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1993 · SNES · Super Famicom
| Region | Date | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | 6 Aug 1993 | Square |
| North America | Oct 1993 | Square |
| Europe and Australia | 25 Nov 1994 | Nintendo |
An action RPG for three. A boy pulls a rusted sword from a stone, a girl and a sprite join him, and the three set out to stop an empire from raising an ancient flying fortress. You control one character while the computer runs the other two, and with a multitap two friends can take over those characters at any moment, dropping in and out as they like.
Fights happen in real time on an overhead map. Swing and a power gauge empties; wait for it to refill and your next hit lands at full strength. The Ring Command menu pops up around your character and pauses the action for spells, items and gear. Eight weapon types each level up with use, eight Elemental spirits teach magic, and later a small dragon named Flammie carries you over a rotating Mode 7 world.
Square released it in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2 on 6 August 1993, a sequel to the Game Boy game known in the West as Final Fantasy Adventure. Koichi Ishii directed, Nasir Gebelli did most of the programming and Hiromichi Tanaka produced. It was meant for the SNES CD add-on; when that collapsed, the team squeezed it onto a cartridge and, by Ishii's estimate, lost up to 40 per cent of what they had planned, including branching routes and endings.
Ted Woolsey translated it for North America in 30 days, cutting large parts of the script to fit, and it was on shelves by October 1993. It sold over a million copies in Japan that year, shipped 1.83 million worldwide by 2003, and introduced many Western players to console RPGs. Hiroki Kikuta's score, his first, is still one of the most admired on the system.
With friends, it remains a unique pleasure: a full RPG you play side by side, bickering over who gets the next weapon orb. The world is bright and lush, the music is extraordinary, and the flying map still feels magical.
Alone, the seams show. You can tune how the computer-controlled allies behave, but they still need watching. The power gauge makes combat stop-start, some bosses are just endurance tests, and when too much happens at once the game struggles to keep up. The rushed translation leaves the story thin in English. Expect a charming, flawed adventure rather than a polished one.
Secret of Mana let three people into one adventure, and so it gave the 16-bit RPG something the genre had kept to itself: an argument over who gets the next weapon orb. A friend could grab a controller mid-dungeon and put it down for dinner, and the quest carried on without asking permission.
Erving Goffman wrote that a game creates a shared world with its own rules of relevance, and that engrossment together is what makes an encounter feel alive. That is what the multitap bought. Stopping the empire mattered, sort of. Who wasted the last healing item mattered more. Émile Durkheim described collective effervescence, the charged energy of people gathered in one activity, which binds them. A boss falling to three people shouting at once is a small, loud version of it. Alone, the computer allies need watching and the game feels thinner. That is less a flaw than a clue. It was always meant for more than one.
Verdict · 8/10
The co-op RPG of the 16-bit era, with a soundtrack to treasure. Play it with friends and forgive its rough edges.
