather than a hindrance as it can potentially be to some, empowers me and fuels my creative endeavors. Why, Secret of Memoria alone was born out of the feeling and memories that produce it—The main character's name is even Remy Niscent!
Has it really already been three years since Animal Crossing New Horiozons launched?
Feels just like yesterday that I was counting down the days after the E3 2019 reveal and subsequent delay to March 20th, 2020. The floodgates were open and Nintendo would finally begin to share info on the game in the months that followed, culminating in a huge info dump in early 2020 with an Animal Crossing Direct nearly a month prior to release.
While the game was always destined to be a mammoth hit coming off the success of New Leaf, plus with the added number of Swtich consoles sold at that point, no one could have predicted the suffocating presence the game would go on to have all over the world; It became so big that fast food joints, furniture manufacturers and even the presidential nominees at the time were all up in the game's business, using its unavoidable popularity by creating towns as means to impress potential voters to get out and vote(Which Nintendo did not take kindly to).
2020 was a pretty wild to say the least. The coronavirus pandemic that was officially declared in late March is still ongoing as of the time of this entry and doesn't show any sign of ending any time soon. It was because of the pandemic when lockdown began (which did not happen in America, unfortunately) that Animal Crossing's arrival was greatly lauded by a whole bunch of people, because at its core Animal Crossing is a game about connecting and socializing, and in a world that we simply could not congregate safely, it allowed for friends and family to get together again safely. Heck, some players even held their weddings in-game after the real-world events had to be cancelled due to the exploding in Covid-19 cases across the country.
Animal Crossing, for better or for worse, dropped at the most perfect time.
I began my town around 10am on the 20th. Long after waking up and tending to errands and other household chores as soon as I could in order to have no intteruptions the rest of the day, I put close to ten hours in on day one and would, eventually as of yesterday, go on to put over 2000 hours in total.
Yesterday I recorded a town tour, which is likely to be the final layout of the town barring any further (unlikely) updates for the game, content-wise.
Happy birthday, Animal Crossing! Thank you for the memories.
I'm finally getting to play the Secret of Mana remake!!!
I definitely have not put eleven hours into it so I wonder how Steam is getting those numbers when I've only barely put six hours at the point of going back to see Sage Joch again after the three errands he sends you on.
I hoped for so long that this game would eventually come to the Nintendo Switch. It was announced shortly after the console came out and at that point, I had already transitioned into a handheld-only gamer, and I wasn't about to buy another PS4 just to play it. So I waited, and waited, and waited some more.
And then the Trials of Mana remake happened, followed by a Legend of Mana remaster— Both of which hit the Switch day and date with the rest of the platforms. Still, the Secret of Mana remake was nowhere to be found, and with each passing year, the likelihood of it ever coming out was looking pretty slim.
But then the Steam Deck and the advent of portable PCs happened.
Without going too deep into it, Nintendo's act of quadrupling down on the Switch by not pushing out stronger hardware(and even increasing hardware production in 2023!) just left a sour taste in my mouth, so I started looking into the portable PC market, which is when I landed upon the Steam Deck.
Fast forward from January of this year to today, I now not only own a Steam Deck but also have amassed an impressive little library of games, at the cost of trading in the majority of Switch third-party games and peripherals at Gamestop for store credit, which I then used for Steam gift cards. And thanks to the first big Steam sale of the year, I was able to finally obtain a (playable) copy of Secret of Mana for PC.
This brings me to my impressions of the game: It's not as bad as people made it out to be. The fact that I can say that through nostalgia-tinted goggles and my overwhelming "can do no wrong" love for the original game, is really saying something. No it doesn't play exactly like the original, and in some ways, it's more difficult, in others it's easier.
I feel my tale relating to this game has warranted a review, so that's what I will do upon completion. It's just a shame the game didn't get the treatment that Trials of Mana did. It would have been something else seeing the world of Secret of Mana fully realized in 3D.
Author's Note: I wrote a short story last year prior to the release of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. It's from my own perspective talking about my beginnings with Pokemon, but told as if I lived within the world of Pokemon itself; Some of it matches up with real-world happenings that lead to me getting Pokemon Red for Christmas in 1998.
"Deep in the heart of the only free land left in the world, untouched by the ruling hands of any kingdom, lies the village of Memoria and its peaceful inhabitants. Living beneath the canopy of the great Evermore tree is a young orphan boy named Remy Niscent. Along with his friends, a talking cat, and an unbreakable wooden sword, he sets out on daily adventures full of monsters and magic to discover the Secret of Memoria, and uncover the truth about the beautiful and mysterious land he calls home."
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