While most collections are products of profit and/or preservation, Collection of Mana advances the Western Mana canon with its surprise inclusion of Trials of Mana. This feels like a minor miracle and, despite the collection's austere packaging, sparks hope that Square-Enix may disentomb more of their perceived gems that never made the voyage westward.
Games in the Mana series center around the concept of balance. Usually, an impending environmental cataclysm squares off against the elemental forces that represent the universe-balancing force of Mana. Weave this conflict around a few intertwined destinies of a ragtag sort, throw a couple of characters down a waterfall, and you basically have a Mana game.
Collection of Mana bundles the first three entries of the action-RPG series on the Nintendo Switch — and aside from a music player, not much else. The package lacks the features and extras that make retro collections feel complete and worthwhile — there’s no instruction manual scans, concept art, interviews, or any scans of those weird claymation versions of the Secret of Mana heroes that were seen in the marketing materials at the time.
On the other hand, while most collections of this sort are products of profit and/or preservation, Collection of Mana advances the Western Mana canon with its surprise inclusion of Trials of Mana, which previously was only officially released in Japan on the Super Famicom in 1995 as Seiken Densetsu 3. For a longtime fan of the series, this feels like a minor miracle and even sparks a bit a hope that we may see Square Enix lean more heavily on its catalog of perceived gems that never made it westward.
Final Fantasy Adventure
The original Seiken Dentestsu was released as Final Fantasy Adventure in North America in 1991 for the Game Boy. It’s not easy to pass judgement on a twenty-eight year old Game Boy game without fully disclosing the fact that I’ve played this game six or seven times as a content-starved eleven year old. RPGs were scarce in the early 1990s, especially action RPGs. Final Fantasy Adventure ultimately helped to define my tastes in video games — a plot driven with simple set-pieces, real time combat, and exploration of a (seemingly) sprawling world.
And even after twenty-eight years, Final Fantasy Adventure strikes the nostalgia chord in all ways games from that era tend to do. Every note, every plot beat, and even the way the weapons awkwardly protrude from the character sprite during attack animations feel familiar. And to really drive it home, Final Fantasy Adventure includes a Game Boy filter, complete with green tint and scanlines.
Final Fantasy Adventure isn’t an essential piece of the Square-Enix lexicon, but is it a well-made game from an era that was lite on action RPGs. At its core, Final Fantasy Adventure features simple, top-down traversal, a reasonably varied set of weapons with unique behaviors, and a layer of concepts that would become ubiquitous in modern games: stat-allocation; AI companions; and real-time combat. The writing and characters don’t escape the era — it’s mostly bland fantasy drivel, but the mere presence of plot twists is something of note from such an old game.
Independent of nostalgia, Final Fantasy Adventure is not much more than a neat piece of history, but its inclusion in the collection is certainly welcome.
Secret of Mana
Perhaps one of the more beloved games in Square Enix’s library, Secret of Mana helped to define what an action RPG could be. It would’ve been nice to see some of the visual filtering options featured in Final Fantasy Adventure, but, even without a CRT filter, Secret of Mana withstands the test of time in pixel-perfect form, especially on the Switch’s portable mode. The character sprites of the three main adventurers are full of life and personality that transcends the limitations of the Super Nintendo.
The balance of Secret of Mana’s moment-to-moment action feels like the result of years of testing and iteration, consistently giving you enough time to breath between bouts of action. By requiring the player to wait about two seconds to fully recover from a weapon strike, Secret of Mana finds a rhythm in its combat that strikes a very neat balance between its action and jRPG inspirations. Should the player choose to execute the attack prior to the attack “resetting” to 100%, a weaker attack can help keep an enemy stun-locked for a brief moment. As your characters become more skilled with weapons, they can charge up for more devastating attacks and combos.
Secret of Mana came along in an era of random encounters and turn-based combat. Its contrasting style was refreshing. With no overworld map (aside from air travel), traversal creates a connectedness between areas. Though it’s simply a network of connected screens with a pretty limited set of biomes, there’s feeling of sprawl to Mana’s world that makes its weird, playful world feel large and connected.
The tinge of weirdness (rescue Santa, fighting pumpkins, etc.) that hovers over Secret of Mana’s otherwise rote fantasy world gives it a personality that blends well with its terrific pacing and balance. Though it’s a fairly straightforward plot about a band of heroes navigating a pre-apocalypse to reawaken elemental spirits, Secret of Mana’s balances traversal and combat to create an unmatched feel of sprawl and adventure.
Trials of Mana
Certainly the most ambitious game in the collection, Trials of Mana asks the player to pick three of six main characters and effectively weaves the story around your choices. This is an ambitious feature — even modern takes on the jRPG genre like Octopath Traveler are still trying to stick the landing — but Trials of Mana manages to navigate the nuance by sticking to a straightforward plot that pits the forces of Mana against those would love to undo it (and not much else).
Trials of Mana takes risks to iterate upon the Mana formula, but by doing so, it flies a bit too close to the sun, taking a few steps backward in areas where its predecessor shined. The added complexities are Forged in the age of robust instruction manuals, in-game explanation for Trials of Mana’s many layers is completely absent — there’s not a ton of in-game context that helps you draft your first party, allocate stat points, change classes, or understand the complexities of its calendar cycle. This would have been a perfect opportunity to feature a digital manual as part of the collection.
The character and monster sprites are detailed and expressive, but the muted color palettes can look a bit muddy and confusing in spots — it took me a couple of hours before I could tell where the beastman Kevin’s face began and where it ended. Still, Trials of Mana projects a pleasing aesthetic that doesn’t abandon the weirdness established in the previous games. There are still plenty of mushroom men to kill and cat people to talk to.
Combat doesn’t flow with the same fluidity that Secret of Mana perfected, often giving in to a more disjointed, mashy feel. The attack-and-recharge system is gone in favor a very limited brawler system that turns the well-considered strikes of Secret of Mana into a crowded beat ‘em up at times. Characters only have access to their own special set of weapons, and you’re stuck doing the same few combos in most battles. Even when layering in the special attacks unlocked by the rather extensive class change system, the action just doesn’t reach a point where it feels like any sort of mastery is required to progress, beyond the occasional need to grind for experience points.
Despite a more diverse set of kingdoms and factions that are, of course, very much at odds with one another, the world of Trials of Mana doesn’t always feel as physically connected as it could. The game’s penchant for disjointed and occasionally claustrophobic traversal can disrupt the sense of adventure when traveling to the next destination. The outdoor spaces are often too small, with only one or two brief monster encounters before the transition to the next screen. The excessive fades to black create a noticeable disruption to the game’s pacing — in one instance, I counted six transitions when traveling from one town to the next.
Trials of Mana is an ambitious game with robust and synergistic systems that offer a tremendous amount of replayability — it’s a real shame that this wasn’t released in the West at a time when action RPGs were few and far between. Even without the benefit of nostalgia, Trials of Mana still manages to capture a playful sense of adventure, but the balance between combat, traversal, and storytelling is often quite unremarkable.
