Secret of Mana review

A great video game remake can be a revelatory, even transformative, experience. By latching onto the heart of the original work and steaming away the musty whiff of dated elements, a remake can remind us why we loved a classic in the first place. It might even give us a newfound appreciation for an older creation that never clicked with us before. Of course, a poor remake can also help you better appreciate the original for entirely different reasons, as Square Enix’s new remake of Secret of Mana demonstrates.

A groundbreaking 1993 Super NES action role-playing game, the original Secret of Mana cleverly combined the mechanical depth of a traditional RPG — the series began as a Final Fantasy spinoff — with the immediacy of action RPGs like The Legend of Zelda. Light on the puzzle elements that Zelda perfected on Super NES, Secret of Mana made up for the minimal complexity of its dungeons with an equally engrossing proposition: seamless, drop-in/drop-out, three-person multiplayer action. To sweeten the pot, it even threw in some gorgeous visuals and one of the most innovative soundtracks ever constructed for a 16-bit console.

Visual overhaul aside, this remake consists almost entirely of the same content and mechanics as the Super NES original. One to three players embark on a journey to prevent the Vandole Empire from reviving a legendary super weapon called the Mana Fortress. As in the older game, your party collects eight legendary weapons and eight elemental spell sets, leveling up each tool and skill through repeated use in combat. And yeah, you still fight Santa Claus. It’s all here.

Somehow, though, this new Secret of Mana manages to recapture little of the older version’s appeal. Remakes should ideally strip away a game’s outdated or broken elements while enshrining its strengths. Secret of Mana’s remake instead emphasizes the parts of the original that didn’t quite work while leeching all joy from the parts that did. What few things it changes, it alters for the worse. This is a remarkable remake, but not in a good way: the kind of update that leaves you scratching your head wondering how they could hew so closely to the original and yet manage to get everything about it so catastrophically wrong.

The problems begin with the visual overhaul. As with Square Enix’s previous Mana remake (Adventures of Mana), the developers have revamped the original 16-bit sprite artwork into middling polygons. I suppose whether or not this constitutes an improvement comes down to individual tastes, but I’m not a fan. I’m also not sold on the new localization, which includes a few welcome changes (the androgynous Sprite, Popoi, is now referred to as “them”) but mostly just tamps down the original English script’s whimsy without adding any real substance. And someone out there might even enjoy the bizarre remixed soundtrack, which I can only describe as “accordion-based choral techno.”

The new visuals do objectively diminish Secret of Mana in one sense: They remove the game’s appealing physicality. Secret of Mana’s characters possessed a sort of floppy intensity on Super NES, somehow conveying the sensation of your heroes throwing themselves into every action with just a few simple frames of animation. And because the game took its RPG elements seriously, enemies could only harm the player’s party with actual attacks, not by mere contact (as they do in other action games). So heroes and monsters would press up against each other as they waited for their action meters to refill, making combat close and personal.

That intensity doesn’t come through here. The remake’s canned polygonal animations come across as stilted and bland. The resized, visually inconsistent character models for both the protagonists and enemies no longer appear to exist in the same world as one another, let alone shove up against each other in desperate close quarters as they used to. It’s a subtle difference, but it drains the life from the game.

The move to polygons introduces other shortcomings as well. Characters no longer have to attack in cardinal directions, as they did in the original. Now, you and enemies alike can attack in all directions. That might sound like an improvement at first. In practice, it turns combat into a chore. The addition of 360-degree targeting makes combat cumbersome for your party members. I found it much more difficult to line up my actions here than in the original, especially with projectile weapons, which slows down combat. Enemies can also hit you from any angle, which makes many sequences a lot harder than they used to be. Any place populated by tiny chipmunk archers (such as the Haunted Forest or the Desert Palace) become infuriating murder gauntlets here. You could take advantage of their limited targeting capabilities for hit-and-run tactics, but now they can pepper you with rapid-fire arrows from all angles.

The Secret of Mana remake inexplicably breaks simple interface elements, too. The unique “ring menu” system (pop-up menus that allowed direct access to any of your party members’ battle commands and inventories) no longer retains the memory of which menu item you last selected. If you need to, say, repeatedly cast a particular spell, you have to navigate the menus to reach that spell every single time you cast it. Even more annoyingly, the rings now pop in the center of the screen rather than above the character they represent, so you don’t have an obvious tell for whose rings you’re navigating. These aren’t game-breaking issues, but they’re annoying — and nonsensical, given that the Super NES version got those quality-of-life details right 25 years ago.

You’ll also notice that the useful artificial intelligence “action grid” has been removed. Now, each character has just four command settings, which allow for a couple of handy options (the ability to support a specific party member is great) but which ultimately prove to be far more limiting than the 16-bit AI grid was.

On the plus side, the remake does at least retain Secret of Mana’s multiplayer element. I can’t speak to its performance, though; I reviewed the game on PlayStation Vita, which doesn’t offer a Nintendo DS-style download play option due to the size and complexity of the software. Each player needs to have their own Vita copy of Secret of Mana, and multiplayer sessions involve ad-hoc waiting rooms — there’s no drop-in/drop-out cooperative play on the go, only on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.

The one genuinely new element that the remake adds to Secret of Mana is the new character conversations at inns. When you rest and save your game, your party members will banter about the most recent plot developments. This is mildly amusing, but it really just amounts to riffing on the paper-thin characterization established in the characters’ first few interactions. How many times do we really need yet another gag about how Primm, the female party member, is hot-tempered and has a crush on a guy named Dyluck? The story advances through mildly detailed cinematic renditions of the older game’s cutscenes, complete with voice acting, but none of this really adds much to the experience — and whatever improvements it represents certainly can’t make up for the all the ways in which this remake diminishes the underlying classic.

Make no mistake, Secret of Mana remains a decent game, even in this damaged state. But the lifeless spirit and newfound flaws of the remake emphasize all the clumsy details that were easier to forgive in the original. Its real-time combat can be clumsy and unbalanced. The early hours of the game prove to be extraordinarily repetitive, sending players back to the same handful of locations over and over again. And the weapon- and spell-leveling mechanics make for lots of tedious grinding.

Wrap-up

This new remake marks the third time I’ve revisited Secret of Mana in the past year: First with the Japanese release of Seiken Densetsu Collection for Switch, and then again with the 16-bit game’s inclusion on Nintendo’s Super NES Classic Edition mini-console. The first two experiences reminded me what extraordinary alchemy Squaresoft achieved with Secret of Mana. It was one of those rarities whose inventive charm superseded its many flaws. I suppose, in a sense, the remake reinforces that revelation. Now I’ve played Secret of Mana without its charm, so that only the flaws shine through, and it’s even easier to appreciate what the original game accomplished.

Secret of Mana was reviewed using a final “retail” PS Vita download code provided by Square Enix. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.