FGC #693 Secret of Mana

Secret of Mana is shit. It’s a good game, but it is time to admit it is fubar’ed in ways that are still baffling videogameologists to this very day. Think the biggest issue in this action-RPG is wonky hit detection? Wrong! That is just the tip of the iceberg! Here are a few highlights from a recent playthrough:

• Number one concern: anytime a creature has a pattern where they are occasionally airborne, you’re going to have a bad time. Starting with the Spikey Tiger and ending with the literal final boss, opponents revel in “hiding” for 90% of the battle while your only viable options are to sit there and get hit.
• Even when a creature is literally entirely motionless, you may have trouble finding an actual hitbox to actually do damage. Wall Face epitomizes this issue across the whole of Secret of Mana, as it is the only boss with a time limit. Find that special spot quickly or repeat the whole dang dungeon!
• Some bosses have literally impossible hitboxes. Axe Beak apparently takes damage somewhere around its knees, but getting anywhere close to that causes you to take damage. Hope you powered up your javelin!
• Should your party spread out at the start of the fight with Dread Slime, it will be completely impossible to move without watching some of your party members die. And, yes Virginia, the blob does appear to have maximum magic defense.
• Speaking of dealing damage, the entire battle system is based on the risk/reward of charging weapon meters to absurd heights to cause as much pain as possible. So you would think someone would have debugged that procedure so you don’t lose a charge by, like, touching a staircase. Or being near a locked door. Or “defending” against an “attack” that is your opponent standing motionless. Or the ever popular “was one frame from hitting the monster, but a spell triggered, and now it is back to square one”. Landing a charge attack is less likely than finding your dad’s old sword because you tripped down a waterfall.
• Do not get me started on the AI pathfinding and watching your allies get wrecked while they struggle to find their way around a basic 90-degree angle. Just walk around, Primm! The hedgehog can’t hurt you here!
• Most big battles involve your allies just standing there. Even when set to maximum aggression, they will linger in a boss room and stare at the carnage. This is less noticeable while running through dungeons, but they still have a tendency to use that time to toss boomerangs at nothing.
• MP conservation is impossible. You have a maximum of four faerie walnuts to restore MP between inns. That’s it! Only other “field” restoration for MP is Sprite’s MP Drain earned about 70% of the way through the game. Not an MP restoring spring or Level Up bonus to be found. So you better be goldarned psychic to know whether or not this dungeon has a boss you can actually hit, one that requires magic, or six successive bosses that all require magic. Thanks, Mana Pure Land!
• And for funsies, glitched chest spawns can completely bork the leveling system of your weapons. Why wasn’t everything tied to mandatory boss fights or plot events? Why is there an axe orb hidden in the far-off corner of a dungeon you can only explore once?
• Why is there a carousel you can see from the sky at Vandole, but you can never ride the damn thing!?

And the list could go on as long as Mana fuels this planet. We are stopping only because I must say something contradictory: I love Secret of Mana more than anything. I have played through the game 10,000,000 times, and nothing can stop me from playing it another 10,000,000 times. The entire reason this article exists is I played a taste of Secret of Mana for Even Worse Streams, and I could not stop myself from playing through the rest of the game outside of the stream. Hell, I even did it twice, as I played through more of the 2018 remake, too, just to make a few comparison conclusions. The 2018 remake did clean up the ally AI! It even makes some of the bosses significantly easier (since, you know, you have a real party of three active participants). It looks like garbage, but 2018’s gameplay is quantifiably better. And it doesn’t matter! Because the original Secret of Mana is Secret of Mana! And I’m not just saying this because it was the #1 game I played when I was eleven!

… Though that is probably a factor…

Maybe that’s the trick: Secret of Mana is more than its broken gameplay. I was a child that predominantly read “comedy” as a kid, which meant that my shelves were stocked with books that were textbook parodies or humorous essays (normal kid stuff, obviously). I additionally hit some horror, like Stephen King, Goosebumps, or Choose Your Own Adventure stories where at least 80% of the outcomes were your untimely demise. I did not read The Lord of the Rings or -insert a second epic fantasy thing available in the 90’s-, and did not really get into “fantasy” as a genre until discovering Neil Gaiman in my 20’s and then drifting over to Pratchett. All the swords and sorcery I ever saw was in videogames, and it was limited. Best we could hope for were some magical crystals and silly dwarfs in Final Fantasy. But Secret of Mana! Holy Mana Tree! We’ve got lost civilizations bubbling to the surface! Evil empires with witchy usurpers! Elemental coded shrines with unique spirits and personalities! Santa Claus! This game might not function as a game, but it lit my imagination ablaze like a Heck Hound casting Blaze Wall.

And did you see the Nintendo Power coverage?

It isn’t just about art that is dramatic and amazing.

…. Okay, that demands one more…

But it is also about how three months of coverage of the entire damn game was relayed as a first-person account of the adventure. At the same time Nintendo Power was trying to bolster interest in Death and Return of Superman (“The Grab and Throw technique is almost always your best fighting move.” Thanks, NP!) here was some journalist flexing their creative writing skills to transform a 16-bit videogame into something to rival Arthurian Legend. Secret of Mana was a broken game, but its propaganda papered over any possibility you would quit after an unfair boss encounter.

And if you want to see the exact opposite phenomenon, we are fast forwarding seven years to Final Fantasy 9.

Gogglebob.com recognizes Final Fantasy 9 as an excellent experience. In fact, as previously covered, it may be one of the games that best epitomizes its era, as it is a pinnacle of Playstation-era RPG presentation. As suddenly as Final Fantasy 10, RPGs tried to be playable movies. Here in 2000, Final Fantasy 9 had learned from its forebearers, and knew exactly how to relay everything through text boxes, from a lore dump to a tender scene between woman and monkey. It is a lost art! Just look at later games aping that style with static images heaving text at each other. In much the way Secret of Mana got so many things wrong, Final Fantasy 9 got an entire moment in time in its genre right.

Except its strategy guide was all wrong. By the fourth page of Final Fantasy 9’s official strategy guide, there is this explanation:

“If you’re not familiar with PlayOnline.com…” because it just started existing? PlayOnline was SquareSoft’s internet strategy at the turn of the millennium. The basic concept was to be the online hub for all things SquareSoft. Some future plans included online weapon trading in the (then) upcoming Final Fantasy 10. Yes! SquareSoft was going to use PlayOnline to create NFTs in 2001! It never materialized, but they were going to try! And, in a weird way, you might be able to blame the ludicrous requirements for FF10’s ultimate weapons on intended PlayOnline functionality. PlayOnline is responsible for so much lightning-based suffering!

So, depending on who you ask, PlayOnline was either a hideous failure (as of this writing, it is still a domain registered by Square Enix, but completely inoperable without so much as a forward), or the most successful online venture ever conceived (it is, arguably, the evolutionary ancestor of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV). If you were a Final Fantasy 11 player, you remember PlayOnline branding. If you were not, you likely are only aware of PlayOnline because of seeing something like this…

Let me break this one down: Strategy Guides used to be sold in videogame stores. Thanks to the great Ifnkovhgroghprm controversy of 1984, strategy guides for complicated games were often considered essential. So, for roughly a quarter of the cost of the game you were actually playing, you could obtain a guide that would iron out the wrinkles that might otherwise hamper your quest. As games became more complicated than simply “know the solution to the puzzle”, these strategy guides somehow became more essential, as “missables” became a significant part of our favorite games. Would you have obtained the best super attacks without the guide? Would you have let Corel collapse into ruin because you thought that was the only outcome available? Would you even know there were 100 skulltulas out there? Strategy guides were relatively costly, but they had the potential to deliver a more directed gaming experience.

Here is Final Fantasy 9. Final Fantasy was already a franchise known for being complicated and containing major missables. The previous Final Fantasy title famously ended with a “disc 4” that forbade revisiting practically half the game. It was reasonable to expect Final Fantasy 9 to pull a similar stunt. And it did! And so much more! Final Fantasy 9 contained plot scenes, treasures, stealable items, and entire characters that could be permanently missed if a player wasn’t paying attention. And did the official strategy guide help? No! Because you were informed via a pretty blue box that there was something to find here, but you had to jump online to actually learn what that might be. And this was not an era when you could just bring it up on your phone. For most of us in 2000, visiting PlayOnline meant clearing everyone in the household off the phone line, dialing into our internet service provider, navigating the web on a 56K modem, and then hopefully finding the data we were searching for. And I emphasize that “hopefully” statement there, because I know for a fact that PlayOnline’s coverage of Chocobo’s Paradise was lacking. Why do I know this? Because I will never forget.

Final Fantasy 9 is a great game, but I will literally never forget the frustration of trying to do everything, being told there is more to do in specific places, but PlayOnline being an unnecessary obstacle to accomplishing any of those things. In much the same way that AI now haunts and obfuscates much of the internet, PlayOnline was my first experience with the enshittification of something that had previously been remarkably straightforward (buy guide, get information), and permanently marred my love of these supplemental materials. You know what else was online, PlayOnline? GameFAQs! So when Final Fantasy 10 rolled out a year later, I didn’t even chance grabbing its strategy guide. Wouldn’t make the same mistake again when a free alternative proved to be easier to use on the exact same internet…

And that’s how the divine tree falls. Decades after Secret of Mana, I will buy any given Mana game sight unseen, and wind up with a stack of DS games that were played for no longer than ten minutes (until streaming them 20 years later). Conversely, I see Square Enix touting their latest “experimental” offering, from NFT-based games to whatever happened with that Splatoon-wannabe, and I assume it is another PlayOnline-esque scam. A careful presentation made a shit game good, and the opposite made a good game shit. Completely subjective, but now my brain is going to believe it as an objective truth until the day I die.

And I’ll die with a Super Nintendo controller in my hand…

FGC #693 Secret of Mana

• System: Super Nintendo, and then every system that came out after, like, the Playstation Vita. Once Square Enix gets a game portable, it is ported forever.
• Number of players: Three! Fire up your Super Multitap to get exactly one extra player! This makes Super Bomberman totally worth it.
• Best Moment in Gaming: Turtlance, an unassuming turtle knight skulking around the Mana Temple, can randomly grow wheels and an exhaust pipe to motor across the screen. Take that, Rabites!
• It finally happened: Hey, I got a snap of the secret porn in Secret of Mana:
  

  If I was still eleven, I would be so excited about that.

• Localization of Mana: As many people know, the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom had different colored buttons, so the menus of Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2 had to be changed across regions to properly match the controller in your hands. Less known is that Kettle Kin, a robot found in the Mana Fortress, had a chainsaw and drill “legs” in Japan, but was stuck with mallets and a wheel in North America. No one should be surprised, as there is evidence chainsaws were a point of contention in the American rating system of the time.
• An end: Nobody knows what impacts the phases of the moon shown on the final The End screen of Secret of Mana. Nobody.
• Unanswered Questions: It is revealed at the finale of the Pure Land that the Mana Tree is in fact your main hero’s mother now tree-ified. But when venturing through the Pure Land, you are repeatedly assessed via mortal combat to earn the right to proceed. So, was that mommy dearest testing your mettle to see if you were worthy of an audience? And if so, is Mana Mom the worst mother in gaming?
• Did you know? Full-fledged dragons do not appear in Final Fantasy Adventure until you are storming the Mana Holy Land. In this sequel, unique dragons similarly only appear during the near-final dungeon of the Mana Pure Land. Starting with Trials (and emphasized in a few later titles), traditional (aka non-Flammie) dragons are nearly universally regarded as the worst, most destructive monsters on the planet. Visions of Mana even made one the final super boss. So can dragons only be good if they stick close to our favorite tree?
• Would I play again: Do I need to reiterate how I would die happy playing Secret of Mana?

What’s next? I’m not going to lie to you: Mana is going to continue until conditions improve. Trials of Mana is up next, and a benevodon or eight may be involved. Please look forward to it!