Director/Designer Koichi Ishii
Producer/Designer/Writer Hiromichi Tanaka
Programmer Nasir Gebelli
Art Designer Hiroo Isono
Music Composed by Hiroki Kikuta
Developer/Publisher Squaresoft
Review by William D. Tucker
Long ago, humanity exploited the magic power of Mana to erect a terrifying flying fortress of unimaginable destructive capability. The Earth, enraged at the exploitation of its lifeblood Mana, sent forth the Mana Beast, an apocalypse monster capable of destroying the Mana Fortress, and therefore humble the ambitions of humankind. This epic battle happened long ago, and has passed largely into legend, myth, and fable. Human beings have settled back down into simple existences mostly using medieval-agrarian levels of technology, save for a few centers of high technology including an evil empire and some pirates with an impressive earth burrowing land cruiser. The Mana Fortress is long gone, destined to live on in rumors of submerged mystery continents and dark schemes in the Emperor's heart . . .
A young boy wanders outside of his village, led along by a ghostly presence. He finds a sword in a stone, which he promptly removes, and becomes the target of an aggressive, outsized bug monster dwelling in the subterranean caverns below his village. The boy defeats the monster, but he is immediately exiled from his village by the community elders for the sword he wields is a repository of great mystical power. The dark forces of this world will attack the boy in order to kill him and take the potent weapon for themselves. Anyone near the kid may also be killed, and so the young boy must leave the village in order to confront the source of evil in this world and free himself from the curse of wielding a heroic sword of legend.
The Earth is filled with animals, plants, and giant insects with unusually high levels of aggression. The implication is that the natural world has become much harsher to keep humanity in check since the war against the Mana Fortress, lest humankind decide to create a new supreme weapon of annihilation.
You, whoever you are, are the player. You control the boy and his two eventual allies, piloting them through a maze-like top-down world of forests, towns, cursed temples, towers filled with Game of Death-style floors filled with opponents of escalating difficulty-all with the goal of gathering a complete set of the mystically empowered heroic weapons of old (which include a whip, a battle-axe, a spear, a set of steel knuckles, and a mighty bow) to keep them out of the hands of the dark forces. You must also collect a set of magic seeds which are tied to different elemental powers. All standard fantasy role playing game stuff, but with a few tweaks.
For one, you cannot actually purchase any of the weapons. They must be earned by overcoming evil forces, and then you must charge them up by killing scores of enemies in battle. Yes, these heroic weapons of yore are charged up by the blood of your foes! The game doesn't quite present it like this. But the reality is that you must kill many, many forest animals and monsters in order to make your weapons more powerful. There's also an experience point system which increases your hit points, your magic points, your various defensive and offensive statistics, but the combat really leans into the notion of these mystically charged, ever transforming weapons. Power, how it should be used, and how it may corrupt those who wield it, is the theme of Secret of Mana.
You eventually take control of three young heroes-a human boy, a human girl, and a sprite of indeterminate gender identity-stand between the world and the world's annihilation. The boy wields a sacred sword of legend. The girl uses healing magics. The sprite casts offensive spells: fireballs, lightning bolts, makes enemy go boom. The fighter, the healer, and the death-ray shooter-a classic trio.
The gameplay consists of nonstop combat with no real puzzles like in a Zelda game, which is somewhat unfortunate. Some puzzles would've livened things up a bit. The combat is surprisingly addictive despite it not always feeling completely under your control. Every time you take a swing with your weapon, you have a recharge period before you can attack at full strength again. As you gain higher levels of weapon proficiency, you can charge your weapon up to deliver a mystically empowered killing strike. The trade-off is that the higher level charge strikes take longer and longer to build up to criticality thus leaving you open to attack. Fortunately, you have your two companions to carry on the fight while you charge up, so you rarely end up feeling overwhelmed as long as you take the time to grind up to a level equal to or above that of your enemies.
An amusingly strident instruction manual exhorts the player to go forth, conquer evil monsters, and to restore balance to the world. It also provides some interesting explanations for why you can throw away most all of the items in your inventory except for your weapons. Your weapons are mystically empowered and capable of transformation into deadlier forms; therefore, they cannot be permitted to fall into the hands of enemies or innocent civilians lest they wreak havoc in the hands of the malicious or untrained. There is also the implied prospect of powerful-perhaps semi-living-weapons corrupting whoever wields them, and this is a bit of lore not obvious within the game itself. It's a nice little bonus that's only in the manual. It got me thinking, "Is this game an elaborate allegory for principled use of weapons in time of necessary armed resistance against overwhelming evil?" Hmmm . . .
Secret of Mana's story isn't quite all that it could have been. The game was originally developed for a cancelled CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo that would've allowed for a much more expansive gaming experience. Once the CD-ROM was scrapped, the developers had to cut large portions of the planned design to fit into the constraints of the regular SNES cartridge. As you get further along in the game, it becomes more and more obvious that a much more elaborate scenario has been hacked down to the minimum: boss enemies are reused; dungeon crawls become simplified and repetitious; the story goes in directions which are not fully elaborated; characterizations are slashed to the minimum-however, it mostly works if you consider that the heroes are children. The game takes place from their perspective, and so not all of the complexities of the world are immediately obvious to them. What is obvious is that the world is in chaos, full of monsters, and endangered by the ambitions of evil would-be rulers. And since the adults have long ago abdicated moral leadership, the children must step up to make things right.
In fact, I rather enjoy the semi-coherent magical realism storytelling of Secret of Mana, which seems culled from various myths and religions. It gives the game the vibe of some half-forgotten, half-remembered myth-cycle only partially set down in writing upon ancient tablets or scrolls or 5D metaphysical holo-cubes or whatever the ancients liked to doodle upon in their idle hours. It reminds me of the endless battle sagas I would compose with my action figures as a kid.
That's not to say Secret of Mana doesn't pack a dramatic punch in a few key scenes. It does, but the game was clearly much more ambitious in its original unconstrained design than what they were actually able to ship back in '93. Many of the themes here explored would achieve greater expression in Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and in games from other developers such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Secret of Mana has a very strong reputation for those of us nostalgic for the SNES, but it doesn't quite live up to such fond memories. Today, it plays like a much more casual kind of game, closer in play-style to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest-which is not an insult coming from me. Mystic Quest is massively enjoyable for me to play through-the low-stress alternative to more demanding JRPGs.
Secret of Mana and Mystic Quest have something else in common: both games are blessed with excellent soundtracks. I revisit these titles as much to hear the music as to experience the gameplay. Secret of Mana's soundtrack ranges from soothing meditative arctic melodies to the manic, coked-out loop that plays when you are hanging out in the underground blacksmith works of the dwarfs. The boss battle themes are killer: the mainline boss fight theme begins with a hectic evocation of overwhelming danger that transforms into a soaring theme of heroism thereby providing a sonic map of the ideal flow of battle: danger met, danger conquered, bask in the glory! The Dark Lich Battle Theme is, I believe, an act of psychological warfare upon the player. My personal favorite might be the quietly unsettling theme that plays late in the game signalling the dawn of an ominous new era-but you'll just have to play the game yourself to get the story on that one.
Visually, Secret of Mana pops. Bright colors, credible designs of houses, temples, stores, subterranean lairs, with the one shortcoming being the noticeable number of empty rooms that serve no purpose other than to be dead ends. This is obviously a sign of the cuts made to the game design once the CD-ROM device was cancelled.
All of the enemy and character designs are charming and distinct from the cutesy chibi mini-figure designs of other JRPGs at the time. The characters are stylized, but somewhat close to human proportions. Chrono Trigger would carry on the character design ethos and some aspects of the enemy design approach to new heights, but it's all basically laid out in this game. The boss monsters are satisfyingly large and intimidating thereby giving you the satisfaction of victory once vanquished. One of the more unusual boss creatures is a mega-slime that grows to nearly screen-filling size as you inflict damage upon it. As mentioned above, the game repeats a number of boss fights with slight variations which is another sign of the game's reduced design ambitions.
In terms of gameplay, my favorite stretches involved the longer crawls wherein you really could get the feeling of controlling three swashbuckling heroes dueling wave after wave of formidable foes. The final dungeon before the end boss fight was satisfyingly demanding, although due to my obsessively grindy play style I blew through it pretty quick. I loved fighting the ninja enemies, and would've thoroughly enjoyed fighting an entire castle filled with those guys. The combat has moments where it really cooks, and I wish there would've been some longer, more challenging battles. The final boss fight did keep me on edge in a way I did not expect.
Secret of Mana is an unfinished game which shouldn't work as well as it does. It's not quite a masterpiece all on its own, but it lays the groundwork for superior games to come from Squaresoft and most likely had an influence on other developers of JRPGs in its day.
So take the sword from the stone, and fight alongside three punk kids to save the world from the ambitions of asshole adults!
