The Secret of Mana - Koichi Ishii
This felt like Square’s response to the Zelda series. For the first time, we have overworld fighting, rather than the typical cut to combat screen that we are so used to in the Final Fantasy series.
They moved to overworld fighting, just like Zelda. The choose to do something completely different with the way items work.
In both Zelda and the Final Fantasy series, weapons simply get replaced with new weapons. Here we see a move to levelling up items. This was really counterintuitive.
When your group start increasing in size, the combat is extra bad. Because you are only controlling one of the three party members, the other two are prone to get in the way of attacks and are just dead weight. This was game-ruining for me.
The narrative felt odd as well. The typical Final Fantasy plot of a villain wanting to overthrow the world order felt weird and out of place here for some reason.
Sitting between Final Fantasy and Zelda, it surprisingly fails at both. You would have expected the developers to take the good points from both, but it is almost as if they didn’t understand why the other games were so good.
I was surprised to learn that the game had gotten a HD re-release. This wasn’t for me. I gave up at Spikey, about 12% through the game.
