One of the things I think I should do more of is write. About movies, and TV, and music, and other crap I do. But mostly about video games, because that’s what I know best. So to that end, I’m going to write a whole second blog post about the Secret of Mana remake.
I’ve finished the game now, and yeah, it was good. It was more or less exactly as good as playing the original, as I more or less said in my last post. It’s just that faithful to the original game. I know some people will die on the hill that this is how video game remakes should be, but I can’t agree with that. If you’re just making the exact same game again but with more polygons, what’s really the point? I had basically the same experience as I would have had if I’d just played the version I already own, and I’d be like $50 richer.
This is almost exactly how I felt about the Super Mario RPG remake from a few years ago.
Now, it’s not like it’s the exact same game, but most of the differences are cosmetic. I e that isn’t, however, is the new conversations the party has whenever they stay at an inn. This is a completely new feature, and I very much liked it. Secret of Mana didn’t put a lot of effort into character development, so being able to see these little chats that gove the characters so much more character is a really fantastic add. Yeah, a number of them are corny and tropey, but being able to see the party members grow from a group of people who only stuck together because their goals aligned into a real team was awesome. It adds at least a little depth to a game that really never had much.
This remake also adds a handful of gussied-up cutscenes, and for the most part, they’re a nice little addition. But one, when you’re escaping from the top of the Imperial Palace, is a little wonky. See, once you beat the boss, a cutscene plays where you summon Flammie and fly off to safety. But then, when the cutscene ends… the characters are standing on the roof again, hoisting the Flammie drum, and then it plays the usual animation of Flammie flying down out of the sky to pick them up. It’s so weird that the same sequence effectively happens twice, and it would be so easy to fix that it had to be left that way on purpose. I would very much like to be able to ask someone exactly who made the decision to do it that way and why.
I don’t really think there’s much else to say specifically about the Secret of Mana remake that wouldn’t also apply to the original. It has trophies, I guess? 80% of which are for defeating bosses, and the rest for filling up the various collections. But most of those last ones require grinding for rare drops that are much too rare for me to care about them, so I ended the game with only the boss trophies and haven’t looked back. I did keep a save right before anything would become missable, but I don’t think I’ll ever actually go back to it.
And that’s that! What a game it was! A pleasure to revisit, and almost exactly the way I remember it, just with a few extra bells. Not even any whistles. I’ll be honest, when I started writing this post, I was intending to write something a little more thoughtful, but I think I took too long to get through it and now my interest in doing so has faded. I don’t know. I’m bad at writing. Enjoy this official art!
