So, Almost a Half a Decade Later. . .

 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.