SNES

Secret of Mana

Trivia

It was #40 in FLUX Magazine's (Issue #4) Top 100 Video Games of All-Time.

It was named Role-Playing Game of the Year in the 1993 GamePro Editors' Choice Awards (Vol. 6, Issue 2)

One of the first games announced for the then-announced CD-ROM addon for the SNES. Nintendo eventually gave up trying to get the peripheral off the ground after the deal with Phillips to make the drive fell flat. Square eventually released a tooled-down version, which pushed the SNES hardware constantly (hence the slowdown and lack of multiple enemies onscreen), and overall left Square bitter for having to go through the process of downgrading its game. This probably was one of the reasons Square decided to bail on Nintendo (and its then-upcoming N64 console) and take its multimillion seller, Final Fantasy VII, with it (which was first announced for the N64).

Ironically, Square signed the deal to bring the game to the PlayStation with Sony, which was the original partner for the SNES CD drive, but was publicly stabbed in the back by Nintendo with the Phillips deal. The CD drive technology that Sony had been working on for the SNES, was then used to create the PlayStation itself.

Secret of Mana was voted #77 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Jun 29, 2004.

Due to technical limitations, only three enemies can ever be on the screen at one time. Sneaky players can use this to their advantage and keep 'easy' enemies alive to block the spawning of more powerful ones. The merchant cat Neko, is also affected by this and may not always appear during busy combat.

The Slime bosses are the trickiest enemies in the game, not because they're difficult, but because they're so buggy. When fighting one of these bosses it's possible to slow the framerate to a crawl, freeze the game or in extreme cases, wipe the contents from your saved battery backup.

Secret of Mana is quite possibly the first RPG game to support 3 Players. It is certainly the only one on SNES that does (along with it's sequel, which was never officially translated). A multitap is required for the third player.

The Hero in Secret of Mana bears an almost identical appearence to the Hero in another Squaresoft title, Chrono Trigger

Contributed by MaiZure (113) on Feb 19, 2003.