Secret of Mana – Review

28/10/2009 in Reviews

Secret of Mana – 800 Wii points

Review by Bobby Foster

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.

Secret of Mana is one of too few Japanese RPGs that avoid grind completely. This is partly as battles occur in real time rather than the oh-so-polite turn-based line-dance system favoured in the majority of other JRPGs, but also because easy fights are few and far between. Sure, the boss battles remain a good chunk harder than fighting against regular enemies, but it’s also quite possible for your entire team to get slaughtered just wandering the game world if you let your concentration slip and fail to look out for each other.

This “looking out for each other” is key. The game is hugely flawed as a single player experience, as your computer controlled companions have an annoying habit of getting stuck behind scenery and behaving suicidally in battle. Although you’re given some control over their tactics through a matrix of battle stances (containing “Guard”, “Stay Away”, “Attack” and “Approach”), putting them on anything much above the most defensive setting is usually only going to guarantee their premature death.

There are other problems. Having told your AI buddies to “guard” and “stay away” in an attempt to keep them alive long enough to reach the boss of the dungeon you’re in, you may find yourself fighting monsters whose attacks knock you to the ground. Infuriatingly, the time it takes to get to your feet is exactly the same amount of time it takes them to make another attack, and you’re left defenceless as you get hit again and again while great chunks are taken out of your Hit Points. The friendly AI can only be counted on to stand by and nervously twitch from side-to-side as they watch you die.

“How horribly broken!” you might cry, but what made (and still makes) Secret of Mana revolutionary is that three people can play at once, with each player controlling one of the three main characters. Suddenly the frustration of being stuck on the floor defenceless while you get hit repeatedly floats away, as you can hold out at least some hope that one of your human companions might come to rescue you. Valve’s Left4Dead has more recently demonstrated that putting players in a position where they are helpless to defend themselves is a great way to encourage teamwork, and Secret of Mana did the same thing over a decade earlier. The only difference here is that it’s not quite so obviously an intentional design choice, and the quality of the AI is nowhere near high enough to make it work when you’re playing the game by yourself (an area which even Left4Dead fifteen years later still couldn’t quite get perfect).

Yet assuming you can persuade one or two of your real-life friends to play with you, then you’re ready to enjoy what remains one of the best roleplaying games ever made. I returned to Secret of Mana with a sense of trepidation: I’d fallen in love with the game as a teenager and had concerns that years of nostalgia and changes in my tastes might make it an “Event Horizon” moment in my life. In other words, it would prove to be one of those beloved cultural artifacts from my youth that fell apart under older, more mature scrutiny.

In fact, it’s aged marvellously. The world looks vibrant and distinct. The combination of timing, sensible strategy and flexibility of approach required to succeed in combat makes it a game you easily end up playing compulsively. And oh, shall we talk about the sound track?

Secret of Mana continues to feature in those “Best Game Music Ever!!!!” lists for a very good reason: Hiroki Kikuta does amazing things within the constraints of the SNES’s sound module. The opening theme alone outshines pretty much every recent release I can think of, and really helps to convince you that you’re about to play something special. For the rest of the game, the musical landscape shifts between the kitsch and the profound, from the playful to the sinister and the sombre, with a quite uncommon confidence. In fact, the greatest testament I can make to the quality and variety of the in-game music is that hearing it again has left me in despair at the pathetic way modern games are satisfied with (and even aspire to) simply imitating Hollywood movie scores.

This is a game with its own identity, where the visuals and sound aren’t showy distractions but an integral part of the charm and sophistication of what you’re playing. It’s a 16-bit cartridge that embarrasses modern JRPGs for their lack of ambition, both artistically and technically.

Why don’t more narrative-driven epics like this let you play with friends? Probably because it’s a damn hard thing to do well, and Secret of Mana has cast an intimidatingly long shadow. But now we find ourselves in 2009, and few developers are even trying to match it, yet alone go one better. Borderlands and Star Wars: The Old Republic offer some hope for a bolder and braver future, but why has Japan given the West so long to catch up? Perhaps more importantly, how could there be more innovation in a 16 year-old download from the Virtual Console than all of Square Enix’s output from the past five years?

I’m baffled. But what I do know is that if you decide to buy Secret of Mana, you’ll also be getting a ton of troubling questions about the creative decline of Japanese RPGs for FREE.

Secret of Mana – 800 Wii points