‘Secret of Mana’ review: Can't capture that old-school magic
If you’re going to remake a venerated video game, then for god’s sake, do it right.
For the 25th anniversary of “Secret of Mana,” developer Square Enix has created a 3D released of the title for Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Valve’s Steam service. Unfortunately, it fails to capture the same old-school magic that made the original a beloved classic.
“Secret of Mana’s” charming plot was never very complicated, which was part of its appeal when it arrived in 1993 — a gaming scene dominated then by games like “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Contra III: The Alien Wars.”
Unlike many of its role-playing contemporaries at the time, which were downright Tolkien-esque in their storytelling ambitions, “Secret of Mana” kept it simple. You follow a goofy trio of odd-duck characters — Randi, Primm and Popoi — as they combat an evil empire trying to resurrect a giant floating battleship called the Mana Fortress, powered by the magical energy of mana.
Unfortunately, the jump to 3D wasn’t a smooth, or memorable, one. The original game eked out much of its charm from a cute and memorable virtual world stitched together by vibrant 2D pixels. The remake offers equally vivid colors, but they’re offset by occasionally blurry textures and oversized, bobblehead characters whose mouths don’t move, even during conversations.
It’s not a deal breaker, but the 3D characters lack the charm of their pixel-based counterparts, which compensated for the technological limitations of the Super Nintendo console with simple, yet effective animations that still charm to this day.
The combat in Secret of Mana is also a mixed bag. One of the original’s best features was that combat occurred in real-time: instead of waiting your turn to attack as you did in those early “Final Fantasy” games, you could hack and slash away as you saw fit.
Again, that’s still the same case here, but combat is actually harder in some cases. Characters no longer have to attack in the four cardinal directions — north, south, east, west — like they once did. Now, you can attack in any direction, even diagonally.
That sounds like a step up from the 1993 classic in theory, but in practice, I found it harder sometimes to line up my attacks. It also transformed several areas in the game that were previously fine to get through into agonizing slogs.
Just one-and-a-half hours in the game, I stumbled upon the fog-ridden Haunted Forest. Over the course of an hour, I died over 20 times as dozens of oversized chipmunk archers slung arrows my way in rapid succession from every angle. That’s not just challenging gameplay — that’s mediocre game design.