The Games That Shaped Me #1: The Lion King

 Do you remember the very first video game you ever played?  For many of us that probably seems so long ago that the actual answer has faded away.  We may gravitate towards the first game we ever owned to answer the question, as it's a pretty easy benchmark.  Or they might state that their first game was the first "noteworthy" title they ever played, a game that was particularly memorable not just to them but mayhaps to gaming history.  Statistically speaking, we can't ALL have started with a Mario game, y'all.  Some of us had to have started with, like, the Dora the Explorer game where she meets an ice princess. I do, however, actually remember the very first game I ever played.  It was probably like 1996 or 97, I was barely capable of conscious thought, and I was being babysat at my aunt and uncle's house, either by them or by my cousins.  Regardless, though, I was actually playing with my cousins at the time, and they had a Sega Genesis that they allowed me to toy around with in their room.  Now, there's no way that my cousins would've let me pick a game to play, I was like 3, but they thankfully knew exactly what I liked.  I was, after all, autistic, and so I was very very loud about the things that I liked.  And like most 90s kids, one of the things that I very vocally loved was the Lion King.

The Lion King was, for many years, my favorite movie.  I probably first saw it when I was not even old enough to register that I had, and it quickly became child Me's entire personality.  At least until a game we'll be talking about in a couple entries came along.  I was obsessed with the Lion King, I've been a major animal lover my entire life and the Lion King was probably THE piece of media that contributed to that love more than anything.  I would not stop talking about it.  I remember when I was a kid I would try and memorize the soundtrack lyrics so I could perform them for my half-siblings when they would be around.  Somewhere deep in my brother's memory banks is probably a haunting memory of the time I sat him down and sang the entire soundtrack, front to back, in the loudest, most 4 year old singing voice possible.  It was the origin of my love of animation, my love of musicals, even my love of Broadway.  I saw The Lion King stage show the very first time it came into my city on tour (I was probably too young) and it has been the stage show I have seen the most in my entire life.  I sadly had to throw out the merchandise my mom bought me back when I was a kid, actually, I had a watch I've been holding onto since I was a kid and the plastic band completely snapped in the last move without me realizing.

So as you can imagine the idea that I could play this movie that I loved so much was mind blowing to this younger version of me.  To be clear, I was too young to understand the concept of a "video game", I was like a toddler.  I probably assumed it was just another toy to play with.  If I ever made it past the first level, which this was long enough ago that there's very little chance I did, it was probably on the back of my cousins helping me.  But that didn't really matter to child me, I was just able to run around as my boy Simba in Pride Rock.  What more could one ask for?  There's something that is literally impossible to recapture about the experience of playing games when you're too young to understand them, when you just view them as toys.  It is perhaps the most magical point in your life when you're playing video games, that point where you are unable to beat the first level of a game and you don't even care because even that feels like an impossibly deep world to explore.  It was only important that I was able to play this thing that I loved so deeply.

Thankfully, my cousins also knew all the cheats so I was able to keep throwing myself into the first level without having to worry about my playtime being interrupted.  Granted, I was just throwing myself at the first obstacle over and over again, not really putting together how to win against it.  I think maybe I probably figure out eventually that you could hop on the first beetle you encounter?  There's no way I would've ever beaten that porcupine, though, I never would've figured out at like 3 or 4 that I could roar at it to flip it over.  But again, it doesn't matter, because I was just having fun.  It's weird, because I do have a memory of making it to "I Just Can't Wait to be King", the game's infamous second level where the gloves come off.  But I don't think I ever did, I've played this game so many times throughout my life trying to finish it that I'm probably misremembering.  But who knows, maybe I figured it out and my brain isn't lying to me.  Either way, the Lion King very quickly became my favorite "toy" when I visited my cousins, and we would play with it probably every time I went over there.  I have the sneaking suspicion that I played with their copy of Lion King for the Genesis more often than they did, my cousins were not really the type to play video games constantly, one did band which ate up most of his free time and the other was Mr. Popular so he was always running around.

However, my cousins were thankfully better at games than me, given the development of cognitive reasoning, so I did get to see the later stages of the game through watching them.  They were, in particular, very excited to show me the Stampede stage, the game's fourth stage and if my mind was already blown from being able to play my favorite movie, being able to play a scene from that movie basically as it was in the movie just took it to the next level.  This is actually the most distinctive memory I have of the Lion King, my cousin excitedly going "if you think the game is cool now, watch this" or something to that effect and then playing until they got to this level to see how wowed I was.  It was like the first time I remember connecting with a video game, seeing the Stampede level, and is probably my second earliest gaming related memory?  My first was one year when a different aunt and uncle were throwing a New Year's Party and all the kids sat around and took turns playing Donkey Kong Country but like, I was literally 2 I'm pretty sure so I didn't play and instead just looked at the funny Monkey on the TV screen and probably giggled.

Unfortunately, the Lion King would leave me not too long after these brief memories.  It was already 96 or 97 maybe, the PlayStation 1 was out, and my cousins would upgrade to that.  The Genesis would get relegated to a forgotten shelf of the entertainment center, then to a container in the basement, and then sold.  I would myself get my own game consoles and not even really know how to ask for this Lion King game I loved so dearly, not that I could play it even if I had it.  I had an N64, and it was on SNES/Genesis.  Those consoles had long since been sold, my older brothers becoming "too old" for video games.  But, it would re-enter my life in a big way in my late teens.  There was a brief time in the late 00s/early 10s where I flirted with being a Let's Player.  As previously mentioned on this blog, I was homeschooled and had a lot of free time because I would finish school in like half a day, and so a lot of that time was spent looking up gaming related content on the internet.  This series is going to reveal a lot of embarrassing pieces of content I used to enjoy, I can't wait.  But I got really into Let's Plays in particular, the original style not the Pewdiepie/Markiplier style that would become what the genre is associated with nowadays.  And I wanted to do them myself, it seemed fun.  So I downloaded Hypercam and never registered it, I asked my parents for a camera for Christmas not understanding that I needed a thing called a "Capture card" to get good gaming footage, and I struck out to make Let's Plays.

Now, I never finished a Let's Play.  I had a bad habit of getting way in over my head with a project and then realizing it a few episodes in and stopping.  I did a lot of "blind playthroughs" of old SNES RPGs, namely Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, only to immediately lose steam on them like 10 episodes in because I didn't know what I was doing and also the work was bad.  I save scummed on an emulator over and over and did things like "take phone calls in the middle of recording", which I also recorded post-commentary so there was no reason to leave that in but boy did I.  Embarrassing.  Anyways, my very first Let's Play on this channel (none of these videos exist anymore, kind of sad about that but you know, it happens) was the Lion King.  I figured it was only right, the very first game I ever played being the game that started my YouTube career.  Ignore I had done like 30 slideshow videos of fake Smash movesets.  I'll talk about my Smash project someday.  Anyways, I booted up Unregistered Hypercam 2 and got to recording the Lion King for... Super Nintendo?  Yeah, I don't know why, I forgot I played it originally on Genesis, I was like so certain that I played the SNES version when I was a toddler.  Which does not make sense because there's a game we'll be getting to later in this series that I also played at that cousin's house, and that is literally a first party SEGA title.  Memory lying to me, I swear.

I'm sure people who don't know the Lion King have so far been like "oh this is a lovely story, this is so cute".  And those that DO know the Lion King have been like "oh no.  OH NO."  The Lion King is one of the many very good licensed Disney games that came out during the third and fourth generations of video game consoles, but among that class it is probably the most infamous.  While the Capcom suite of Disney games tended to be a bit on the "tough but fair" side of things, the Lion King was made by the studio that took over after the Capcom license expired, Virgin Interactive.  Virgin tended to be way more cruel.  They were more directly under Disney's thumb with way less negotiating power in regards to game development and Disney was literally just telling them to make the game harder up until it was ready to launch.  You know that old theory that games were difficult back in the day because companies wanted to combat game rentals by inflating playtime?  That was literally what happened during the Virgin days, Disney was telling them to add more puzzles or kick up the difficulty over and over.  The infamous monkey puzzle in level 2 was added at the last minute, as Disney was mandating more playtime and they didn't have time to add more levels.

So I was basically doing a first playthrough of a very difficult game for the internet to judge me, using a mouse and keyboard because, again, I emulated everything.  I am not a PC gamer, even to this day I kind of play games on my PC while gritting my teeth a bit.  I did not grow up on mouse and keyboard, I do not feel comfortable doing it, and outside of management sims and point and clicks, if I HAVE to use a mouse and keyboard I am probably just not playing that game.  And with the Lion King, you have to be VERY precise.  It is a game that will have you jumping to tiny platforms that you can barely stand on, having to play it on a keyboard is absurd as a first time.  I was also too dumb to figure out how to hook up a controller to my PC, or how to even get one.  It was pre-Bluetooth so hooking up controllers to your PC was a process if you didn't have, like, a 360.  Which I didn't because I was hard into my Nintendo fanboy era when this was all happening.

It should not surprise you, I did not beat the game during this Let's Play.  Not only did I not beat the game, I had three entire episodes devoted to one platforming challenge.  I shouldn't have done that, in hindsight, especially since that was the end of the Let's Play, I should've just stopped it when it was clear I wasn't beating it after 30 minutes of trying.  However, I got shockingly far.  A combination of save scumming and me surprisingly locking in at some points (I actually had a good run of I Just Can't Wait to Be King, which is a huge difficult spike, I got that platforming down and only lost at the ostrich parts) meant that I made it all the way to Hakuna Matata.  Yeah, the platforming challenge was not the ostriches in I Just Can't Wait to be King or the tiny platforms in the Elephant Graveyard, it was the waterfall.  I just could not seem to make any actual progress up the waterfall, I was probably playing too safe and not trusting my jumps but it was just a war of attrition.  I would literally do a dozen jumps in a row only to end up at the exact same ledge I started from.  If you've played this game, you can relate, it is the canon experience.  Once again, I recorded this failure, edited it into videos, and uploaded it onto YouTube.  I just thought it would be okay because I sped up the footage and played Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" over it.

Unfortunately, the Lion King did not pan out at that time.  Again, none of my Let's Play games panned out, I got way in over my head and didn't make significant progress on any of them, except for Kingdom Hearts, which I got all the way to Neverland in.  That YouTube channel had to be nuked because I got everyone mad at me from trolling too hard and I was suffering the consequences.  It's a shame too, I kind of wish that work still existed even if it was truly terrible so people could laugh at how much of an idiot I was back then.  I would eventually return to that run and get a bit farther, I made it all the way to the very first adult Simba level which is honestly probably my favorite level in the game?  I love the vibes of it and I love their crunchy 16-bit rendition of Under the Stars as goofy as it sounds.  Unfortunately I would not beat it on that run-through either because I could not mash fast enough to defeat the final obstacle, a gauntlet of the Leopard enemies, and so I wasn't able to beat the level and move on.  I guess fast enough isn't the right term, it's way more of a rhythm thing, just mashing means you will die.  It doesn't help that the first adult Simba level also sees you lose all the upgrades you unlocked as young Simba so the safety net you've sewn for yourself is suddenly taken away.

I put the Lion King down for many years, likely 12?  That sounds right.  A dozen years passed where I just didn't really find the space for a playthrough of the Lion King.  Part of it was that I got really weird.  I bought into a lot of very weird ideas about emulation being a net negative, the value of physical gaming over digital, I grew an obsession with having my games "legally".  You know, just really anti-consumerist viewpoints which behave as if spending money is a moral imperative and blames those who lose out on their games for going digital as if it is a moral failing on their part rather than a call to action for better consumer protections.  You ever notice how the people who are the loudest about the value of ownership are the people who directly benefit from people purchasing old games "legally" because it drives up demand which means if they choose to sell their dragon hoard they can turn a major profit.  Funny that.  I digress.  I spent a lot of that time playing more modern games.  For a while I was big into my Nintendo fanboy era and so really I wasn't playing modern games, I played Arkham City like two years later than everyone else on a port with shoved in controller gimmicks to justify its existence.  But eventually I got a PS4 and started to fill in the gaps of what I had missed the past decade or so by being such a hardcore Nintendo guy.  That combined with the decreasing presence that retro gaming had in my circle meant that returning to the first game I ever played became lower and lower on the priority list.

That is until 2023, my very first year doing Game Clearing in roughly the same iteration I'm doing now.  There have been some nuances year-in and year-out, I initially didn't track my start and end dates and obviously I wasn't doing the blog in 2023, but more or less the way I do things now started in 2023.  My earlier game clearing vibe that year was very slapdash, just kind of picking random games from either my shelf or my NSO service and playing through them.  If I remember correctly something had happened that previously year that made me throw out my TV stand and so I was kind of without a TV.  So basically everything I played was on Switch or on my PC, and again I hate PC gaming and it is only after 3 years of doing it that I don't complain about it constantly when I do it.  And so, pulling random games off my shelf and out of my digital library, I decided it was finally time to tackle the Lion King, which I had gotten via the Disney Classic Games Collection at this point.  I hadn't yet decided I was cool with non-official emulation, 2023 was probably the year I was legitimately coming down from my "forever physical" mindset.

Now, I was admittedly a little hesitant to play the Lion King.  I always think I'm going to hate retro platformers more than I end up actually hating them.  In 2023 I had long since stopped being a big retro game guy, I don't hate retro games now but I'm very touch and go about them.  Like with all things, my opinions on them are always evolving and are very much on a case-by-case basis.  Sometimes I love a game I would probably otherwise hate (Gunstar Heroes) just because it hit me at the right time, you know?  But I have played enough classic platformers to know that usually the harder ones don't do a lot for me.  I tend to find excessive difficulty boring, I acknowledge its importance in the retro game space especially and, don't get me wrong, I totally understand why other people find this compelling.  I get the gameplay loop of hitting a wall and wanting to tear it down and that driving you.  But revisiting older games nowadays for me can be very hard, especially if the game is very hard.  The Lion King, of course, is infamously hard, with its brutality being one of the first things anyone knows about it.  So I went into this playthrough a bit cautious, ready to have my heart broken.

Y'all, I love the Lion King.  I was fully surprised by how truly good this game is.  Now, mind you, I'm biased.  This is an adaptation of one of my favorite movies of all time, a movie that was my literal favorite for the first 16 years of my life until I saw Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes.  Yeah, I know, terrible movie to overtake The Lion King, what can I say.  As well, I obviously have a history with the Lion King, this game has been an important fixture of my life, but that doesn't really mean anything.  One of the biggest posts on this blog is literally me talking about how, despite a long history with the game "Banjo-Kazooie", I ended up hating it.  Like, I was assuming, going into it, that the Lion King would probably just be a very mid platformer that I would be glad I played but kind of shrug off ultimately.  One of the many MANY games I play every year and go "well, you know.  It's alright."  But no, I adored the Lion King, I thought it was great.

A pretty big reason is admittedly how effectively it captures the style and tone of the movie.  It beautifully recaptures the style of some of the most iconic scenes in the original film, from the bright, colorful visuals of "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" creating this super fun and kind of trippy level that's a visual showcase; to the more melancholic look and tone of something like Simba running through the jungle chasing Rafiki.  It's funny, in my memory the film looks way more like the former, like that's the look I associate with the Lion King.  Very vibrant, very colorful, very light.  But playing through the game, it really hit me how melancholic a lot of that film is.  You spend way more of that game in levels with muted color palettes and kind of solemn music.  That's correct, of course, that is what the film is.  It's not a happy film, it's very grand and epic and sad.  I just find it amusing how my memory latched onto the moments of levity just because I saw it when I was so young.  But the game is just such a wonderful recapture of the movie, at some points it even looks like actual movie animation.  Virgin Interactive was good at that, their Aladdin game on the Genesis is largely considered the better version because it effectively recaptures the flow of the movie in a way that the Capcom game doesn't.

But also, the Lion King is just a fun platformer.  Its reputation as an exceptionally difficult game is totally justified, don't get me wrong, it is a very difficult game.  I will fully admit I had to use the rewind and save state functionality contained within the collection numerous times, I am very bad at most games and as such try to use every tool available to me to get through.  But it's also just incredibly fun.  Like the platforming is rough and very precise but it's very satisfying, the amount of secrets hidden in each level make them fun to test different paths in, when you finally unlock combat in the later sections it becomes a very fun sort of hack-and-slash.  It's just a very fun game, I don't know if it is necessarily a "must-play" game in the SNES library anymore, it certainly was at a time.  It is very difficult and can be very frustrating and I think without the obvious connection that you might have to the source material and/or an appreciation for retro platformers, the Lion King probably isn't worth playing.  But truly, I adore it.

And so the first story ends.  The shadow that the first game I ever played cast over me finally dissipating.  But there will be more stories to tell, more games to explore.  I really want to turn this into an ongoing series, I feel like it'd be nice to go over my gaming history in this way.  I hope you all enjoyed this one, and stay tuned for the next entry, where we get a bit more aquatic with it.

Secret of Mana - A Gaming Diary

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