Review:
I will be honest with you before I begin this review: I did not finish Secret of Mana. Moreover, not only did I not finish Secret of Mana, I didn't get close enough to finishing it to where I can give a full view of the game necessarily like I could with, say, Minish Cap where I played the entire game up to the final boss and then it glitched out. If that makes you feel as though my opinions on the game are to be disregarded, I understand. I know it can be seen as unfair to review a game in an official capacity without properly finishing it. That being said, I think I got enough of a view of Secret of Mana to where I know if I had continued it would've been roughly this score.
Secret of Mana is a game that starts out with a lot of promise. It has a very interesting combat system, taking a lot of gameplay notes from the Zelda series and evolving it to be more of an RPG. It has excellent music, with some truly beautiful and mystical tunes. It's a game with a lot of potential to be truly something special. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it loses its steam pretty early on. I just feel like the game is exceptionally poorly designed. Enemies and bosses are designed in such a way to where stunlocks are exceedingly common. The combat system is very poorly balanced, with magic, once obtained, completely invalidating the complex weapon proficiency mechanic the game is built around. Grinding is excessive, shockingly so for what is otherwise seemingly intending to be a beginner friendly RPG with its fairy-tale story and multiplayer capabilities. The AI is just truly awful, just some of the worst I've ever seen in an action-RPG. And the plot is just nothing, made moreso nothing by the irreverent localization where characters are excessively jokey. I didn't have NO fun with Secret of Mana, but I played for 10 hours and I was mostly pretty bored. One of the easiest DNF's of my life. 4.5/10
Diary:
1/13/26
I have owned Secret of Mana for a very long time. I feel like I start all these diaries with some paragraph about how this game was a long time coming now, it's almost as if a key feature of my Game Clearing is that I'm filling in gaps in my gaming history. But legitimately, I have owned Secret of Mana for like a decade and a half at this point. I had a cousin who knew I liked retro video games and just had a Super Nintendo sitting in the back of her car forever so she gave it to me. I, unfortunately, didn't get a ton out of that Super Nintendo because I'm like. Poor. So any gaming money I had usually went to buying new games. But I did manage to amass a few Super Nintendo games from going to retro game stores and conventions and stuff. One of those games was Secret of Mana. I've always heard really great things about Secret of Mana, it ranks among the greatest SNES games and the greatest games of all time, so I was excited to play it. But hooking up a SNES is inconvenient in basically any setup I do and so it was always on the backburner. Luckily, Square Enix released the Collection of Mana, a much easier way of playing the game, so now I have the opportunity to do so!
I'm really intrigued by Secret of Mana's combat. I knew going into this that Secret of Mana was an ARPG instead of a more traditional turn-based RPG, which makes it kind of an outlier in the SNES RPG boon. But I wasn't expecting its combat to be so reminiscent of Zelda? Like that's kind of what Secret of Mana feels like so far, a Zelda game where it continued to delve deeper into the RPG elements instead of stepping away from them more and more. But it also enhances the Zelda style of combat a whole lot. Like you can do combos where you follow up moves with other attacks with attacks to either close in gaps or do powerful attacks. I don't know how this happens, mind. It kind of seems to happen at random, like. I think the game is doing a bunch of calculations that determine whether the player does a follow up. Dodging also seems to happen at random, though I do like that if you attack mid dodge you appear to always land a critical. It's a very paced combat system that I find very compelling, even if I don't fully understand it.
I also enjoy that there aren't any weapon limitations. Every party member can seemingly use every weapon and, if anything, you're encouraged to do so. Every character has weapon proficiency levels that you level up as you use your weapons. I don't exactly know what these do yet either, the person who has the highest level in the fist weapons still appears to miss most of her attacks, but I have to assume that the higher the proficiency, the strong you will be with the weapon and the less likely you will be to whiff attacks. Which is, unfortunately, a high likelihood currently. The first dungeon had so many slime enemies that were really hard to take down as I kept missing attacks and when one of them fell, the other slimes would clone themselves, it's ridiculous. Neither one of the boss fights I've done so far took that long, I swear.
Speaking of boss fights, that's been the weak point of combat so far. Especially the first boss, which is meant to be a tutorial for boss fights in this system. It's meant to be a fairly fast paced but not unreasonable boss that you cannot truly die to so you can learn how this combat system really works: much like a Zelda boss you memorize patterns, wait for an opening and retreat. In theory, great. In practice, man, this boss sucks. His attacks come out way too quickly, he's incredibly large for the area, some of his attacks are unavoidable despite this being a tutorial on how to play bosses in this game. It's a very poorly designed fight in my opinion that only isn't a problematic wall because the game gives you infinite revives. The second boss is much better, feeling way more like what I think they wanted out of the bosses, a boss that you wait for an opening, hit a couple times, and then go back to dodging. But it's still not great, sadly.
I have concerns about the party AI in this game. I'm not going to say it's bad yet, I grew up with Kingdom Hearts 1, a game that a lot of people will tell you has bad party AI when really they just didn't explore the menus enough to find out how to make Donald and Goofy do what they wanted them to do. But I do not understand the way to make the AI to do what I want it to do. It's like, on an Alignment grid? You have four different extremes, two on each axis, and they control whether or not your AI rushes forward or plays cautiously on one axis and whether or not they attack or defend on the other. It's intuitive in theory but in practice it feels like the AI will either rush in recklessly, draining their own HP to comical degrees to get a single hit in, or they will play too cautiously and just not do anything in a fight. I'm sure I'll learn how this works as I play around with it more but man, I already wish I had someone to play with. It would make this whole thing a lot easier.
Speaking of things that have a learning curve: the menu in this game. I think I'm getting the hang of it now but at first, nah man. I hated this menu. It's like a weird ring menu that pops up surrounding the character you're trying to view the stats and change the equipment of, but because the characters are typically standing together it's difficult to parse whose menu I'm currently on. Also the fact that it's not immediately apparent how to use items or equip weapons because they aren't just on the ring menu? Bonkers. Like I said, I'm getting the hang of it though and even though I'll probably never be the biggest fan of the menu, it'll probably become natural for me in time, y'know. Having an entire option to change the window AND the controls on every menu but not an item menu or weapons menu though? Absurd. What are you doing?
So, I'm a little concerned at this point that the diary I'm currently writing is going to get thrown out. If you're reading this, hi, I'm not editing this if this makes it to a blog post the point is to be genuine. The main reason being that the way I tend to structure these things, especially when it comes to RPGs, is that I talk about the gameplay at the start to give a baseline and then most of my updates are progress related as they relate to plot beats. As I finish more of the plot of the game I update the blog based on that information. Secret of Mana is already both very fast paced, with plot beats happening rapid fire one after another with no clear plot arcs happening to give the player a moment to breathe, but also very gameplay focused. You'll show up to a place, receive an objective, then immediately get back to the wilderness to fight monsters until you reach said objective. It's not a bad structure, I have been critical of games that take too long to get through the plot points so I can just play, but it's a bad structure for what I'm doing here. So, we'll see if you ever read this, I guess, lol.
The soundtrack to this game is amazing though. I'm particularly impressed by how mystical and otherworldly some tracks feel so far. It reminds me a lot of the works of Joe Hisaishi, that sort of magical ethereal Ghibli sound to it. The more fun tracks I've heard so far are great too, don't get me wrong, however the real high point has been the more solemn stuff. The title theme for Secret of Mana, Fear of the Heavens, is such a magical piece of music, it's immediately become one of my favorite RPG intro themes. I Won't Forget, the song that plays when you're talking to the villagers after the first boss, is a solemn and sad piece that really resonates with me. But the moment I truly knew I loved the Secret of Mana soundtrack was when I heard the track Spirit of the Night. Spirit of the Night is the track that plays when the main character is being exiled from the village and his backstory is being told to the audience, and even if it's a pretty simple loop, it's such a beautiful and heartbreaking piece. I love it so much. This game, if nothing else, already has an A+ soundtrack.
1/15/26
Y'all, I don't think I like this game. I played through three, maybe three and a half more hours and like. I don't think I'm vibing with this game. I apologize, normally I like to balance things I like about the game with my criticisms but I think the following is just going to be complaining about this game. While hours 1-3 showed a lot of promise, with an interesting combat system and an amazing soundtrack carrying the work. It was a little rough around the edges, sure, definitely had some pain spots, but it showed a lot of potential. Hours 4-7 though were just miserable. It's like every worry I had in the first few hours came to pass in this second play session. I'm so sad because like, when a game is as important or well-loved as Secret of Mana, when you dislike it, it just feels bad you know. It feels like you're walking into an art museum and looking at a painting that is a masterpiece and just seeing a canvas with paint on it.
I got magic in this section. So, there are two big things about magic that kind of rub me the wrong way. The first is that magic makes you realize how much the game wants you to grind. It's absurd. If you want your magic to be upkept at a decent pace so it isn't stuck at level 1 all the time, you will be stuck casting spells at least dozen times in order to gain one level. The pace of the game slows to a crawl after getting magic as you try and fail to understand the way magic levels up. I'm told by a walkthrough, fwiw, that the way magic levels up is that, with each use, it goes up 9 - the element's current level. I.e., each cast of level 0 Ice magic will go up 9 exp, causing you to have to cast said magic 12 times before it reaches 100 EXP, the amount needed, and goes up a level. So already we are in a situation where magic needs to be grinded out in excessive amounts.
The second problem I have with magic is how unbalanced it is. It is no secret that magic tends to be the more powerful option for your RPG party, a necessary exchange for you to even consider using it in the face of its sometimes steep cost. But Secret of Mana's magic is so ridiculous that it completely invalidates the entire rest of the combat system? Yeah, that combat system I was actually really excited about, no reason to ever mess with any of that anymore. Even at level 0, the magic is already so strong that it'll probably one or two shot most regular enemies and will take out bosses within a few turns. Or if you want to just AOE everything, magic can do that too, because for no additional cost you're allowed to cast spells on all your enemies at once with just a minor damage reduction. This may seem like a bonus to some, and I'm sure it is how a lot of people made quick work of this game once they figured it out, but I actually don't like it. I don't like that the systems inherent in the game Like, glaring game design issues are not something I'm often willing to overlook even if they directly benefit me. I want to like the weapons systems and the core combat of the game, but there's no reason to engage with any of it when one of the characters can just burn through enemies in a single turn with magic spamming.
I am now officially going to say that the AI is terrible. If you give your party members a melee weapon and they are AI controlled, they are simply useless. They will endlessly charge at an enemy in a direct path only to get up close to the enemy and not do ANYTHING. They are constantly getting caught on walls and stuck behind things as you traverse areas, which is a problem because your party has to all be together to move about the land. Secret of Mana is, perhaps, the earliest instance of a local co-op game being single screen and having that thing where players can no longer move if they're too far apart from each other. So if a party member is stuck, you are also stuck, and need to figure out how to get them to reunite with the rest of the party before you can proceed. The party member AI is completely unhelpful and I think it's to the detriment of this game, I have to imagine a lot of the people who really love Secret of Mana had someone to play with to make this problem far more bearable. It's very annoying playing this game with two AI controlled party members.
Stunlocking is just so common in this game. Like, this is going to vary by player, I've seen a lot of people be like "I've never been stunlocked playing Secret of Mana". But it seems like in any dungeon, it becomes exceedingly easy for enemies to get you in a corner and hit you, which then stuns you for a while, only for another enemy to come up and hit you again, stunning you again, and then those two enemies are hitting you in just the right patterns to where you can never move until your allies manage to get one of them off you. I feel like the majority of the situations I've been put in where I've been in danger of dying have been, exclusively, because of stunlocking. Especially in boss fights, there are so many bosses that can just put you in a stunlock because their cool down is exactly as long as you're stunned for. And what's worse is that sometimes bosses have access to the "unconscious" condition, which knocks you down for even longer periods of time, so not only can they stunlock you, their ability to stunlock you does not require them to constantly attack you.
That bit in the first section where I was like "the game was teaching you how to fight bosses and while it did a poor job of it, you kind of get what they're going for". Yeah so that was a lie. Bosses in Secret of Mana are just obnoxious. They do not have noticeable patterns for you to learn and counter because their moves are thrown out faster than you can respond to them. They don't really have wind up or cooldown animations, they just throw out attacks like it's nothing. It's not impossible to respond but it is overly difficult given how early in this game this is. Moreover, every boss in this game has just an absurd number of magic attacks? And magic is unavoidable. So really it doesn't matter if you try to play ball or not, the game is just going to lock you into a boss chain casting magic over and over anyways and there's nothing really you can do about it unless you want to chain cast magic too. The once promising combat system is frustrating and boring and it's really drained my want to play this game.
I also just don't really like the characters or the story. In part it's because of the localization, I'm usually a defender of 90s era Square localizations, I think that they are more funny than detrimental to the work. Secret of Mana though is a very bad instance of this, it's light hearted to a fault. Character personalities are so obnoxiously jokey that key moments of the story just do not land due to how unserious the characters actually are. But also the story just isn't gripping, it's utilitarian to a fault. It's very "go here, get a plot beat, go somewhere else, get a plot beat". It's like getting a Wikipedia summary of the plot of Secret of Mana, there's nothing compelling here, nothing that's gripping me, it's the hardtack of stories. Just there to provide sustenance without any flavor. I want to give this game one more play session, see if it hits me in the next few hours but like. I don't like the gameplay, I don't like the story, I don't like the characters, so far the only thing I like is the music. I think this might be a DNF, y'all. I think Secret of Mana might be something I stop playing early because I just do not think this game is good at all. I am however still interested in playing Trials of Mana as I've heard that game is way better so this probably won't be the last time you see a Mana game on this blog regardless!
1/17/26
So, I want to start this next section by saying that I did enjoy this game a little more during this next part. I did make the decision, ultimately, to end my playthrough here, I was not having a great time of Secret of Mana, I have too many problems with the game already. But I think by accepting that this game wasn't my thing and had all these pretty glaring problems, I just kind of let myself chill, you know? Like, I still didn't like the game but now that I knew what game I was playing, I was able to engage with it better. It was to the point where I finished my play session and was like "do I actually want to continue this" and then I was like "well, I don't LIKE the game, I've just accepted how to play it". So my contempt for Secret of Mana from the previous section has dulled considerably, it's a game I'm more indifferent on now.
That being said like, 1/3 of what I did last night was just grinding up spells. This part of the game is so annoying, like. I will never understand why people have this deep love of grinding in RPGs. I still see people complaining that Pokemon is a lesser product because you don't have to spend like 15 hours of your 40 hour playtime just fighting random wild Pokemon to grind up. I feel like especially in the RPG fanbase, there's way too much reverence given to tradition, like, "this is the way things have always been so this is the way things always should be forever". I digress. It is very deflating how, in this game, it seems like each time you unlock new magic you are effectively forced to grind.
Magic is paramount in this game, having it up as high as you can get it is how you are going to progress because the actual combat is ineffective. As you progress, more and more enemies have punishingly high evasion stats, and some of them have ridiculous Defense stats on top of that so even if you do hit them, it does 0. So you just gotta cast magic and hope for the best! I'm honestly surprised how stingy this game is with MP because of how central magic is to combat? Like, where I ended off, if I were to fight every enemy and use magic since the game is telling me "hey, magic is like the only worthwhile thing in combat, so just use it", I'd be running out of magic every screen. I have to heal multiple times each grinding session, it's legitimately absurd. Secret of Mana's game design sure is something, y'all.
I did like the area I got to in this section, though. I made it out of the "starting area" which constituted 8 hours of the playthrough, sure, and headed north into the world proper. And the first introduction to the world outside of the little starting area was a fae woods area, an enchanted forest which seems to stretch forever. It's one of those areas that is all four seasons at once and you have to navigate the seasons in a specific order to progress. Also, there are Moogles!!! I knew there were Moogles before, one of the statuses in this game that is way too common to run into is the "Moogle" status where you just turn into a Moogle and can do nothing for a little while but run away. This is different from the balloon status where you can do nothing and are stuck in place but have access to your menu, and the unconscious status where you can do nothing but cannot move. Or the shrink status where you can do nothing but can run away but also you're tiny!!! The latter status also doesn't go away by itself. Anyways, the fae woods were a cool area and I at least liked to look at them even if I was kind of over playing the game by that point.
Me deciding not to finish Secret of Mana is not indicative of the game being unfinishable. I feel like this game is absolutely someone's game and, if I maybe was playing it with a friend or something and committing to a full playthrough like that, I would be more positive on this game. Like I said at the beginning, I kind of just accepted that Secret of Mana was like this for this play session and had a better time. If I really wanted to, I could commit to finishing it and, who knows, maybe I will someday. Maybe I'll be bored and go "I should finish this game". But while I thought that maybe I could finish this game, I realized that I would be finishing Secret of Mana for no other purpose than to check off the game on my backlog. I do not enjoy it and I probably gave it more time than it deserved by even playing up to the 10 hour mark. It's one of those games where I wonder if it's more influential than it is good, you know. Secret of Mana is a very early action-role-playing game and it's one of if not the first of its specific kind, a game trying to marry JRPG with action elements. But it's kind of shoddy work in my opinion, I do not think it has aged well and I don't really like it outside of its cultural relevance and its music. I don't know how it's persisted in the discussion of the best SNES games of all time especially, that is a stacked console library and this is not there. 4.5/10
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