A very, very long time ago, there used to be these businesses where you could go in and pick out a video game that you wanted to play (or a movie you wanted to watch), give them $5, and they would let you take it home for a few days, and then you’d have to bring it back. It was a pretty decent deal, and a fun way to experience new games and movies that you didn’t want to pay full price for (or use up an Xmas present on).
Back when the SNES was the hottest new thing -or, I guess, halfway into its lifecycle because we didn’t get ours until Xmas 1994- one of the most alluring games to me was Secret of Mana. I wasn’t really into RPGs at the time because it seemed like they would be impossible to beat over the course of one rental, but Nintendo Power did such a fantastic job of marketing it that I just had to give it a shot. And so I rented it once, and played the crap out of it, not quite making it to the end. I returned it, and then at some point, rented it again. This happened some indeterminate number of times. In my memory I rented the game six or seven times, but I think it more realistically took three rentals to finally beat the game. Might have been that the final time, the rental period had been extended from three to five days. I don’t really remember how all of that worked because it was like thirty years ago.
But anyhow, Secret of Mana. Not only did I rent the game a bunch of times on the genuine SNES hardware, but I played an emulated version a ton, had at least one Virtual Console version (on Wii, I don’t remember if it released on 3DS or WiiU and I don’t care to check), played through the entire 2010 iPhone port, and have the Collection of Mana on Switch. This is one of those games that will follow me for the rest of my life and I will happily re-purchase it on as many pieces of hardware as possible, like Mega Man X, Super Mario 64, or Resident Evil 4.
So it’s kind of weird that I hadn’t ever played the 2018 remake until just last week.
I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, I put this off for so many years. This remake was released on PS Vita, PS4, and Windows. There were ample opportunities for it, but for whatever reason I just never hopped onboard. Perhaps because at some point near its release I heard that the soundtrack had been horribly butchered, and I adore the original Secret of Mana soundtrack, so even as hearsay, I simply couldn’t abide such a thing. If you had any idea how often I would listen to Fear of the Heavens in my formative tween and teenage years, you would probably understand. I don’t think that I truly understood just how beautiful and impactful music could even be until Secret of Mana.
To tear the band-aid off this one quickly: no, I don’t like Secret of Mana’s remastered soundtrack as much as I like the original. But it’s not terrible! For the most part, I like that the new soundtrack adds new instrumentation and new layers and more depth to just about every track. They lose the nostalgic quality of SNES samples in the process, but I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing. To be quite honest, for most of the time I’ve been playing so far, I’ve just been bopping along to the familiar tunes without really noticing the differences all that much. Sometimes you get a song that shifts dramatically like “Dancing Animals”, which has gone from a funky island beat to a complex prog rock tour-de-force, but I wouldn’t consider that a bad thing!
The core gameplay has scarcely been touched; the biggest difference I think being that the player is given full 360-degree control instead of 8-direction movement and 4-direction attacking. Otherwise, Secret of Mana feels just as clunky and kinda busted as the original. And I mean, if you know the game’s background, you probably get it, but I don’t have a hard time understanding why people who didn’t grow up with the game tend to dislike it. Combat doesn’t always feel great since hitboxes sometimes seem more like suggestions than anything, and while the ring menu is really cool in concept, it does slow things down a lot. Let’s not even get into how effectively using magic completely squashes the game’s difficulty curve.
All the warts carry over, often feeling less forgivable here than they were in the barely-held-together SNES version. But there are some improvements, too! Like being able to assign weapons and spells to L1 and R1 for easy swapping and/or casting. And… that might be it? I think some of the weapons have been tweaked a bit so that they feel more unique than they used to (the whip’s range is incredible now), but I haven’t really noticed anything else that has changed, at least mechanically. It really does feel a lot like Square-Enix just took the original game’s code and tuned it just enough so that it would work in a 3D engine, for better or for worse. Depends on how you like your remakes, I suppose.
Being 3D now is definitely the biggest change that Secret of Mana’s remake has to offer, but some of the choices there have my mind completely boggled. Like, the 3D graphics have been modelled to match the original’s sprites very closely in most cases, which has its ups and downs. It’s fun to see most of the sprites fleshed out in full 3D, but some of them (Elliott and the Moogles spring to mind) just look awful as 1:1 conversion. There are a handful of characters and enemies have been redesigned entirely though, and they generally look great! Some of them are even much easier to interpret with the added level of detail (see Cannon Man as the prime example).
I think my favourite thing about the visual overhaul is actually the one thing that’s completely faithful: the mini-map in the corner of the screen shows the pixel graphics from the original game. It’s a cute little feature that doesn’t have any bearing on anything at all, but I appreciate it.
And then, there’s… *heavy sigh* the voice acting. Every single line of dialog is now voiced, and it’s not good. It’s really not good. The voice acting for most of the main characters is fine, but so many of the secondary characters and NPCs are just so hammy and cartoony that it makes me wince. Technically it does fit with the somewhat goofy tone of the game, and good on Square-Enix for actually going through all the trouble of hiring all these people to voice every single line, but it’s not enjoyable to listen to. It’s so bad, in fact, that I’ve considered turning the voice volume down to zero, but I think that listening to the entirely new chats the party has among themselves when you stay at an inn are worth the pain.
So that’s how I feel about the Secret of Mana remake so far. I only just rescued baby Flammie, so there’s a lot of game left to play, but I doubt that my initial impressions are going to change. It’s generally been such a faithful remake so far that I feel like I know exactly what to expect from the rest of the game. I’m certainly enjoying my time with this one -it’s fun enough to go through the game again with the audio/visual overhaul- but if we never see a port of this version ever again, I won’t feel any particular need to complain.