Secret of Mana

Originally posted on Facebook on 7 June 2021 

Just finished Secret of Mana for the first time.

I'm glad I finally know what this game is about, since it makes frequent appearances on peoples' "Top RPGs" lists. Playing this one felt overdue for me.

Overall, I had a good time. I like the world, the different weapons, and the general progression. The story is fine, and it's cool how there are a ton of boss fights in this game. Overall, it is a good game. 

...But I'm not enamoured by it.

It's no Chrono Trigger, that's for sure. I personally wouldn't want to play this one again any time soon.

It just felt a little too awkward to play - especially during combat.... and there is a LOT of combat in this game.

The combat in this game feels so clumsy and imprecise to me. My biggest problem is that it's really difficult to know whether your regular attacks will land or not.

The game really doesn't give any feedback as to why my attack didn't land. To me the player, I swing my weapon at the enemy, and it very often looks like it just does nothing at all. 

So from what I can tell, there are several reasons as to why an attack might not hit:

- The enemy avoided it using their evasion stat

- The enemy was still stunned from a previous attack and is therefore immune to damage

- The enemy just started casting a spell and is therefore immune to damage

- I didn't quite align myself with the enemy properly, so the attack just plain missed.

But the game does a poor job at actually showing any of this. The monster's sprite doesn't change, there's no "MISS" text, there's no sprite flickering when it is invulnerable, or anything useful like that. it literally just looks like my attack did absolutely nothing, despite the fact that the sword slash did indeed overlap the enemy's body. It really doesn't feel great to me.

What makes this worse is that your weapons need time to charge. So you can't just attack whenever you want, you have to wait for your gauges to refill. So a missed attack is also a missed opportunity - and if you've been charging for a long time, readying a huge attack, it really does feel awful when it just doesn't connect for whatever reason, after spending so long charging it.

There were some other annoyances I had with the game that prevented me from truly feeling "comfortable" within the game's world.

The most annoying problem to me is that the screen only scrolls when you're very close to the edge. I know they did this so that you could move all around the battlefield without the screen zigzagging all over the place, but outside of battle it really feels awful.

The game already has distinct "battle" and "non-battle" areas anyway, since your characters put away their weapons and aren't able to attack while in towns etc. Couldn't they have also made the camera behave normally while in a non-battle area? I found exploring the towns and houses and finding NPCs much more annoying than it really should have been, just because the screen view was so limited.

The other thing I'm not a huge fan of is the menu system. I'm okay with consumables, spells, and weapons using the game's unique ring-menu system, but having to also use this ring menu to find the equip, stats, and weapon-level screens just feels annoying, especially since the START button doesn't actually do anything at all. Could they have not made START a shortcut to the stats screen? 

Secret of Mana is okay. I liked it enough to play through to the end. It was enjoyable to level up and raise weapon levels and find the upgrade orbs and all that.

But I don't really see it as a masterpiece like so many people online seem to do. The main combat mechanics just feel too loose and too difficult to discern what I'm looking at. And outside of the combat, the game doesn't really do anything extraordinary with its world or story.