I have played Secret of Mana a lot. It’s one of the two games I remember completely falling in love with as a kid. I have so many memories of playing that game and thinking about playing that game. It’s pretty much the first thing I think about when I think about summer; as soon as I finish mowing the grass I can go back in, where it’s cool, and play Secret of Mana.
For some history, if you need it, Secret of Mana is an Action RPG for the Super Nintendo, published in North America in 1993. You play as 3 heroes and can play with two other people (if you have the extra attachments for the SNES). You have to journey the world powering up your sword to defeat evil (as you do). It was originally published in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2, the sequel to Seiken Densetsu, a GameBoy game (which was published in North America as Final Fantasy Adventure)
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard about the sequel to Secret of Mana (which at the time everyone was calling Secret of Mana 2), but I definitely remember looking at web forum posts and walkthroughs for the Japanese version (Seiken Densetsu 3) and thinking about how much fun having six heroes was going to be. Especially having a storytelling system which was supposed to mix the six heroes’ stories together depending on who you had in your party and all kinds of different classes your heroes could level into. I spent a lot of time dreaming about all the ways I wanted to play this game.
And then it was never released in North America.
I did play the fan translated ROM, but somehow it never clicked with me. A little bit of that was because I was sitting at my desk rather than on the couch and that I was playing with the keyboard rather than a SNES controller. At the end of the day, it felt slow and a bit disjointed and it just wasn’t *fun* in the way Secret of Mana was fun.
I’ve played a few of the other Mana games since and they’ve been all over in terms of how much I’ve liked them. Mostly I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t interested in the places the Mana games were going. My feelings about Secret of Mana got mixed into my plans to make an Action RPG someday and I was pretty happy to move on.
And then they announced The Collection of Mana.
Secret of Mana on the Switch, along with Final Fantasy Adventure (Adventure of Mana - Seiken Densetsu) and … Trials of Mana? Seiken Densetsu 3, with a full official translation and everything.
And I was a little excited. (Apparently I made a really interesting noise during the direct).
So, on a nice day early in July I sat down to play Trials of Mana again, and I thought it was slow, a bit disjointed and it just wasn’t *fun*.
And then they announced the Remake.
Given how generally down the people I followed online were about the Secret of Mana Remake from 2018, I wasn’t very interested. Still, the reviews eventually sounded kinda good and possibly if I supported that we’d get other good games from Square-Enix from the 90s (*cough*Illusion of Gaia*cough*) on the Switch, so I picked it up.
And I finally played through Trials of Mana.
I can’t say it’s one of the greatest games I’ve played, but it was pretty fun and had several interesting elements. It also had a lot of slightly odd choices and I found myself wondering as I played, how did those work in the original game? So finally, I got out the Collection of Mana and played all the way through Trials of Mana. And then, just to see if Secret of Mana was really the masterpiece I love, I played through that again too.
And there are some things I’d like to talk about.
Beware of spoilers for Trials of Mana, Trials of Mana (Remake) and Secret of Mana.
Things I Liked
I’m going to focus on the 1995 original version of Trials of Mana, because it’s the game I dreamed about for so long. The Remake is either faithful or better in almost every aspect. While there are things to talk about with the remake as well, I don't have as much to say about it right now.
The thing that has always stood out to me about Trials of Mana is how great it looks. It takes the vibrant cartoony vibe of Secret of Mana and makes it better looking and cooler. The look of places feels like they put a lot of effort into the sprites and the background.
The character sprites are the same way. Durran looks like the grown up, badass version of Randi (also he’s named Durran and not Randi, so that seems way cooler - especially in 1995). All of the characters are cool and badass and probably have half again as many frames in their animations as the characters in Secret of Mana.
The quality of the sprites ties into a fairly well constructed sense of place.Even though a lot of the background sprites (and all of the character sprites) were shared, I feel like each place was different. The dungeons felt similarly, although I think the design leaves me thinking about them more as abstract places than remembering specific locations. Place is much more clearly written in the remake, and I may be transfering my feelings from that version, but I think place is one of the things Trials of Mana does very well.
Another thing I liked about Trials of Mana is the way they weaved six character’s stories together. It’s not perfect, but especially the idea of having a story that works out differently depending on who you bring along. Certainly in all the years I spent dreaming about this game, the diversity of stories was the part that most held my interest.
Things I Didn't Like
I think following the rule of cool, which made the game look awesome, really brought out the two things I didn’t like.
The first is that the combat feels bad. The combat in Secret of Mana is weird, but for me, it’s a weird I grew up with. The combat in Trials of Mana is slow and feels janky. I think it’s supposed to feel cool, awesome, and flashy. When animators talk about animating for video games, they often mention that you want as little anticipation in your player animation as possible. That means that if a character is going to throw a punch, within two or three frames of animation after the button is pushed the punch should be happening on screen.
In Trials of Mana there is a mix of too much anticipation, too much input lag (where it seems like the game isn’t doing anything at all after the button is pushed), and no animation cancelling. Once a character is doing an animation they seem to keep doing it, regardless of which buttons you push. Again, I may have just had different expectations, but I never felt happy playing the combat in the game at all.
The other rule of cool problem is that the magic effects take too long and push you out of the action. In Secret of Mana, your magic gets more and more impressive effects as you get stronger. The fireball turns from little sparks, to football sized globes to dragons larger than your characters. In Trials of Mana they tried to start there. If you cast the first wind spell in the game tornadoes pop up all over the screen and take a while to fade away.
In short, I think the effects programmers took all of the tricks they had learned working on the Super Nintendo and put them into this game. However they are overused, especially given that using the spells over and over again is the only way some groups of your heros can hurt some enemies. It ends up feeling like they focused on making magic look as impressive as possible and didn’t think about how the game would actually play.
Things I Noticed
I mentioned that I liked having six different stories worked together, but in implementation there are some problems. It’s possible depending on how you play to only see a small portion of the story on any particular play through and particularly if you don’t pick two characters for your party who share a story a lot of things go unexplained.
I played as Hawkeye, whose love interest is captured by the big bad early in the game. Then, spontaneously, she was released. In my first playthrough (in the remake) when I fought the final boss, it was over the body of Riesz’s little brother. They were mentioned, but because I didn’t have Riesz in my party, I had no emotional attachment and not a lot of knowledge about the character. In the second playthrough I did have her in my party and at least the connection was clearer, but still not as emotionally meaningful as if Hawekeye’s love interest had been the macguffin.
Apparently if you choose other characters you get a whole other final boss. On the one hand that’s wonderful, but it made me spend most of my time wondering if I’d made wrong choices or if there was something else I was missing.
I think there’s a way to tie everyone together better, but I also think that having 6 main characters makes storytelling much much harder. I think it’s hard to walk the line between being dynamic, honouring the player’s choices, and telling a coherent story.
Things I'd Put In A Game
As I’ve mentioned, Trials of Mana is the game I dreamed about for years, and figuring it wouldn’t come out, I’ve spent a very long time thinking about how I’d make my own Secret of Mana 2.
The long and the short of that game in my mind is one that reflects a lot of the player’s choices and where the characters and the world are aware of and reacting to the player's action. It’s also about tying together the player’s actions with the story of four different characters.
Usually I try to be concrete in my takeaways but I’ve spent more than twenty years mapping out how I’d fill that Secret of Mana 2 shaped hole. I won’t lie, I’m feeling a little distressed that I haven’t actually done it yet, but it shaped a ton of how I think.
Final Things
How would I have felt, if Trials of Mana had come out in North America in 1996? I really don’t know.
Not too long after I didn’t love Legend of Mana (another game I’d like to come back to -- the remake / rerelease train has been pretty good lately). Its controls were also weird, but it didn’t have any sense of place.
Trials of Mana takes a lot of what I love about Secret of Mana and tries to polish it. Sometimes I think it does it in a way that makes the game worse, but the developers tried to take the good in Secret of Mana and intensify it.
I may always love the memory of Secret of Mana II more, but I’m really glad Trials of Mana finally came out and I got to play it.
