Secret of Mana VWF Edition
Apr. 24th, 2011 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroConsidered among the best of the SNES action-rpg genre, Secret of Mana is a Squaresoft classic. The translation was one of Ted Woosley's early works, and as such was pretty decent, but the problematic font made it hard to squeeze in all the details. Hacker FuSoYa decided what the game really needed was a Variable Width Font Edition.
This is actually a rather minor patch--moreso than you'd expect given that the font is completely changed. It's not so much that the dialogue is replaced so much as tweaked a bit--for most of the game, it's just that lines are clearer in some places, a few characters get a little more character, and it's clearer where you're supposed to go. Several of the storyline points are clarified a lot (what happened 15 years ago, what Thanatos is up to), though that only requires an additional few lines of dialogue to do. And FuSoYa sneaks in a reference to himself (or the FF4 character...) on the ferry to the Moon Palace; and a reference to his co-hacker Relm in a "secret code."
It's nowhere near as necessary as the Breath of Fire 2 retranslation I played a few months ago, but it's nice and does improve the game.
As a little change, I decided to try a few things I hadn't done before, despite having played this game half a dozen times through since I got it back in the 90s. I played the first branching path "right" for the first time, stopping to get the girl in Pandora, then going straight to the witch's forest and being told I should visit the dwarves to get an axe, then going to Gaia's Navel. Turns out, if you do it that way, you can actually have the girl with you for the Tropicallo fight. I'd never seen that before! (The official hint guide suggests you skip Pandora and go back for the girl after you get the sprite. I usually did that. The other times I've played I had the girl leave when I tried to do Gaia's Navel first and then she rejoined in the forest. Okay, it's not much of a branching storyline, but it does the job.)
I opted out of the second branching path, where you're supposed to go to the fire palace, find out the seed and Salamando are missing, and then go to Ice Country to find them. Your characters still seem to think the seed is missing when you get Salamando, even if you go straight to Ice Country--there's no accounting for the branch. There's a similar reaction if you go to the Palace of Darkness before going to see Sage Joch for the first time--the characters act like they'd been there before. I think the designers had had bigger ideas about how to design branching paths, but time/technology limits prevented them from being realized.
The other different tact I'm taking is that I used a cheat to boost only the boy to level 99 (so I could skip grinding and get through the game quickly), but that means I'm not grinding magic so it's not very effective on bosses. There are a lot of bosses in this game who I've never tried fighting with only weapons before! I didn't realize how annoyingly difficult they can be to hit!
A glitch with my emulator forced another change--apparently with SNES9x, the controller I'm using apparently has issues with continuously holding a single button, so I really couldn't use charge attacks much. That's okay, I rarely used them except during the Mana Beast fight. When I reached that fight, as I knew I couldn't win it my usual way, I used Lunar Boost and just attacked normally. Turns out, if you're high enough level, that's actually faster and more effective that charging up!
It's interesting the things you notice when you're watching a game with a critical eye. I'd recently read a Let's Play of Final Fantasy Adventure, and I'd never really noticed before how many of the enemy sprites got reused (and are used again in later Mana games--Sword of Mana uses the exact same enemies in the Mana Holy Land). Similarly, there's a hard limit of three enemies on the screen at any time, which is particularly noticable with enemies that split or spawn more creatures; you can actually use this to control whether more creatures spawn or not.
Heck, I don't think I was ever properly conscious of the game's action-rpg nature. Most of the boss attacks are undodgable, as are all spells--your stats and the RNG determine whether you're actually hit by them. There's a similar ramdom chance of your attacks missing or your character making the "blocking" pose against an enemy attack. I feel like later games in the series got more action-ish, making your aim and dodging count for more.
The game has some glitches (in addition to the problematic pathfinding the NPCs sometimes demonstrate). Most of them are standards like slowdown, clipping errors and graphical artifacts. At least one of them, though, I think is actually a feature: Sometimes, when you open a chest with a weapon orb in it, the chest won't disappear and you can get a second orb. Thing is, that only seems to happen when you've missed a weapon orb from a previous area. I think it's set as a "catch up" measure so that weapons don't permanently fall behind.
Many of the weapons fall behind anyway--the bosses in the Mana Fortress don't drop weapon orbs, but some random enemies occasionally do, which allows you to get the 8th orb for most weapons and the 7th orb for a few. I wonder if they'd originally counted the number of bosses so that you'd automatically get those 7th orbs, then realized that you can't get back out to the blacksmith after most of them, and cut them out. Either that, or they just really love random drops: The best armor store in the game (which is easily-missable, though you can go back to it) sells armor only slightly worse than the very best. The best dozen pieces of armor are all random drops, and you'll be lucky to get one or two of them if the RNG loves you, unless you spend a lot of time farming. (If I had to guess, the designers probably intended that you'd grind magic and levels in the last two dungeons,which would double as farming for weapon orbs and the best armor.)
If you've never played Secret of Mana, you really should. If you're going to be playing on an emulator anyway, play this version, but if not, it's not a huge loss.
This is actually a rather minor patch--moreso than you'd expect given that the font is completely changed. It's not so much that the dialogue is replaced so much as tweaked a bit--for most of the game, it's just that lines are clearer in some places, a few characters get a little more character, and it's clearer where you're supposed to go. Several of the storyline points are clarified a lot (what happened 15 years ago, what Thanatos is up to), though that only requires an additional few lines of dialogue to do. And FuSoYa sneaks in a reference to himself (or the FF4 character...) on the ferry to the Moon Palace; and a reference to his co-hacker Relm in a "secret code."
It's nowhere near as necessary as the Breath of Fire 2 retranslation I played a few months ago, but it's nice and does improve the game.
As a little change, I decided to try a few things I hadn't done before, despite having played this game half a dozen times through since I got it back in the 90s. I played the first branching path "right" for the first time, stopping to get the girl in Pandora, then going straight to the witch's forest and being told I should visit the dwarves to get an axe, then going to Gaia's Navel. Turns out, if you do it that way, you can actually have the girl with you for the Tropicallo fight. I'd never seen that before! (The official hint guide suggests you skip Pandora and go back for the girl after you get the sprite. I usually did that. The other times I've played I had the girl leave when I tried to do Gaia's Navel first and then she rejoined in the forest. Okay, it's not much of a branching storyline, but it does the job.)
I opted out of the second branching path, where you're supposed to go to the fire palace, find out the seed and Salamando are missing, and then go to Ice Country to find them. Your characters still seem to think the seed is missing when you get Salamando, even if you go straight to Ice Country--there's no accounting for the branch. There's a similar reaction if you go to the Palace of Darkness before going to see Sage Joch for the first time--the characters act like they'd been there before. I think the designers had had bigger ideas about how to design branching paths, but time/technology limits prevented them from being realized.
The other different tact I'm taking is that I used a cheat to boost only the boy to level 99 (so I could skip grinding and get through the game quickly), but that means I'm not grinding magic so it's not very effective on bosses. There are a lot of bosses in this game who I've never tried fighting with only weapons before! I didn't realize how annoyingly difficult they can be to hit!
A glitch with my emulator forced another change--apparently with SNES9x, the controller I'm using apparently has issues with continuously holding a single button, so I really couldn't use charge attacks much. That's okay, I rarely used them except during the Mana Beast fight. When I reached that fight, as I knew I couldn't win it my usual way, I used Lunar Boost and just attacked normally. Turns out, if you're high enough level, that's actually faster and more effective that charging up!
It's interesting the things you notice when you're watching a game with a critical eye. I'd recently read a Let's Play of Final Fantasy Adventure, and I'd never really noticed before how many of the enemy sprites got reused (and are used again in later Mana games--Sword of Mana uses the exact same enemies in the Mana Holy Land). Similarly, there's a hard limit of three enemies on the screen at any time, which is particularly noticable with enemies that split or spawn more creatures; you can actually use this to control whether more creatures spawn or not.
Heck, I don't think I was ever properly conscious of the game's action-rpg nature. Most of the boss attacks are undodgable, as are all spells--your stats and the RNG determine whether you're actually hit by them. There's a similar ramdom chance of your attacks missing or your character making the "blocking" pose against an enemy attack. I feel like later games in the series got more action-ish, making your aim and dodging count for more.
The game has some glitches (in addition to the problematic pathfinding the NPCs sometimes demonstrate). Most of them are standards like slowdown, clipping errors and graphical artifacts. At least one of them, though, I think is actually a feature: Sometimes, when you open a chest with a weapon orb in it, the chest won't disappear and you can get a second orb. Thing is, that only seems to happen when you've missed a weapon orb from a previous area. I think it's set as a "catch up" measure so that weapons don't permanently fall behind.
Many of the weapons fall behind anyway--the bosses in the Mana Fortress don't drop weapon orbs, but some random enemies occasionally do, which allows you to get the 8th orb for most weapons and the 7th orb for a few. I wonder if they'd originally counted the number of bosses so that you'd automatically get those 7th orbs, then realized that you can't get back out to the blacksmith after most of them, and cut them out. Either that, or they just really love random drops: The best armor store in the game (which is easily-missable, though you can go back to it) sells armor only slightly worse than the very best. The best dozen pieces of armor are all random drops, and you'll be lucky to get one or two of them if the RNG loves you, unless you spend a lot of time farming. (If I had to guess, the designers probably intended that you'd grind magic and levels in the last two dungeons,which would double as farming for weapon orbs and the best armor.)
If you've never played Secret of Mana, you really should. If you're going to be playing on an emulator anyway, play this version, but if not, it's not a huge loss.
