Secret of Mana [Steam, 2019]

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. 

To start things off with (arguably) the least important aspect of the game: The Graphics

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.

Now into the most important aspect of any game: The Gameplay

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.

Now about that soundtrack...

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.