Secret of Mana

Secret of Mana, released in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2, is a 1993 action role-playing game developed and published by Square for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the second installment of the Seiken Densetsu? (later Mana) series.²¹⁷ Set in a high-fantasy world, it follows three heroes who attempt to prevent an empire from conquering the world with the power of an ancient sword and the elemental forces held in balance by the mysterious Mana Tree.³⁹ It was widely acclaimed on release and has appeared repeatedly on lists of the best games ever made, including IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time.¹¹

The game is the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure, the first title in the series, and was the first game in the series to be tied more closely to the Mana concept than to Final Fantasy.¹³ Like the earlier games, its story centers on the Mana Tree, which holds the world together and keeps all elemental forces in balance.² A young boy named Randi pulls an ancient sword from a stone resting in a lake, and is subsequently banished from his village when the removal of the blade draws monsters to it.¹³ An old knight named Jema identifies the blade as the Mana Sword and sends Randi on a quest to visit eight temples scattered across the world to restore the sword’s true power, all while agents of the Vandole Empire pursue him.¹³ Along the way Randi is joined by two other heroes, a teenage girl and a sprite child, who become steadfast partners in a common cause.³¹³

The heroes learn late in the story that the true enemy is not the emperor or his nation but a man who has been using the empire from within, seeking to harness the Mana power to build a flying fortress.³¹⁰

Gameplay

Secret of Mana is an action RPG in which battles take place in real time rather than in a separate, turn-based screen.⁹ Rather than button-mashing, combat is timed around a power gauge: when a character attacks, the gauge drops and must recharge to full strength before another full-power blow can be struck, encouraging players to strike and then fall back.¹³¹⁸ Players can also charge a weapon up to eight levels of skill to unleash powerful special attacks, some involving multi-strike combos and characters throwing fireballs from their hands.² Each of the three characters can wield eight different weapon types — from swords and spears to boomerangs, whips, and bows — which are strengthened by collecting weapon orbs and taking them to a blacksmith, and whose proficiency levels rise through use.²⁴

The girl and the sprite can cast magic, learned by meeting each of eight elementals; where earlier Square games used four elements, Secret of Mana uses eight — Water, Earth, Wind, Fire, Light, Darkness, Moon, and Nature.² Magic skill rises through use and is capped by the party’s Mana Power, which increases as the party collects Mana Seeds.² The male hero, by contrast, has no magic but the highest strength, defense, and HP, and gains weapon skill faster than the others.²

The game replaces the encyclopedic, menu-laden inventories of other RPGs with a “ring menu” system, in which a ring of icons surrounds the character for items, magic, and equipment, reducing screen clutter and simplifying management of the other characters’ options.⁹¹¹ Its most distinctive feature is seamless cooperative multiplayer: up to three players can each control one hero simultaneously, joining at any time by picking up a controller and pressing start.⁹¹⁷ On the original hardware this required the SNES Super Multitap accessory, since the console normally supported only two controllers; on the Wii Virtual Console re-release the three-player mode became easier to set up.¹¹ When fewer than three humans play, the remaining characters are controlled by AI whose behavior can be tuned through the command ring, though reviewers frequently criticized the AI companions for getting stuck on obstacles.³¹³

Development and influences

Secret of Mana originated from an ambitious project codenamed “Maru Island,” conceived for the planned Super NES CD-ROM extension being developed jointly by Nintendo and Sony.²² The team envisioned a vast world incorporating a time-travel element, and illustrator Akira Toriyama? was asked to join the project.²² When Nintendo and Sony failed to reach a financial agreement and the CD add-on was abandoned by the end of 1992, Square requested that the project be released on cartridge instead.²² The time-travel concept and its intended art style were set aside for a future title, which became Chrono Trigger, while the leftover story and gameplay ideas were heavily rewritten to form a sequel to the original Seiken Densetsu.²²²⁵ Several commentators attributed the game’s disjointed structure and abundance of unfinished elements to this reworking and the resulting need to compress the material onto limited cartridge space.²³²¹

Koichi Ishii, creator of the original Seiken Densetsu, whose dream had been to make a Zelda-esque title with the narrative drama of a Final Fantasy game, teamed with Final Fantasy veteran Hiromichi Tanaka, who contributed to the story, dialogue, and game design.²² Tanaka drew inspiration from animated films and children’s storybooks, citing The NeverEnding Story and Alice in Wonderland as well as European cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s such as Moomin.²² Anime based on northern European literature and folklore, including Banner and Flappy and Nils Holgersson, were often set in tranquil country settings with nature as an overarching theme, and the storyline, art style, and music of Secret of Mana were shaped to breathe that same atmosphere.²² The illustrator Hirō Isono created the well-known artwork portraying the three heroes as tiny figures before the massive Mana Tree, work often characterized by jungle imagery as its leading subject.²²

The word “mana” itself derives from the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family?, where it means something like “supernatural power,” a concept that entered global gaming culture as a term for magical energy.²⁴ The game’s development was completed in Sacramento, California, after lead programmer Nasir Gebelli’s work visa expired and Square relocated him and the development team to his home city to finish the game.²³

Design philosophy and mechanical influences

The developers conceived Secret of Mana as a deliberate reaction against what they viewed as the stagnation of mainstream RPGs, which director Koichi Ishii and producer Hiromichi Tanaka felt had grown stale by differing only in their stories while retaining the same command-style format.²⁶ Ishii and Tanaka criticized both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for never breaking out of the frame imposed by menu-driven role-playing games such as Wizardry and Ultima, and stated that the entire project began from the desire to free itself of those constraints.²⁶ Ishii’s aim was to give the player a direct, “sensory” connection to combat, so that the character swung the sword and struck enemies rather than selecting “Attack” from a menu.²⁶

The team described the resulting system as a hybridization of a traditional turn-based RPG and an action role-playing game, a combination that produced numerous unexpected problems and time-consuming revisions; they noted that a pure action game would have been simpler to build.²⁶ Tanaka cited the action RPG Ys as an influence but contrasted its design, in which the core is action with RPG elements layered on top, with their own goal of making something closer to an RPG that even less-dexterous players could enjoy.²⁶ Retaining RPG mechanics was a conscious choice: Tanaka argued that a purely action-based game would create a gulf between skilled and unskilled players such that weaker players might never defeat the final boss, whereas traditional RPGs allow anyone to finish by investing time and effort.²⁶

Several of the game’s systems were adapted from earlier titles. The “wait time” concept and charge bar that govern combat were described by the developers as a remnant of turn-based RPGs, devised to prevent players from making continuous full-power attacks.²⁶ The traps placed on treasure chests were added in the manner of Wizardry, so that players would think twice before automatically opening them.²⁶ The multiplayer element, by contrast, was not planned from the outset but emerged as an idea during development.²²

Technical features and audio

The game runs on the SNES’s Mode 7 technology, most visible when a dragon named Flammie flies the party across the world map.⁹ Reviewers praised its hand-drawn backgrounds rendered in 256 colors, though the world map appeared heavily pixelated during flight.² Its box art depicting the three heroes before the Mana Tree doubles as the game’s title screen.⁹ The soundtrack, composed by Hiroki Kikuta, was widely singled out as one of the finest on the SNES, described as striking a balance between chirpy and ethereal, appropriate to a light-hearted quest about nature.¹⁸¹⁷

The North American localization was handled by Ted Woolsey? in roughly six weeks, and reviewers noted the story felt disjointed in places as a result.²¹³ The game had originally been intended for the SNES’s planned CD add-on before being repurposed as a cartridge game, a change that reportedly cut several features including multiple endings.¹⁷

Reception and legacy

Contemporary and retrospective reviewers rated the game highly; RPGFan’s reviewers scored it 90% and 95%, calling the three-player mode its brightest point.³⁴ IGN, reviewing the 2008 Wii Virtual Console re-release, noted the game had been named to lists of the Top 100 Games of All Time many times and placed 79th in its 2007 ranking and 48th in 2005.¹¹ Retrospective critics also noted its combat can feel clumsy or “janky” to modern players, comparing its underlying rhythm to the Active Time Battle systems of the Final Fantasy games and its atmosphere-driven appeal to Diablo II.¹³¹⁸

The game has been re-released and reworked repeatedly, including on the Wii Virtual Console, in the Collection of Mana compilation for the Nintendo Switch, and as a 3D high-definition remake released in 2018 for PlayStation 4, PC, and PlayStation Vita.¹³¹⁶²⁰ The 2018 remake retained the original’s structure, level design, and mechanics while adding fully voiced dialogue in Japanese and English and eight-directional attacks, though IGN found it an “odd duck” that made some strange changes while preserving the original’s charm.¹⁶²⁰ Later entries in the Mana series — including Legend of Mana, Sword of Mana, and Seiken Densetsu 3 — followed, though commentators have noted none quite recaptured the critical and commercial effect of Secret of Mana.⁹¹⁶