Oh! Emperor Vandole is a DOG. - Let's Uncover the Secret of Mana!

Oh yeah, that reminds me: this screen always bothered me because up until this moment I thought those things on its head were horns and then they suddenly are flapping in the breeze. And then i was like, are they floppy ears? I guess the art shows they are feathers, but as a kid just playing the game it bugged me.

Another first-playthrough thing, I NEVER really used dryad because I was freaking tired of grinding magic levels, so I missed out on Burst being awesome, AND when I got to the end I thought I had to use the Mana sword, and at Lv. 1 it lasted about 30 seconds!

Oy... The puns.

That Metal Crab on the left seems real enthused to be here.

Good advice for many enemies in many games.

And the Master Mana Sword sleeps again... Forever! (Or at least until Square needs more money and decided to make a sequel.)

The Mana Beast is still my go-to example when I think of game-makers just doubling the scale of a graphic instead of actually drawing it to a large size.

I lolled out loud.

We sorta did. This song plays during the section of the Grand Palace that was raised out of the ocean and covered in sea stuff.

And now for a MEGA SPOILER! At least I hope not many of you are already aware of the following connection:




So, this tree is in a forest with moogles?



I guess that makes Mog's ending in FF6 a Percy cameo! Look carefully at the tree in the image below.

Here.

(Also, JPEG? Really? Most every image editor worth using supports PNG.)

I've done it. With every school of magic for both the girl and the sprite.

It actually makes your magic a lot weaker, overall, for the sprite because the level 9 offensive animations freeze time. Therefore you can't stun lock with spells. I can't recall off-hand if the same thing happens with beneficial magic, but if it did it could actually be useful there for the same reason.

I did it with the Sprite, and not only that, but got all the "ultimate" equipment drops from the Mana Fortress, and then farmed weapon orbs for a few hours before asking what the fuck I was doing when I still had jack.

Oh man, are you ready to have your mind blown?

Meridian Dance is basically a remix of Flammie's Theme.

This LP brought back many fond memories! I enjoyed it.

Round of applause for Sky Render. Great LP, great memories. And I don't care how cheesy this game's story is or how shallow the characters, I still tear up when I see

If you really want to cheese your way through this fight you can use midge mallet or moogle belt to prevent all damage to yourself this way. You can do this all the time if you get the timing down, it's just really easy against the mana beast.

Also, I don't see a sprite in that FF6 image, just a waving moogle in the tree. Although I never noticed that before!

Totally boss.

Holy crap, I didn't realize that this was the same as the intro song in SD3 (Meridian Child). I guess I just never heard the name until now...

Yeah, that is a bit of a shock the first time you realize it. I don't think anyone expected the last boss theme from SD2 to be remixed into the title credits theme of SD3.

Thanks for the web link. Actually, the only place I could find the image was in a YouTube clip, which had aleady blurred it somewhat, so I figured JPEG wasn't going to hurt it any more.

Darn it, I looked closely at the tree again and now I see the moogle waving. But it really looks like SoM's ending image, doesn't it?

SD3 also remixes Meridian Dance into two of its early boss musics, Obsession and Nuclear Fusion.

Interestingly, SoM/SD3 weren't the first games to do this. Zelda 1's game clear fanfare became Zelda 2's dungeon clear fanfare.

Oh hell, recycling and remixing music in video games is as old as the Pac-Man era. Used to be the norm of how to put music into games, in fact: just take whatever was popular and stick it in your game. Same with sound effects. Simpler times, those were. Back before the game's programming staff were even allowed to include their names in the credits...

Everyone loves the Flammie sprite. Whoever touched up the graphics for the phone port put some special care into it, too.

That old Flammie sprite is odd. It's only seven colors, including translucency. It's as if they took the same approach to coloring that Link to the Past did, only using half of the SNES's 16 colors per tile in order to save cartridge space.

Yes, but a game is putting a lot more faith in its audience by expecting it to recognize an endgame melody from a long adventure than anything from a brief arcade game.

I did this before I new about spell locks, but By the time I got around to it the Mana sword 1-2 hit everything but bosses.

Level 8:99 spells don't take nearly as long as you would think when you are grinding for gold though (I tried to get maximum and didn't get close where I was grinding at [Desert with spiders...]).

Today, when I had sushi for lunch, it dawned on me that Woolsey missed a great trick when he translated this spell's name: He should have called it Wasabi.

Something tells me nobody's going to hunt down the hidden images in the LP without at least some impetus, so I'll go ahead and post the first one.

Oh dear god why???

Well they are hidden for a reason...

Way back in the days before people posted these things to the internet, I discovered the level 9 spell effects quite by accident and set out to see every single one of them. I feel like I ended up skipping a bunch of the girl's effects, in the end, because running around the Ice Country grinding attack spells was fun (for a certain definition of "fun") but just running in and out of the inn grinding buff spells wasn't.

This would be around the same time that I attempted to land everywhere on the world map to try to find secrets, too.

This has been a great LP, Sky Render! Nice work!

The last time I finished this game I did it on emulator with an unlimited MP code and I basically nuked my way through half the game. I think I got most if not all of the spells up to 8.99.

It's hidden image time again! This one's from part X:



Fortunately, there's only two to go! Unfortunately, there's still two to go.

Oh boy, another secret image!



That one was surprisingly tame. And hey, there's only one left!

...I apologize in advance.



On the bright side, assuming your sanity survived that, there's no more hidden images! In this LP, anyway! The Secret of Mana LP is out of secrets.

Oddly, both convex Percy and concave Percy are less horrifying than the original.

So, before this LP disappears, I'd like to say that the dragon-slaying weapons aren't completely useless. Yes, the dragons of the Pureland are the only really dragon-like ones, but a LOT of enemies count as dragons for purposes of such weapons. Specifically:
Captain Duck/Duck General
Chobin Hood/Poron
Dark Ninja/Ninja
Eggplant Man/Chaos Sorcerer
Goblin/Goblin Lord
Kid Goblin/Goblin
Ma Goblin/Goblin Guard
Mad Mallard/Duck Soldier
Master Ninja
Robin Foot/Porobin Foot
Tomato Man/Dark Priest
So, they still aren't exactly useful, but not completely worthless, either.

...Dragons.