"Does anyone remember where we parked?"

“Secret of Mana” is an action RPG by Squaresoft for the Super NES that came out in 1993. It is from a 3/4 perspective and plays a lot like “The Legend of Zelda”. One of it’s most unique features was that it used the multitap adapter to allow for three players simultaneously.

These are the facts, and they are all well and good. But this isn’t really a review in the traditional sense. This is more of a recounting of my experience surrounding Secret of Mana and why it is one of the games that means so much to me as a gamer.

It all started with a friend of mine in Junior High, Chris. In shop class he would spin tales of this crazy new game he was playing. Tales of epic battles against hordes of unique and interesting sounding monsters, a flying dragon you traversed the world on, and of teamwork in doing so thanks to the game’s multiplayer components. Chris and his dad were playing through this grand adventure together. I had never heard of this “Mana” game he was talking about, but after his stories, I had to play it.

Around this time, I had two really close friends that I would spend most of my free time with. Justin, who I currently work with today, and Tim. Tim was my best friend growing up, who sadly died of leukemia a few years ago. Back in Junior High and High School, the three of us were inseparable. We would stay up late watching terrible B-movies, playing video games, and sometimes even make cheesy Star Trek parodies. Justin and I were even each others best men.

At this point, the game had only been out for a short while (probably a few months), but it was already nearly impossible to find. No one had it to rent anywhere. For whatever reason, I took it upon myself to track down a copy, even though it was Justin who was going to be buying the game. I guess I just wanted to play it that bad.

When I finally was able to locate a copy, after calling every store in the surrounding towns that sold video games, I immediately called up Justin. It turned out his family was on vacation at Mt. Rainier. I left several messages on his machine, because I kept forgetting important details about it. I had reserved a copy at the K.B. Toys in the mall, it was X amount of dollars (I can’t remember, but it was probably astronomical at the time), etc. I don’t think his parents were very happy with me for a while after that.

The game was purchased, and after tracking down a Super NES Multitap at another local store, we were ready to go.

The game started with a singular hero. I can’t remember if we were warned ahead of time that you actually had to play the first several hours of the game before getting your sidekicks. We didn’t mind this too much, as we were used to playing round-robin on single player games, passing the controller from player to player when one of us would die, get stuck, or have been dominating the controller for too long and annoyed the other two.

Once we picked up that third character and were all adventuring together, the game completely changed for us. Outside of simple beat-em-ups, mostly played in the arcade, I don’t think I had ever played more than two players at the same time before. Certainly never on a game like this. You leveled up, not only yourself, but your weapons and magic attacks as well. The more you used them, the better they became. The level cap would increase as you found more and more Mana seeds throughout the world until you had finally found all eight of them.

This was where it all went wrong. Tim, being a completionist in games, had to max out everything. But to make it easier, we stayed in the low level areas where we could get kills on enemies with two or three hits. This very slowly but surely got us to max out every weapon and every spell with all three characters, which took hours and hours of grinding.

When asked about this recently, Justin remembered spending hours goofing off when it was not his characters turn to level. See, it only counted toward building up that spell/weapon if you got in the final blow. He would often purposely get in the last hit out of boredom and just to irk Tim. He also commented that the “thwack!” sound effect in Mana is one of the most satisfying sound effects in all of gaming, especially when the monster you are attacking exploded into a pile of bones when defeated.

The thing we didn’t realize, since we were all pretty new to RPGs, was that this did our character levels no good at all. After grinding our characters’ weapons and magic to their current level cap, we would have to run through the dungeons, avoiding combat so as not to be constantly dying. This allowed us to save all our healing items for the bosses. It wasn’t a good plan, but it got us all the way to the final area on top of a floating castle. Unfortunately, the running through tactic no longer works at this point.

Justin and I both remember starting the game over several times before we “got it right”. I think we may have been better off just having gone out to grind some of the earlier dungeons than starting all over, but we never really stopped having fun with the game either way. We even had one save game where we used the Game Genie to get all three characters to level 99 at the start of the game.

Another feature in Secret of Mana that blew us away at the time were the Mode 7 flying dragon sequences. At one point in the game, you get a dragon named Flammie who you can summon to travel the world. Not only did he look like Falcor, the luck dragon, but you actually controlled these sequences.  It really opened up the whole world of the game from that point on, and has always been one of those very memorable moments in gaming for me. It is the kind of thing you never thought possible when playing those old Atari and NES games back in the day.

For me, playing through Secret of Mana is a fond memory. It is even one of those games I can go back to and it is still fun. It is still hard to track down a physical copy, but it is also available on the Wii’s Virtual Console and supports three players. I highly recommend grabbing a couple friends and playing through it. It is still the best game in the Mana series.

Tags: action, friends, multiplayer, multitap, rpg, Secret of Mana, SNES, Squaresoft

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.