After deciding those fucking flan challenges on Kingdom Hearts 3 were not worth getting the last Keyblade or Platinum, I hopped over to an oldie but goodie: Samurai Warriors 4. Also never platinumed, but damned if I care about some of these redundant requirements they put on trophies.
It's not a new game I was looking at next. I first played Secret of Mana on the Super Nintendo in my preteen years. It's one of the games that bonded me to one of my best friends nearly 25 years ago. We beat it many times over, at that, so while I knew going in that nostalgia was a thick rosy fog on this choice, it's only been about 15 years since I last played the original.
So how does it compare?
The music- I'm glad that it's still... kind of the same. In truth, they really could have just left it alone. I still consider the original a soundtrack masterpiece. I'm not sure what they were thinking, but the remastered music lacked all of the original emotion and was even annoying or distracting at times. I would start humming along and then some odd little noise garbage would ruin it for me.
The battles- I feel like this game was likely handed to new hires here. The original battle system had its issues but somehow they made it worse. There's this funky delay after a blow is landed and subsequent blows are piled on. You can also be nose to nose with an enemy and miss completely. For that matter, a programmed missed blow occurs often enough that the characters seem ridiculously inept. The healing delay is frustrating as well, with enemies easily killing off your character who is unable to move during the healing animation while the enemies have full reign to fuck you up. That being said, the boss strategies are still inventive as ever, even with the setbacks.
The voices- I tried them in both English and Japanese and I sincerely wish there were none, like the original. It could be experience saying this, but the dialogue feels a lot cheesier than I remember too.
The animation- I wanted to like the characters zooming in to animate during dialogue but it's some of the laziest animation I've ever seen. The mouths don't move. At all. The characters line up like a grade school play and don't do that much moving either.
The backgrounds- this is one area that was actually an improvement. The environments are beautiful, brighter and smoother. The only gripe I could pose here is that I feel more boxed in by the invisible walls here. It's like a glorified labyrinth, although that's an overstatement since this isn't a game where you ever get stuck (at least in and of itself) because the maps are pretty simple.
The characters- adding this for those new to the game, but don't expect really deep characters here. the hero is a bumbling young man who stumbles on a legendary sword. You learn he was adopted by the village elder but little else. The ponytail wielding blond is... I don't know, the advisor to the king's daughter so some sort of nobility. She's headstrong and in love with a common though prestigious soldier and her dad convinces the king to send her lover on a doomed mission in the hopes this somehow ever works to convince a girl to marry some asshole he picked for her. Instead, she tells her dad to get bent and unofficially recruits our hero to help her. I went several years without realizing the third character is a boy. It's a Sprite that apparently lost its memory but isn't above conning people. You do find out what happened to them, just like the blond catches up to her lover and the hero... I don't know, just kind of does hero things because heroes do that. Even though I adored the game as a kid, it's mostly because the designs are fun, the music was great and the themes were interesting. The characters are just okay.
DRAGONS!- Flammie is a dragon that helps you. Not getting nearly enough screen time and, like most dragons, is pretty much a sentient vehicle that can fly where nothing else can reach. Still, very exciting to a 12 year old.
Overall? I hate to say this but you're better off just playing the original. I'll play through this one, but I can't help but find it falls short of the original. The only real benefit is the graphics upgrade and it's just not enough to recommend it. Don't pay more than 10-20 bucks for this one either way.
Honestly, I wish they'd do a quality remake of Final Fantasy 6. They've tried to port it and dress it up half-assed many times over but it would be an absolute masterpiece if they gave it an Advent Children makeover. The amount of storytelling that went into even side stories as well as the skin-crawlingly absurd evil jester Kefka made it so. I dream about what the soap opera house bundle of emotions and humor would be with every facial expression captured. Undoubtedly, that's a game that, even with time, never fails to toss me around. Though Umaro and Gogo were tossed in as last minute characters, I imagine they could add more dimension there as well. Especially since the tale of Gilgamesh, Gogo's alter ego, is so ripe for a wild side story.
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