Secret of Mana 2 - DON'T STEAL GAMES!

I’m going to start by saying that I do not support the theft of games in any way, shape, or form. However, there are times when emulation is the only way to play a certain game. Case in point, Secret of Mana 2. I have fond memories of the first Secret of Mana game. It was a multiplayer, real time combat RPG that I played with my brother and sister when I was young. I got to play the lead character, my sister was the girl and my brother was the sexually ambiguous not-dwarf thing. Imagine my surprise when I learned many years later that a sequel had been released in Japan, but it was never ported over to the U.S. Now some hacker has been nice enough to translate the game so it can be played in English. The only way to play though is on an emulator.

Secret of Mana 2 or Seiken Densetsu 3, as it is known in Japan, was developed by Squaresoft. It was not published in the U.S. and therefore has no U.S. release date. It has no difficulty setting so I’ll claim that I’m playing it on normal.

This is a really cool find and I’m always interested in hacked ROMs like this. Getting to play the older Front Mission games this way is also a treat. This game makes me miss older game styles. Sure 3D is nice and games are looking more realistic, but realistic seems to mean brown and grey. This game is bright and vivid. The colors pop and the sprites look good. They still hold up in quality after all these years. This was Squaresoft’s real heyday. They were inventive and daring, but they didn’t lock themselves into a Japanese stereotype. Sure it had the world is being destroyed by an unknown evil, but that was the premise of many games back in the day.

At the start of the game you get to choose 3 out of 6 characters. You know what this instantly means? Replayability! If this game had been made today then three of those characters would have been DLC that was already on the disk and for a low price of $10 dollars you could have unlocked them. But if you jumped on the pre-order bonus one of them would have already been unlocked, but you still would’ve paid full price to unlock the other two.

Yes I’m still bitter about the War for Cybertron DLC. Pre-order bonus my ass.

So I choose the Valkyrie, the mage, and the beast man. You know what I got to do to these characters? I gave them custom names! You rarely see custom names anymore unless you’re playing an MMO. It helps that there’s no voice over. When you have a custom name and voice over you tend to get awkward interaction like Yuna never directly addressing Tidus in Final Fantasy X. Or everyone is referring to your character as the Grey Warden, or just Warden in Dragon Age. But I enjoyed the chance to name my characters. Kitye, Aura, and Mon respectively.

So far the story has to deal with various kingdoms invading each other to collect these McGuffins called Mana Stones. There are eight scattered across the land and each one is guarded by a spirit. Our heroes’ main goal is to find the stones and with them reach the Holy Mana Tree and this will somehow bring peace to the land! I don’t quite know how that would work but I’m having a fun time trying to do it.