Secret of Mana

The Good
Epic final battles. The last three bosses have 5000, 6666 and 9990 Hit Points. Your characters have about 500 Hit Points. You really gotta work hard to beat them. The soundtrack is also wonderful. I now have the soundtrack album on my iPod device and the tunes are good.

Occasionally a good piece of dialog comes up as well. But these are rare, and hardly worth the effort to read through the text.

Secret of Mana uses a real-time battle system, later found in Chrono Trigger. So you can avoid enemies or choose enemies to fight with much more easily than in Final Fantasy games. Enemies don't just pop up out of nowhere; you can actually see them when you walk around.

The Bad
iPhone games are mostly designed to be user-friendly. Tutorials are carefully laid out to make sure you know what to do. Everything about Secret of Mana is the opposite. I had to read four diffferent guides on the Internet to beat the game. Not knowing where to go next is annoying but it's nothing compared to the battle mechanics. For example, when you touch a Spell icon, which is meant to cast spells, there's a chance that you will not be able to cast the spell. It's hard to know beforehand. This is ridiculous enough, and the game forces to touch two more times to exit the "Spell Menu". So, a failure to cast spell will waste you three screen touches, which is about 5 to 7 seconds.

It's also an expensive iPhone game. The World Ends with You: Solo Remix, another iPhone port from the same company (Square Enix), received criticism for its high price ($17.99). Secret of Mana currently costs $8.99, and cost me about $14 when I bought it.

The Bottom Line
All the annoyances result in a difficult game, compared to most RPGs. A difficult game like this does make one feel accomplished after finally beating it. It took me about 26, 27 hours. If I knew better I definitely would not have purchased this game in the first place.