Secret of Mana

aka: Seiken Densetsu 2
Moby ID: 6645
SNES Specs
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Description official descriptions

Long ago, people lived in harmony with the natural world and used the power of Mana to help their nations grow. But when evil forces took control of the Mana Fortress, seeking to use it to conquer the world, a terrible war began which destroyed much of civilization but brought peace to the world once more. Over the long years, the events of the past became but legends to the new generations of humans. But history repeats itself...

One day while exploring a forbidden valley near his village, a young boy finds a rusty sword stuck in a stone. He does not realize that this is the Mana sword of legend, used in the great war of the past. By drawing the sword, the boy unwittingly summons hordes of monsters, and is expelled from his village for breaking the ancient taboo. A mysterious knight Jema who is passing through the area recognizes the sword and gives him instructions for the future. First, he must repair the sword, and then, with its help, take control of the Mana seeds which can be found hidden around the world to prevent them from falling into evil hands.

Secret of Mana is an action RPG, featuring real-time hack-and-slash style combat, in which up to two computer-controlled companions can accompany you. The protagonist has a stamina gauge: the more stamina he has, the more powerful his strike is. The player also has access to a growing arsenal of spells with various effects. It is possible to upgrade weapons, armor, and magic to higher levels.

Spellings

  • č–å‰£ä¼čŖ¬ļ¼’ - Japanese spelling

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Credits (SNES version)

63 People · View all

Executive Producers
Producer, Concept / System Design, Scenario Message Data
Director, Chief Game Design, Animation / Monster Design
Battle System Design, Monster Logistics
Map System Design / Data
Map Data
Lead Programming
Monster Control Programming
Boss Monster Programming
Message Programming
"Ring" Menu Programming
Calculation Programming
Sound Programming
Demo Programming
Chief Map Graphic Design
Map Graphic Design
World Map Graphic Design
Map Design
Player Character Design
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 50 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 170 ratings with 6 reviews)

A great early Action RPG

The Good
Aside from the highly arbitrary statement of "This is my favorite SNES Action RPG," there a lot of good things about Secret of Mana. It's storyline is well-written, though the script is quite plain, since a lack of cartridge memory caused much of it to be stripped down in the English localization. The graphics are bright and colorful, and show what the SNES was capable of at the time. The music is nice and upbeat, but not too "out there" to the point where it takes away from the game's underlying dark atmosphere. The gameplay is fun and fast-paced, making level grinding actually enjoyable, for once, and the addition of multiplayer is even better!

The Bad
While I truly love this game, there are a few problems that players make come across while playing it. First and foremost, the AI in this game is a bit primitive, and often causes the party members you aren't playing as to get themselves in fatal situations. Bugs are also plentiful, especially when it comes to sprite interactions and collision detection (that's the only term I can associate the phenomenon with). And finally, some players make not like the "Ring Menu" system in the game. Personally, I found this feature rather convenient, but many players who are used to a generic menu system find it a nuisance.

The Bottom Line
Secret of Mana is a great Action RPG, and should be played by anyone interested in RPGs from the 16-bit era. With nice aesthetic touches, a great plot, and multiplayer, it really offers a lot of fun for a 16 Megabit game. I highly recommend trying it out, and for those of you who never owned an SNES, I urge you to stop using emulators and buy this game on the Virtual Console.

SNES · by Idkbutlike2 (18) · 2010

Great Game, one of the best

The Good
Many spells, the magic experience, and attack experience scale, it goes up in level as you use it more. The fact you do not have to buy weapons again and again, you forge them, and you cast magic on your weapon when necessary. A lot of imagination went into this game.

The Bad
Starts off a bit boring, you are in the same area for the first 20% of the game (Pandora realm). "The BIG BUG" as some people describe it is, once you get hit, if the monster keeps attacking, you cant hit him back, and you die. Some monsters/bosses repeated, just in a different element (ie. Fire Gigas, Frost Gigas, Thunder Gigas).

The Bottom Line
A must play for any RPG Fan, especially if you are into the action games as well as RPGs.

SNES · by Scott G (765) · 2004

Edible at best.

The Good
Very beautiful looking.

Real-time combat is preferable over the regular turn-based systems.

Action is fast, but also has some depth to it.

Having companions is kind of nice.

The Bad
Mana sword is replaced fast.

Hits often don't register.

Multiple enemies can fuck your shit up.

Chests more often than not contain traps.

FREAKING EVERYTHING does poison damage.

The Bottom Line
Story

I have yet to play Secret of Mana completely and this is more of a first-impressions review than an actual final product, but so far I am not very impressed with the game. After we type in a name for our characters we get to see a little cut-scene showing off some of the areas we get to see in the future. Through text-boxes throughout this scene we are told that the gods gave people magic, but people abused it and made weapons out of it. The gods got angry with the Humans and created monsters to battle it out against the weapons the people created, eventually resulting in the human fortress been destroyed by a hero with a so-called ā€œMana Swordā€. Both then disappearedā€¦ until the player takes over control. As gameplay starts we find ourselves in a forest where we run into the legendary Mana Sword by pure coincidence, upon pulling it (as instructed) though, the town is besieged my monsters that the sword protected it against.

The hero, in my case ā€œSamā€, is then banished from the village because he pulled the sword. This starts an epic journey againstā€¦ I have no idea. People keep telling me that I should fight the monsters and save humanity, but if the monsters are attacking me, then arenā€™t I provoking the gods? Where is the character on the morality scale? The story doesnā€™t have much impact, especially when the legendary mana-sword gets outdated REALLY fast. You use it to kill a few rabbits, but at the very first area you are told to visit you receive a spear that does more damage and has longer range. ā€œAnd thus the mana-sword disappeared forever into the dark depths of Samā€™s backpack. Until the day Pixelspeech figures out how to sell itemsā€, doesnā€™t sound too epic to me. Itā€™s just incredibly silly and considering the rather serious tone of the game, it feels very out-of-place. There is a lot of dialogue too, which is odd for a SNES game, but I didnā€™t mind that too much. It only got annoying then they started throwing options at me, what is the point? The game is very linear, so giving me dialogue options is just for show-off.

Gameplay

ā€œBut hey, Super Nintendo games are all about the gameplay right? Just look at Super Metroid and Mario World, those have very little story and are still awesome, right?ā€ Yes, that much is certainly true, but Iā€™m not too fond of the gameplay either. Secret of Mana is a very combat-heavy game, which I personally enjoy since it balances well with the loads of text we have to read in calmer sections of the game. However, the combat is sticky at best and insanely frustrating at worst. You canā€™t just spam attacks all the time, there is a small bar at the bottom of the screen that depletes every time you hit something and then regenerates. If you land a hit when the bar is full, then you will do regular damage or critical hits, but any sooner and you do minimal damage. Itā€™s a clever system, but every single hit stuns an enemy (or you for that matter), giving you exactly the right amount of time to wait for the bar. This takes all the pacing out of the fight, but it only gets frustrating when you try to strike an enemy afterwards and the terrible hit-detection doesnā€™t register your hit. Here is a pro-tip: NEVER rush your attack, wait for an enemy to stand up and then hit him. If they are still doing their animation to stand up, then they are immune to all attacks for like two seconds.

To make matters worse: The combat is also incredibly difficult. Every single hit sends you flying, just like the enemies do. If there is more than one enemy fighting you though, then they just gang up on you and leave you with no chance to ever get up. Getting hit just once when there are two enemies or more is pretty much an instant-kill. The game is also big on traps and poison-damage, which became clear to me when I realized I had seen seven different types of enemies so far and five of them did poison damage to me. The first boss you run into also has a magic attack that you canā€™t dodge, which is already unfair when you use it for a final boss and in the first dungeon of the game you run into bats that can stun you any time they want, which is also impossible to dodge. The aforementioned traps are also ridiculous, you see, there is a random chance enemies drop chests for you to loot after killing them. Now, I complained in my review of Resident Evil 4 that there we like five boxes that throughout the entire game that contained snakes, but this is far worse. Every single chest that drops has like a 50% chance to have a trap, which can do poison damage too! I am not even exaggerating, throughout the six hours of play I have undergone so far, I have looted 6 chests with actual items inside and 9 that had traps!

Presentation

I have done a lot of complaining so far, so letā€™s focus on something more enjoyable for a while. The presentation in this game is nothing short of stunning. After the cut-scene at the start of the game we see a quick shot of the camera flying over the world map, which is quite amazing for games this old. You also get to see a similar shot every time you use one of the cannon-travelling systems, you got to love public transport sometimes. The game is also consistently very colorful and even the dark caves I ran into were at least somewhat interesting. That is mostly thanks to the cutesy design on the enemies, which I suppose is somewhat strange to see in a game that pushes the dramatic story so much, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Enemies too are very colorful and some very simple choices made even the basic enemies enjoyable. I have lost count of how many times I fought black bats, but the designers behind this game made them purpleā€¦ Thatā€™s already a bit more colorful and the color doesnā€™t deviate too much, so itā€™s still recognizably a bat and a hostile one at that.

Animation-wise the game is also quite pleasing to look at, which is due to the many different poses the enemies and characters have. Aside from just walking, the player character can also run, attack with different weapons, be knocked down, stand up again and interact with several items. For a normal person it seems like no big deal, but I personally found it a very sweet novelty. The only real problem I have is that opening chests looks very stiff, the character literally lifts it up and smashes it into the ground a few times before throwing it away. This would seem fitting for characters like Conan or Joe & Mac, but not for characters that are clearly civilized and reasonably intelligent.

Replay-value and extras

I see very little reason to replay this game after I am done with it. Unless the game takes a sudden turn for the amazing, itā€™s just a little too tedious. The combat starts to wear on you very fast and to play it for the dialogue alone is a bit silly. There are plenty of places where I find games with good presentation and since the presentation here is not by any means stellar, I might as well replay No More Heroes or DinoCity.

Since this is an RPG though, there is always the challenge of training your guys to the maximum level and collecting all the best weapons. This can soak up a lot of time, so I suppose people who like the game enough donā€™t have to restart anytime soon. Thatā€™s a pretty measly reason to keep playing though and since I am not aware of any kind of collection-quest or other 100% challenge, the extras part of this review doesnā€™t really count for much.

Verdict

Secret of Mana is one of those titles that only really grew a fan-base several years after it was released, making it a pretty big cult-classic after a while. It also comes at a pretty high price, 40 frigginā€™ euros for the cartridge alone. I had to pay an additional 25 euros for the manual and box! Was it worth it? Wellā€¦ I am kind of a collector, so any rare game is a worthy purchase for me, but for the regular person who just likes his retro-games, Iā€™d say an emulator is a better choice. The game can be entertaining and it certainly looks very promising as you play the first hour or so, but after that it really dies down and a sticky combat-system and confusing plot really get to you. I canā€™t even force me to say itā€™s worth playing for the visuals either, though it comes very close to reaching that.

Die-hard fans of JRPG-games likely disagree with me on plenty of fields, so if you count yourself among them, then donā€™t mind my rambling and go try it out, itā€™s quite unique. More western-loving gamers are likely to be turned off, but the real-time combat can win some open-minded people over.

SNES · by Asinine (957) · 2012

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
So what else has changed? CrankyStorming (2927) Nov 6, 2011

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The SNES version of Secret of Mana appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Development

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.

Enemies

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.

Killroy

In the original Japanese version, Killroy has a chainsaw when fighting him the second time. In all Western versions, he is just a re-coloured version of the first encounter.

Multiplayer

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.

Slime

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.

Awards

  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • December 1993 (Issue 53) - Game of the Month* FLUX Magazine
    • Issue #4 - #40 in the "Top 100 Video Games of All-Time" list
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #77 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll
  • GamePro
    • Vol. 6, Issue 2 - Role-Playing Game of the Year 1993
  • Retro Gamer
    • September 2004 (Issue #8) ā€“ #74 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by Big John WV, CaptainCanuck, PCGamer77 and WildKart

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Unicorn Lynx.

Wii U added by Michael Cassidy. iPad added by Rik Hideto. Android, iPhone added by Sciere. DoJa, BREW added by Kabushi. Wii added by gamewarrior.

Additional contributors: Satoshi Kunsai, Apogee IV, MaiZure, Alaka, Patrick Bregger, Thomas Thompson, CrankyStorming, FatherJack.

Game added June 7, 2002. Last modified February 10, 2024.