Secret of Mana
Ted Woolsey for President!Actually, no, but you gotta love the guy anyway.
And his English can't possibly be any worse than George W. can it?
Uhhh.
Well, anyway, I decided to dust off Secret of Mana again, as part of the project (I'm skipping the sequel because it's too much work and moving on to Legend of Mana), and, if anything, it has shown me that Pink is not a fashionable color for glasses.
This game is known as Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan, or Legend of the Holy Sword 2.
It's a sequel to Seiken Densetsu 1 (bet you didn't see that one coming), which was released as Mystic Quest on Gameboy, here in the West.
Noone ever played that game apparently so they decided to give it an entirely different name for the sequel, which became one of the most popular SNES games EVER.
Is this justified?
Well, Yes AND No.
Well, okay, YES, but I just wanted to make the point that it has its problems.
Let me start at the beginning.
You play a Nameless Hero who one day finds a mysterious sword stuck in a rock at the bottom of a waterfall. An eery ghost tells him to remove it, and ghosts are never wrong, right? So the Hero pulls out the sword, and basically, that's the beginning of the end.
Monsters start roaming around, evil people start appearing and generally, people are not very happy anymore. The Obligatory Evil Empire is trying to resurrect the Ancient Mana Fortress and then have the Legendary Mana Beast crash into it to cause the destruction of the entire planet or something. It doesn't really make sense anyway.
In the course of the adventure, two other characters will join the Hero, a small Sprite with a very big Mouth, and a young aristocrat girl, whom I can only describe as "Sassy".
What ensues is an Action RPG full of monster bashing, equipment....uh....equipping, magic spells, weapon forging, Rabites, Moogles, Dwarves, Sprites and a little bit of Romance. Oh, AND Santa Claus and Rudolph. WTF!? I mean, WHY!?
And to put it mildly, this game is very very GOOD. Seriously.
It's one of the best Action RPG's the SNES has on offer, which unfortunately isn't saying very much. It also reminded me of the fact that they don't make games like this anymore. I don't mean games of this quality, because there's been better, but I literally mean games like this. I want a new Seiken Densetsu game in this vein, and hopefully the DS is going to bring it.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has been likened to this game, but it's nowhere near as good.
It's fun, action-packed, humorous, exciting, epic and it has one of the best SNES soundtracks EVAHR.
The great thing is that you can play with two friends to control each character separately, which is not only more fun, but it also saves a LOT of frustration.
Because as fantastic as this game may be, it's buggy as HELL.
Really. I haven't played a game this SERIOUSLY messy since, oh, any Sonic game.
And that includes the Sonic Adventure series. Holy Hell.
I already mentioned Ted Woolsey in the beginning, the Father of All Game Localizing, and also the kind of Father whom you're kinda ashamed of when you think of him. I mean, he means well and everything, but he tends to drool a little bit, he scares your girlfriends, makes stupid jokes and wears sweaty T-shirts. And there are some chips stuck in his beard.
I found an interview with the Good Man at some Geocities site:
TED WOOLSEY!
which incidentally happens to deal with the localization of Secret of Mana.
One interesting point he makes is that apparently he had to translate this game within ONE MONTH, and they didn't even give him the entire thing layed out in an easy to read way. And frankly, it shows.
The localization is very messy. Weird dialogues, faulty message-box layouts, and NON SEQUITURS abound, hahaha.
Still, that is not something we should blame on the game, cause logically, the Japanese version does not have this problem, and it's ridiculous to rate the English version lower than the Japanese one. I'm reviewing a GAME here, not a book.
It's a shame therefore that, if this game WERE a book, several pages would be missing, others would be stuck together in a suspicious way and the letters don't stay in their place.
The fact is that a lot of material was apparently left on the cutting room floor (uh. figuratively of course), and even in Japanese the story is a bit convoluted, not to mention the fact that dialogues are too confusing at time, simply because too many people are talking in ONE and the SAME message box WITHOUT any names (this only happens with smaller characters though, but it's still annoying)
But I can still forgive faulty story-telling since gameplay is the most important thing, but the problem is that the entire GAME is messy.
Please, do yourself a favor and play with your friends, because having the computer control the other two characters is an ORDEAL. They are IMMENSELY stupid.
They have no sense of intelligent movement. I know its hard to program Artificial Intelligence to have characters avoid attacks and everything, but it seems this game is worse than usual.
But the absolute Number 1 most frustrating thing is that they GET STUCK BEHIND ANYTHING. You see that small pebble lying on the ground there? THEY'LL GET STUCK BEHIND IT.
If you've ever played any RPG where you control a party of 3 (plenty of those around), you'll see that the 2nd and 3rd character tend to follow the leader in his EXACT footsteps, even if you decide to make a silly little dance (I'm easily entertained), but this is GOOD, cos it means they will follow you EXACTLY whereever you go.
Not so Secret of Mana. Presumably because each character has to be able to move on his own during battles, they are pretty much programmed to go where they please at ANY TIME. Many, MANY was the time where I would just move, well, anywhere and the second character ALWAYS follows like a good Sprite, but the one in the rear (and it's ALWAYS the BLOODY Girl, which just goes to show the reality of the engine I guess) tends to get stuck behind Trees, Walls, Stones, Tables, Chairs, Desks, Bushes, FLOWERS, ANY BLOODY THING. So you have to walk back to slap her in the face and then move on a little bit more slowly.
God, that's annoying.
Also, when you're being surrounded by enemies, FORGET about running, cos the computer is too stupid to follow you at that time. They figure: "Hey, the leader is running off, that must mean he wants US to deal with this horde of baddies! Let's do it!"
Oh, the Cups of Wishes I've spent.
But that's not all, I actually managed to get stuck MYSELF as well. Sometimes you're just wandering around, minding your own business, only to suddenly get stuck in a part of the scenery. It HAPPENS.
First time it was the computer actually (YES, THE GIRL) getting stuck, not behind, but IN a wall. I mean. IN A FRIGGIN WALL. Fortunately, there was one of those posts around that you can use your Whip on, which automatically gathers your entire party to one spot when you get close to it, no matter WHAT they're stuck in or behind.
Second time, it was ME getting stuck in between some rocks, I still don't know how I did that, and I had to use the Magic Rope to escape back to the beginning of the Dungeon. VERY nice.
Really, every game is allowed to have some bugs, I've been told it's IMPOSSIBLE to get them all out, but some games are considerably sloppier than others.
Now a SuperNES has cartridges, which are generally less accident-prone than CD's, but I'm not lying or exaggerating when I say this game has crashed or bugged on me considerably more often than most CD games I own.
Yes. It actually CRASHED on me once. It just froze. In the middle of the final dungeon. Great Job Square.
It's all the more frustrating if you consider the fact that, when the game IS functioning properly, it's absolutely awesome. It's SO damn good, that I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to most of the problems at hand here, but there are some minor things about the game itself that should've been improved.
For one thing, buying new equipment is a bit unclear. I mean, generally speaking, the most expensive item is the strongest, but you can't see any status improvements in the shopping window (the Ring Menu System rules all, though), and you have no idea whether it's an actual improvement over what you're already wearing.
Secondly, and this annoys me to no end, there are SO many empty and completely USELESS rooms in this game. Empty houses, okay, people need to go shopping sometimes, right? But empty rooms in dungeons and castles, I mean, WHY!?
Use that excess memory for something USEFUL dammit. Like BUGFIXING for instance.
Shit.
Seriously, without all these stupid things, this game would've scored a 10 probably, but as it is, I'm letting it off with a 9+, for being just really good.
They should still make more games like this though, they should just try testing it first.
posted by Ingen! @ 10:42 AM
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