Secret of Mana

Story 5/10
Soundtrack 6/10
Graphics 8/10
Gameplay 7/10
Controls 5/10
Overall 6/10

Let me start off by saying I really respect the creativity of this game and how unique it was for its time. I know that you may be saying well Zelda is just like it, but it isn't entirely, is it? No, Secret of Mana is definitely unique, it is honestly one of the grand fathers of action adventure RPGs. That said though, this game definitely does not come without its flaws.

This review is written from the perspective of someone who moderately enjoyed the game but was greatly disappointed at the clunky combat system and poor coding that the game had to offer. One of the number one moments that comes to mind when I am talking about the clunky combat system is towards the start of the game you're to face off against two werewolves who are currently about to kill your first future ally. These werewolves can literally chain stun you until you die from full health and they do it quite frequently. Enough to where I had to stop and spend 3 hours of grinding to come back to annihilate them. There are more werewolves throughout the dungeon ahead too, but the two at once combo in an open room was devastatingly annoying.

The companions AI in Secret of Mana isn't spared from the general rule that all AI in games is absolutely terrible. The even worse part of it is in Secret of Mana if your followers are too stupid to round a corner, it can hold YOU back and get YOU killed... or... even worse... permanently stuck forcing you to reload a save.

Now you may be saying, jeeze man, what's the point of me playing the game then? Well... I don't know honestly. That's up to you! Just because it was plagued with bugs and issues it doesn't mean it is neccessarily completely unenjoyable. What I did to combat the really buggy combat system is I spent about 8hrs leveling up early on in the game after I got both my companions and most of my weapons. I turned on that turbo button and leveled all my magics and to a much higher level.

Story

Secret of Mana's story is pretty straight forward, there was a great war many years prior where the gods got really pissed off at man and sent a bunch of beasts to destroy them and wipe out "Mana" from the world. The game begins with the empire, the antagonists, as they begin/continue their quest for all 8 mana seeds. As you could have probably guessed, your quest is to mess up theirs!
Your objective is to use your Mana Sword that you obtain early in the game and venture to each of the "Mana Temples" here you'll use the Mana Sword on the Mana Seed.

Soundtrack

This is probably one of my favorite parts of the game, if nothing else it has some really nice tunes to listen to while playing.

Graphics

Keeping in mind that the game is on a Super Nintendo I would have to say it has some really nice graphics for its time. The game isn't very pixelated and honestly I have no complaints at all about the art/graphics. It even has a few gems in the art section, in one dungeon you'll have floating books fight you and as they flip pages there is a girl in a swimsuit in one!

Gameplay

Really all that matters at the end of the day is if the game is fun to play or not and Secret Of Mana is definitely going to be hit or miss for you in this aspect. Even though I gave the game an overall pretty crappy review I did think it was fun at parts. It's a truly super unique SNES experience since the console didn't get many action adventure RPGs. If you can get past the games many flaws it can definitely be rather enjoyable. What I did to offset some of the issues is I stopped and leveled my characters up a lot early in the game.

Controls

Hands down, if I had to pick the worst part of this game it would be the controls. Ugh, what a nightmare!!! Like I mentioned before, some monsters can stun lock you from full to dead and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The inventory system in this game is very frustrating and trying to cycle back and forth through characters to use magic/items can be extremely frustrating as sometimes it doesn't pick the character it should be picking and for the life of me I never figured out why.

Overall

As you could have probably guessed, overall I did not really enjoy Secret of Mana. It was an interesting experience and parts of the game were definitely fun but honestly there are so many games out there that are more enjoyable than this one. Unless you're running out of games to play and are looking for an action adventure RPG experience I don't really recommend Secret of Mana.