Seiken Denset-what?

This generation of gaming has been in equal parts blessed and plagued by remakes. On one hand, we got titles like Shadow of the Colossus on the PS4, which took a beloved classic and modernized it in all the right ways for a whole new audience while keeping the core of the experience intact. Then, we have games like TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled which did nothing but tarnish the reputation of the original game with a slew of incomprehensible gameplay decisions and shoddy execution.

Unfortunately, the Secret of Mana remake falls squarely into the latter category.

The new visuals are fine but I found myself longing for the charm of 2D sprites.

MSRP: $39.99(PS4/PSV/PC)
Platforms: PS4, PSV, PC
Length: 16~ hours

For those unfamiliar, Secret of Mana was originally an SNES JRPG with the same title but it was actually the second game in the Seiken Densetsu series. While it doesn’t have the following of other JRPGs on the platform like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 6, it’s one I remember fondly having finished it many, many years ago. It was also notable due to its action-rpg hack & slash combat during a time where most of the popular JRPGs were using a turn-based engine. Even more than that, the element that really made Secret of Mana stand out was the ability to play with 2 other players controlling the other characters for a full 3-man couch co-op.

Back then, I did not take advantage of this unique feature but for this playthrough, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to do so and it really ended up being the saving grace of the experience.

As for the story, it’s about as generic as you can get and given the time period when it was released, it’s no surprise to say that it’s not particularly interesting at all. A boy ends up discovering a magic sword which was worshipped as a relic of his home town and ends up getting exiled. Later, he learns that the world is in danger from a looming threat of something called the “Mana Fortress” and goes to reawaken the full power of the sword which is said to be able to combat any evil. Along the way, he runs into two companions with goals of their own and ends up having to work together to save the world.

Given that this is a brand new remake, there were some attempts made to make the story a bit more interesting but both of these fell rather flat. First is the improved presentation as there is voice acting for all the main characters during cutscenes. Unfortunately, the quality of the voiceovers are so poor that they actually made me like the characters less as they came off as quite grating and annoying.

There are also the additions of what I would describes as skits where the three heroes would often converse about this and that during a stay at the inn but these scenes were so inconsequential and dull that I felt their inclusion served more to slow down the pace of the game more than anything.

Voice overs are a great way to improve presentation and help realize the distinct personality of your characters but only when they’re done right.

From a gameplay standpoint, the game remained mostly the same which is to say that it felt terribly dated as I was constantly struggling with wonky controls and fumbling with unintuitive menus just to cast a spell. The addition of shortcuts to cast certain spells quickly was a welcome addition but the radial menu didn’t feel good to use back then and it sure doesn’t now in 2018.

One thing that annoyed the most was the ridiculous level of evasion that enemies had which rendered my attacks meaningless more than 50% of the time. I’m a firm believer that if I’m playing an action-rpg game and I see my sword clip an enemy, it should take damage. I shouldn’t have to wait for a internal dice-roll to happen to see my attack had landed. This stung the worst when I went for my charge attacks which would take upwards of 12 seconds to build up and seeing every hit of my multi-attack barrage miss was rage inducing.

So, in the end I ended up being forced to spam magic on enemies often which meant stopping the action, going through the radial menu and picking the element, then the spell, then the enemy and repeating this endlessly which made combat an absolute chore at times and made me just skip most of the enemies when I was able.

Prepare to see this a lot.

One bright spot was the inclusion of both the original and remake arrangements of the OST and given I ended up going with the original OST after a few hours with the new tracks, I was happy to have the option.

Despite my many grievances with the game, as I played the game in couch co-op with my little nephews, I was having a good time mostly because I got to share in an experience with them which was quite rare given how few good couch co-op games there are now in the market. It felt like the multiplayer element was really allowing me to forgive the game’s many flaws and work around them but one I could not forgive was the constant crashes I had during my playtime.

The game suffered 5 hard crashes during various points in the game and if not for the auto-save system, we would have lost an hour or more of progress for each of those. I think people can accuse reviewers of looking at Secret of Mana on the SNES with rose-tinted glasses but I can promise you that my SNES game did not hard crash a single time during my playthrough. That’s not all as there were also massive frame rate drops from time to time that would happen randomly and many cases where damage numbers would not register until seconds after the blow has been dealt.

Why a simplistic game like this would even struggle on the slightest being played the PS4 Pro is a mystery of its own.

The screen scrolling will often get characters stuck during co-op so move together as a group to avoid that.

The responsibility of a remake lies in its intent. If the idea was to preserve the original experience as much as possible while bringing the visuals up to modern standards, Secret of Mana fails with its slew of technical issues and unimpressive graphic design. If the intent was to forge a brand new experience based on the original, Secret of Mana fails as the dated combat engine challenged me in all the wrong ways and the added elements like voice acting fell flat with poor performances all around. So in both instances, the remake to Secret of Mana fails and while it is fun to some degree to play in couch co-op, I could say the same for the original and it has the benefit of not costing $40.

Fun Tidbit – I strongly feel that a remake of Seiken Densetsu 3 would have been more welcome as it is clearly the best game of the series in my book and it never received an official state-side release.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.