I owned two different cartridges of this game over the years which I tried playing, I tried it on Wii Virtual Console, I tried it on SNES Classic, countless emulators, and I've even tried it once before on the Collection of Mana and I could never get into the game until this time, when it finally clicked, and I find myself near the end of the game, having had a pretty good - nearly great! - time with Secret of Mana.
It took the Gameboy to teach me how to love it.
I love the Gameboy aesthetic. I will play games for that system that I wouldn't go anywhere near on any other system, simply for the way the games look and sound for that underpowered little chonker. In between rounds of Dungeon Encounters (which I do like and will go back to), I realized I owned the Collection of Mana which had a Gameboy game I'd not played much of, and I remembered that another collection with Gameboy games in it - Collection of SaGa - completely made me fall in love with that series, so maybe I should at least give Final Fantasy Adventure a shot. So I did!
I had a grand old time with it. It's a pretty simple game. You go around, following basic quest lines, fighting absolutely simple enemies who basically wander and bounce around the screen, collecting weapons, armor, money, and temporary party members who themselves just wander around each screen, occasionally attacking enemies. It basically feels like a slightly janky Link's Awakening, except with almost no emphasis on puzzles (which is not a criticism, it's just a different game). The combat in Final Fantasy Adventure made me realize something about Secret of Mana, though - some weapons did zero damage to some enemies, but switching to a different one solved the problem and let me defeat them.
This was revelatory for my dumb ass.
To start praising Secret with a slight criticism, it doesn't tell you when you "miss" hitting an enemy. The only way you can tell is if no damage number pops up after an attack. I had thought this meant I was just rolling bad RNG numbers, and while that may be the case somewhat, switching weapons like you do in Final Fantasy Adventure usually solved the problem of just whiffing over and over again against the adorable creatures of Secret. In FFA, a little tink sound plays if you hit an enemy with a weapon that does no damage to it, which I wish was still in Secret, but regardless, this revelation (again, stressing that I'm just dumb, I should have thought of this over the past twenty years, I don't blame Secret for this) allowed me to start enjoying the combat, something I found nearly impossible to do before. It wasn't just this I had an issue with - having to move your character nearly to the edge of the screen to make it scroll has always (and still does, though I've gotten used to it) annoyed me, because the enemies like to get cheap hits in, often from offscreen. But, once I realized I could just switch weapons and probably hit whatever enemy was giving me trouble, I got into the rhythm of dipping in and out of the somewhat clunky ring menus, which made me start to even like those, which made me start using the Sprite's attack magic more, which made me realize bosses were not impossible walls (well, outside of two cases where they literally are walls lol) that stunlock you until you run out of candy, chocolate, and revival cups and get a game over. MP restoring nuts, though quite expensive early on, are worth their weight in gold! The Sprite, as annoying as the music is in the area where he joins your party (the only bad music in the game, by the way), is essential to clearing this game's bosses, at least for a newbie like me. The different enemies peppered through the games are not only adorably animated, but fun to figure out how to fight - when they're vulnerable, and when they're not. Telling your AI controlled partners to keep their distance but still attack makes things go much smoother, rather than try to fight everything by yourself, alone. The AI seems to know when exactly an enemy is vulnerable, which helps you learn when they are, which I'd not realized before.
It strikes me, typing this, that a lot of this is probably in the game's manual, but I've never owned that or thought to look it up online, alas.
Anyway, once you have magic, the bosses aren't very difficult for the most part, and mostly involve you figuring out which magic does the most damage to them, and spamming that while avoiding what attacks you can while keeping the Sprite's MP topped up. Sure, the boss fights could be deeper, but I don't really care, as to be honest, I kind of find unleashing the Sprite's magic after saving his MP for most of the dungeon quite fun. Some of those attack spells look pretty cool!
---
I've always wanted to like Secret of Mana. I mean, look at this:
We've all seen that beautiful image. But every time I'd see it, I'd think to myself "gosh, Secret of Mana is a gorgeous game. I want to learn to like it. I have to beat it one of these days." I'd boot the game up on whatever platform I was playing at the time, get some ways into the game, and give up in frustration for various reasons. But even during the past twenty years where I thought I'd never be able to like the game, I always admired the graphics and music of it. I've had several Secret of Mana songs on my phones over the years, and I've always thought the graphics of Secret were lush and beautiful in an extremely SNES kind of way. That's a bit hard to explain, so I hope you know what I mean, but basically the game looks like an SNES ass SNES game, but awesome. The animation of the Boy's hair as he runs back and forth. The animation of the Girl and the Sprite as they cast spells. The animation of all the enemies and player characters as they attack and get hit. All of it great. I'd not made it to the ice area in any playthrough prior to this, but the glowing trees were not what I expected. Even the desert looks good, if a bit bland compared to pretty much the rest of the game. It's so nice to be able to enjoy the above while also enjoying the gameplay itself.
---
I'd heard over the years that due to Nintendo cancelling the SNES CD add on, large chunks of this game were excised and/or never implemented. I'd been curious what those were, and how much you could actually tell (I'd heard of some old Ted Woolsey interview where he says something along the lines of "you can literally see where content was cut"). There were hints, but then I got to the Moon Palace and it was obvious that that area was unfinished. A guy has to ferry you to the Palace, you can't land there with your dragon buddy. They'd made a unique space-y moving background that you run around in for one room in which you solve a super easy puzzle, and then it's over and you're done. Clearly there was going to be more there. What were they planning? What could it be? It's so tantalizing, just out of reach...
I loved it.
Here's why, and I'll keep this digression as short as I can. One of my favorite things about my favorite show Doctor Who is that it has 97 missing episodes, which we only have the audio and a few off screen photographs of. All of them are from the 60s, all are in black and white, and all the ones we can see very much feel like they were produced in another place (in the sense that "the past is another country"). We have to use our imagination to fill in what was happening on screen as we listen to the audio, imagine Patrick Troughton's expressive face react to events, look up pictures of actors in those episodes from other television shows and imagine what they were like in Doctor Who (well, this is something I do. It might be the dorkiest thing I do, frankly). Secret of Mana's cuts feel similar to me. What was that Moon Palace going to be like in the original version? The ferry ride there implies they were building up to something big and weird. The moving background of stars is so out of left field for the game thus far that you have to think the rest of the dungeon, had they been able to make it, would have similar weirdness going on. I want to see it so bad! And I'm an extremely new convert to even liking the game!
You can tell that they wanted to have several story threads weave through the game that kind of... don't, eventually (caveat: I have seven of the mana seeds, so if Jema suddenly reappears, my apologies, I haven't seen him in ages and assume he's dropped out of the story by the point in the game I'm at). The beginning of the game is so fleshed out - you can get the Girl and the Sprite at different times depending on how you approach the game at that point. This playthrough, I got the Sprite first quite by accident! Any nonlinearity goes out the window pretty quickly, though, which doesn't bother me (Final Fantasy X fan that I am). The Sprite village feels like there was going to be more there - yes, I'd imagine they'd always intended everyone to have been killed there, but had the game been produced the way we've heard it was supposed to be, maybe you'd talk to all those people before they were slaughtered, or something. Then there's this:
I'd heard about this on Retronauts, and was always curious the context in which he appears, and it is absolutely out of nowhere. You run into Rudolph who tells you that you need to rescue him, then you go do the Ice Palace dungeon and fight the boss, who turns out to have been Santa because he'd been trying to use the mana seed to make more children believe in him, but it backfired and he'd turned into the monster.
WHAT?!
I assume they'd flesh that out a bit more, maybe by having some children in a village somewhere lament about how they don't believe in him or something, only to have him appear after you rescue him and deliver them presents or something. I dunno. It's so weird! Charming as hell, but weird!
There are other examples, these are just what stick out to me on first look. If there's like an interview or something I can read that details what was left out, I'd love to read it.
---
Elsewhere on the internet, everyone's least favorite poster aturtledoesbite* posted a thread saying this game sucks, and I found myself agreeing with him. I'm pleased to say turtle and I were wrong, and this game is good, and now only turtle is wrong, and all is thus right with the world. When I finish Secret (I assume today, I feel like I'm pretty close to the end), I plan on playing Trials, which I've never even touched before. Maybe I'll try Legend after that, which I've also not played!
I'm a Mana series fan, and I really never thought I would be. Hooray! Please feel free to talk about other reasons why you like the game, and/or to dunk on me for not liking it for so freaking long.
*this is a long running joke between me and turtle, just indulge me this brief shitpost
It took the Gameboy to teach me how to love it.
I love the Gameboy aesthetic. I will play games for that system that I wouldn't go anywhere near on any other system, simply for the way the games look and sound for that underpowered little chonker. In between rounds of Dungeon Encounters (which I do like and will go back to), I realized I owned the Collection of Mana which had a Gameboy game I'd not played much of, and I remembered that another collection with Gameboy games in it - Collection of SaGa - completely made me fall in love with that series, so maybe I should at least give Final Fantasy Adventure a shot. So I did!
I had a grand old time with it. It's a pretty simple game. You go around, following basic quest lines, fighting absolutely simple enemies who basically wander and bounce around the screen, collecting weapons, armor, money, and temporary party members who themselves just wander around each screen, occasionally attacking enemies. It basically feels like a slightly janky Link's Awakening, except with almost no emphasis on puzzles (which is not a criticism, it's just a different game). The combat in Final Fantasy Adventure made me realize something about Secret of Mana, though - some weapons did zero damage to some enemies, but switching to a different one solved the problem and let me defeat them.
This was revelatory for my dumb ass.
To start praising Secret with a slight criticism, it doesn't tell you when you "miss" hitting an enemy. The only way you can tell is if no damage number pops up after an attack. I had thought this meant I was just rolling bad RNG numbers, and while that may be the case somewhat, switching weapons like you do in Final Fantasy Adventure usually solved the problem of just whiffing over and over again against the adorable creatures of Secret. In FFA, a little tink sound plays if you hit an enemy with a weapon that does no damage to it, which I wish was still in Secret, but regardless, this revelation (again, stressing that I'm just dumb, I should have thought of this over the past twenty years, I don't blame Secret for this) allowed me to start enjoying the combat, something I found nearly impossible to do before. It wasn't just this I had an issue with - having to move your character nearly to the edge of the screen to make it scroll has always (and still does, though I've gotten used to it) annoyed me, because the enemies like to get cheap hits in, often from offscreen. But, once I realized I could just switch weapons and probably hit whatever enemy was giving me trouble, I got into the rhythm of dipping in and out of the somewhat clunky ring menus, which made me start to even like those, which made me start using the Sprite's attack magic more, which made me realize bosses were not impossible walls (well, outside of two cases where they literally are walls lol) that stunlock you until you run out of candy, chocolate, and revival cups and get a game over. MP restoring nuts, though quite expensive early on, are worth their weight in gold! The Sprite, as annoying as the music is in the area where he joins your party (the only bad music in the game, by the way), is essential to clearing this game's bosses, at least for a newbie like me. The different enemies peppered through the games are not only adorably animated, but fun to figure out how to fight - when they're vulnerable, and when they're not. Telling your AI controlled partners to keep their distance but still attack makes things go much smoother, rather than try to fight everything by yourself, alone. The AI seems to know when exactly an enemy is vulnerable, which helps you learn when they are, which I'd not realized before.
It strikes me, typing this, that a lot of this is probably in the game's manual, but I've never owned that or thought to look it up online, alas.
Anyway, once you have magic, the bosses aren't very difficult for the most part, and mostly involve you figuring out which magic does the most damage to them, and spamming that while avoiding what attacks you can while keeping the Sprite's MP topped up. Sure, the boss fights could be deeper, but I don't really care, as to be honest, I kind of find unleashing the Sprite's magic after saving his MP for most of the dungeon quite fun. Some of those attack spells look pretty cool!
---
I've always wanted to like Secret of Mana. I mean, look at this:
We've all seen that beautiful image. But every time I'd see it, I'd think to myself "gosh, Secret of Mana is a gorgeous game. I want to learn to like it. I have to beat it one of these days." I'd boot the game up on whatever platform I was playing at the time, get some ways into the game, and give up in frustration for various reasons. But even during the past twenty years where I thought I'd never be able to like the game, I always admired the graphics and music of it. I've had several Secret of Mana songs on my phones over the years, and I've always thought the graphics of Secret were lush and beautiful in an extremely SNES kind of way. That's a bit hard to explain, so I hope you know what I mean, but basically the game looks like an SNES ass SNES game, but awesome. The animation of the Boy's hair as he runs back and forth. The animation of the Girl and the Sprite as they cast spells. The animation of all the enemies and player characters as they attack and get hit. All of it great. I'd not made it to the ice area in any playthrough prior to this, but the glowing trees were not what I expected. Even the desert looks good, if a bit bland compared to pretty much the rest of the game. It's so nice to be able to enjoy the above while also enjoying the gameplay itself.
---
I'd heard over the years that due to Nintendo cancelling the SNES CD add on, large chunks of this game were excised and/or never implemented. I'd been curious what those were, and how much you could actually tell (I'd heard of some old Ted Woolsey interview where he says something along the lines of "you can literally see where content was cut"). There were hints, but then I got to the Moon Palace and it was obvious that that area was unfinished. A guy has to ferry you to the Palace, you can't land there with your dragon buddy. They'd made a unique space-y moving background that you run around in for one room in which you solve a super easy puzzle, and then it's over and you're done. Clearly there was going to be more there. What were they planning? What could it be? It's so tantalizing, just out of reach...
I loved it.
Here's why, and I'll keep this digression as short as I can. One of my favorite things about my favorite show Doctor Who is that it has 97 missing episodes, which we only have the audio and a few off screen photographs of. All of them are from the 60s, all are in black and white, and all the ones we can see very much feel like they were produced in another place (in the sense that "the past is another country"). We have to use our imagination to fill in what was happening on screen as we listen to the audio, imagine Patrick Troughton's expressive face react to events, look up pictures of actors in those episodes from other television shows and imagine what they were like in Doctor Who (well, this is something I do. It might be the dorkiest thing I do, frankly). Secret of Mana's cuts feel similar to me. What was that Moon Palace going to be like in the original version? The ferry ride there implies they were building up to something big and weird. The moving background of stars is so out of left field for the game thus far that you have to think the rest of the dungeon, had they been able to make it, would have similar weirdness going on. I want to see it so bad! And I'm an extremely new convert to even liking the game!
You can tell that they wanted to have several story threads weave through the game that kind of... don't, eventually (caveat: I have seven of the mana seeds, so if Jema suddenly reappears, my apologies, I haven't seen him in ages and assume he's dropped out of the story by the point in the game I'm at). The beginning of the game is so fleshed out - you can get the Girl and the Sprite at different times depending on how you approach the game at that point. This playthrough, I got the Sprite first quite by accident! Any nonlinearity goes out the window pretty quickly, though, which doesn't bother me (Final Fantasy X fan that I am). The Sprite village feels like there was going to be more there - yes, I'd imagine they'd always intended everyone to have been killed there, but had the game been produced the way we've heard it was supposed to be, maybe you'd talk to all those people before they were slaughtered, or something. Then there's this:
I'd heard about this on Retronauts, and was always curious the context in which he appears, and it is absolutely out of nowhere. You run into Rudolph who tells you that you need to rescue him, then you go do the Ice Palace dungeon and fight the boss, who turns out to have been Santa because he'd been trying to use the mana seed to make more children believe in him, but it backfired and he'd turned into the monster.
WHAT?!
I assume they'd flesh that out a bit more, maybe by having some children in a village somewhere lament about how they don't believe in him or something, only to have him appear after you rescue him and deliver them presents or something. I dunno. It's so weird! Charming as hell, but weird!
There are other examples, these are just what stick out to me on first look. If there's like an interview or something I can read that details what was left out, I'd love to read it.
---
Elsewhere on the internet, everyone's least favorite poster aturtledoesbite* posted a thread saying this game sucks, and I found myself agreeing with him. I'm pleased to say turtle and I were wrong, and this game is good, and now only turtle is wrong, and all is thus right with the world. When I finish Secret (I assume today, I feel like I'm pretty close to the end), I plan on playing Trials, which I've never even touched before. Maybe I'll try Legend after that, which I've also not played!
I'm a Mana series fan, and I really never thought I would be. Hooray! Please feel free to talk about other reasons why you like the game, and/or to dunk on me for not liking it for so freaking long.
*this is a long running joke between me and turtle, just indulge me this brief shitpost
