#9. Legend of Mana
I’ve recently reacquired a piano, and remembered that one of the things I taught myself to play, when I needed a break from Mozart, Chopin, and Debussy, was the intro* to this pretty, flawed storybook of a game.
Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) is one of Squaresoft’s great classics, one of the best to come out of the mid-90s Golden Age of the 16-bit RPG. In all the “Mana” games since, they’re never managed to recapture that perfect balance of gameplay, visuals, narrative, and pure immersive fun. But they came close with this one: a beautiful experiment that had heart and ideas, and yet just didn’t hang together.
As a story-centric person, I was attracted to Legend of Mana by its promise of competing, interwoven storylines. I’ve always been a fan of collecting multiple characters into a group of adventurers; and the idea that the world and its people moved around you, rather than waiting for you to save it and them, was relatively new at the time. I was also intrigued by the complicated system of world-building, or re-building. As you adventured, you found artifacts with fun names – Jade Egg, Firefly Lamp, Trembling Spoon – that when placed on the map became a new area to explore – Meikiv Caverns, Lumina Town, and the Underworld, respectively.
What I didn’t realize was that the system didn’t work. Rather than offering choices, Legend of Mana left it up to the player to find interesting stories in which to take part, but with little to no guidance on how to find them in the first place. And while many of the stories are one-offs, there are major narrative threads that are difficult or impossible to find on your own. If you want to know, for example, what happens to Pearl and Elazul after you help them find each other, or if you want to follow Daena and Escad on another adventure, there’s simply no way to tell in-game where they are or how to find them; and given the number of areas on the ever-growing world-map, hope and random chance don’t do you much good. And once a character has made a cryptic remark and run off, if you’re lucky enough to run across him, her, or it again, you still aren’t guaranteed the next piece of the story – unless you’re also lucky enough to have fulfilled any number of hidden prerequisites to trigger the next story event in the first place.
This is one of the only games where I broke down and purchased a strategy guide – not because the game was difficult (it’s actually quite accessible), but because I wanted to see the entire narrative thread for one character or another and had no idea how to do so in the game itself. A poor excuse for strategy guide sales.
Add to this that the game’s ending is a total reset, in which the mana tree is “healed” but the world is undone in the process, and the only real result is a New Game Plus – so your efforts of the last 40 hours or so have little real effect, apart from asking you to play again to find stories you didn’t find the first time (one of the guides I followed claimed five playthroughs, with no completion in sight). And the mana tree is needy. “Remember me! Love me! Need me!” For me, it’s the beginning of my frustration with the pseudo-philosophy about love, memory, friendship, and so on that permeates too many Japanese console RPGS, even now. (I’m looking at you, Kingdom Hearts series…)
And yet, there are so many good design elements, and the world and characters are so interesting…. The structural idea here feels wasted, half-finished, and the result is that this charming little experiment of a game has wonderful atmosphere and lacks cohesion. It’s a shame that it didn’t succeed; I would have liked to see a second and third attempt with this sort of multi-threaded storytelling.
It’s still a worthwhile experience – just one that comes with caveats.
*Yes, that makes me a nerd. This should not be a surprise.
