YMMV / Secret of Mana

• Awesome Boss: For a game notorious for featuring bosses that range from braindead easy to infuriating, the final boss the Mana Beast manages to combine traits from both ends to somehow offer a unique and refreshing battle right at the end. For starters, it has Mana Reflector so forget about your usual magic spam strategy, but unlike similar bosses with that trait the fight is confined to a single screen so you can't even heal/buff yourself without helping the Beast instead. In other words, it leads the dance here, and the players have to adapt their strategy and timing based on whether the Beast is on screen/in range or not, adding a welcomed layer of depth on top of a visually spectacular fight. Also, by making the Beast vulnerable to only Randi's Mana Sword it enforces team roles on the characters in a game that had to this point made them feel pretty samey, turning Randy, Prime, and Popoi into a Damager, Healer, Tank combo. And let's not forget that the battle happens directly after the penultimate boss, so even fighting Thanatos becomes an exercise in parsimony to keep precious resources for the real fight. It almost feels like it becomes a completely different game; in fact it's practically a preview of what Trials of Mana would eventually be with its more distinct characters and involved boss fights.
• Awesome Music: Courtesy of Hiroki Kikuta, and widely considered as one of the best soundtracks ever. (The names used here are from the official OST on iTunes; some songs have other translations.)
  • 'What the Forest Taught Me', 'The Dark Star' (also worded Star of Darkness), 'Ceremony', 'Prophecy', 'The Second Truth from the Left', and 'The Oracle' topping the list.
  • Has an excellent final boss song, "Meridian Dance". This one seems to have influenced the songs "Nuclear Fusion" and (more obviously) "Meridian Child" from the sequel, again composed by Kikuta.
  • "Fear of the Heavens", the opening theme. But suffice to say — there's a reason that the composer was the second credit given, immediately after the programmer.
  • Leave Time for Love (AKA Give Love Its Rightful Time; probably actually intended to be "Time Enough for Love", as it shares its Japanese title with the novel and Kikuta has a history of using Literary Allusion Titles)
  • Despite the Broken Base surrounding the remake's OST, one remix nearly everyone agrees is great is 'Secret of the Arid Sands', which some feel is even better than the original version.
  • Despite actually going unused in the main game, the alternate versions for “Danger!” and “The Oracle” are generally acclaimed to be vastly more improved than the very base breaking versions used for the remakes, some saying even better than the originals.
  • Some remixed tracks from the remake have been positively received, such as "Dancing Animals", "Mystic Invasion", "A Wish", "Did You See the Ocean?", "Flight Into the Unknown", "Steel and Snare", "Prophecy", and "Meridian Dance". Conversely, a few particularly prominent songs in the game (in particular, "The Boy Heads Into the Wilderness", "Danger", "Leave Time for Love", and "The Oracle") have received divisive rearrangements.
  • The 2018 version of "Still of the Night" is regarded as one of the most beautiful song on the entire soundtrack. While it is considered not as ethereal and mysterious as the original, both versions are well liked.
  • This review humorously argues that it might be helpful to think of the 2018 OST not so much as the OST of the 2018 Video Game Remake Secret of Mana but instead as the 2018 arrangement album of the 1993 video game Secret of Mana. The frequent overlap of the best tracks on the remake OST with Long Song, Short Scene no doubt didn't help its reception at all: several arrangements that go on for four minutes or longer before repeating are used in scenes much shorter than that, resulting in many players completely missing many of the most compelling sections of the new arrangements. Add in some grating synth voices and questionable arrangement decisions on a handful of songs used often in the early game, and you wind up with a soundtrack whose considerable merits have wound up commonly undervalued.
• Breather Boss:
  • Blue Spike, a Palette Swap of Spikey Tiger from the early game, is pretty much the same fight apart from stronger stats, a lot of HP, and the (randomly non-functional) ability to turn your party members into Moogles. By this point in the game, however, ample spam of any magical attacks from Popoi can turn him into ash, and Primm can heal your party while an optional Moogle Belt allows you counter the status effect. The only attacks that should threaten you at all are his pouncing bite and his Fireball attack. If you've brought the best gear up to this point from the Gold City just beforehand and have kept up on your levels, it's a bit of a Catharsis Factor as it's all too easy this time.
  • While Blue Dragon is not much of a breeze, he’ll be definitely easier to fight than Thunder Gigas. His attacks won’t be a threat, doesn’t have as much defense as the previous boss, and while he has the same attack, Blitz Breath, it’s definitely not as dangerous as Thunder Gigas’ version.
• Breather Level: The Moon Palace is easy peasy. No bosses, no threatening enemies (unless you count the MP-absorbing Malablues); just a simple 'find the orb and cast magic' puzzle. It's only complicated by the infinite-scrolling (but still relatively small) 'outer space' room.
• Complete Monster: Thanatos, once an Evil Sorcerer who sold his soul to the underworld for the prospect of dark powers and immortality, starts the game off by manipulating the corrupt emperor Vandole into throwing his entire country into a brutal war to rise up the ancient superweapon the Mana Fortress. Having already lived centuries by surfing from body to body, Thanatos weasels his way into a position as one of Vandole's loyal servants and has countless innocent lives from the kingdom of Pandora kidnapped and zombified to lure out the noble warrior Dyluck, magically turning the man into his slave and planning to use him as his new, permanent host. Eventually murdering Vandole himself once he lives out his use, Thanatos rises up the Mana Fortress and uses it to vaporize the Mana Tree whilst cackling, preventing the heroes from undoing the chaos he's wrought through his manipulations and planning on using the Mana Fortress to enslave the world to his cruel will, to the point of even possessing Dyluck at the final battle and forcing him into killing himself to prevent Thanatos from using his body.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Chobin Hoods (especially if you decide to go to the Haunted Forest early to avoid losing Primm) and Robin Foots in the remake. They shoot faster and more accurately than in the original game, as they're not limited by being able to shoot in only four directions. Coupled with high damage output, a group of 2 or 3 can easily pin you down and whittle your HP away.
  • Werewolves are the first enemies you encounter who can prove a bit challenging, they hit pretty hard for that point in the game and can buff their attack further or heal themselves. It doesn't help you usually have to fight these things in cramped spaces. If you do end up losing Primm by going to Gaia's Navel before braving the Chobin Hoods in the forest, Randy and Popoi have to take two of them on at once on their own to rescue her, which is potentially one of the hardest fights in the game.
  • Most slimes qualify as they always inflict some status effect which is HP-draining, paralyzing, or both. Not only do they constantly spawn new slimes as you chop them down, but their raw durability make it a real pain to do so. And they deal Collision Damage unlike most enemies in the game, meaning that melee attacks will likely backfire.
  • The first time you head to Ice Country, you might not be prepared for the Howler wolves. Not only do their pounce attacks have obnoxiously-high stunlock potential, to the point that they may just pounce you against a wall repeatedly as soon as you recovered from the last one and shave off chunks of HP, but they're surprisingly durable. They will likely annihilate an unprepared party. Especially if you skipped over going to the desert first and didn't upgrade your gear there or in Todo Village.
  • The list of various monsters that Shape Shifters can spawn includes Eggplant Men, who not only have powerful spells (defensive, offensive, and healing), but THEY can spawn Needlions, an enemy with an absurdly-high Attack stat. The earliest you can face them is during Trial of Courage and they can easily kill you in one to two hits at that point in the game (tellingly, you don't start encountering Needlions as naturally-occuring enemies until the Pure Land, much later in the game). Better hope you powered up Sylphid (and even then, you might all be dead before you know what hit you).
    • Though in the Trial, you have two mercies: the Shape Shifters might not spawn the Eggplant Men, and dying (at least, one time) will just send you back to the start instead of giving you a game over. Perhaps a crueler placement is the Underground City, where a lone Eggplant Man is hanging out in an area just before the dungeon's end. At the end of a hallway filled with weaker monsters from an earlier area^note Said area is a subway, the game world implied to be one that is happening after one or two After the End situations which destroyed civilizations of advanced technology save for a few surviving artifacts the people of the world don't understand, and the superweapon that the villains are trying to re-awaken. Said Subway is filled with Ghouls, zombie enemies from a few dungeons back that are easy now, the implication being these are the undead remnants of people who had been in the subway before and while civilization was destroyed. If you don't know what's coming, you can find yourself going from squishing monsters to being squished yourself, and unlike the Trial, that means reloading a save and redoing a fairly long dungeon with a boss and no save points in it all over again.^note Just to drive home how damn unfair the attack power of the Needlions is; assuming basic levelling, when you encounter them in the Trial or the City, you should have something between 350 and 400 HP, and a maximum extra amount of 252 Defense from the best possible buyable equipment, barring lucky random rare drops. The Needlions can knock half to 2/3 of that off in a single hit, and can possibly hit you multiple times or hit characters one after another. When you actually go to the Pure Lands where the Needlions spawn proper, you can upgrade to new buyable armor that gives you a total extra defense of 470. Which is what is needed to turn their attacks from 'nearly lethal' to 'painful'. This is the same armor, listed below under Difficulty Spike, that you need to survive the Pure Lands at all.
  • The monsters in the Pure Land hit quite hard if you forget to buy updated gear from Neko prior to landing there. The Griffin Claws in particular still hit hard even if you do.
  • Being the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the Mana Fortress is loaded with these.
    • Fiend Heads have 1150 HP, which is almost twice that of any other non-boss enemy in the game, and they're MookMakers that continuously spawn Dark Stalkers.
    • Terminators^note Mace Menaces in the remake have such high defense that you won't be doing more than scratch damage with physical attacks unless you're lucky enough to land a critical hit (although they are quite vulnerable to the Sprite's Shade magic).
    • Master Ninjas are the worst. What they lack in defense or HP, they more than make up for in damage output. They can do several hundred damage in a single hit to even a high-level character with the best equipment, and a critical hit is almost certain to kill you outright even at maximum HP. And their first move is almost always to cast either Stone Saber (with which they can kill you even faster by petrifying you) or Wall (which keeps you from just nuking them from a safe distance).
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Elinee's Castle is when the game's difficulty starts to pick up. Depending on what you choose you'll have to face the Werewolves to save Primm and coming here underleveled, underequipped or without enough healing items will get you killed. Inside the castle you'll fight lots of Chobin Hoods, more Werewolves and then some. Amusingly enough the boss of this area is called Spikey Tiger and is also considered far more difficult than any other boss you faced so far.
  • Again with the Pure Land. If you decided to go straight here after completing the Grand Palace, the enemies and the first boss will kill you quickly. So back to Sunken Continent, find Neko, and buy the very expensive armors. That will make your life easier.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: For how iconic the French translation was with gamers at the time, almost none of the names introduced in Secret were carried over in the following Mana games.^note Only the names of the Spirits survived, which is curious considering the wild Dub Name Change for Salamander (Athanor) and the fact that they still use the literal Woolseyisms for Sylphide and Lumina when the English translations now use the more accurate Jinn and Wisp respectively. Also note that the translation itself took nothing from Mystic Quest though there was almost nothing to carry over anyway. The next game in the series to receive a French translation was Sword of Mana a decade later which introduced brand new naming conventions for enemies, items, and miscellaneous that carry over to this day, including both the IOS port and 3D remake of Secret with a redone and more faithful localization (and an unavoidable Broken Base). Interestingly enough, Collection of Mana features Véronique Chantel's original translation since it is simply an emulated SNES rom and Square-Enix likely judged pointless to rework it when they already had their hands full with localizing Trials, with only slight alterations done to remove some goofy and copyrighted references from the script (most notably Sheex and Fanha, who were originally renamed "Schwarzy" and "Rambo"). This makes the French Collection of Mana quite an Inconsistent Dub between the poorly translated Mystic Quest, the old-school Secret of Mana, and the brand-new Trials of Mana with the regular naming conventions.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Flammie, despite only appearing halfway through the game, became so popular that it reappeared in nearly all of the games in the franchise since and became the Mana equivalent of a Chocobo (that it effectively replaced after Final Fantasy Adventure).
• Game-Breaker:
  • Casting the right offensive spells on a boss not only inflicts far more damage than any of your physical attacks, doing so also stuns it until the spell is finished casting, during which time you can cast another spell and so on until the fight's over. It's telling that That One Boss is the last one you fight without magic. Nerfed slightly in the 2018 remake: while the right magic can still make quick work of most bosses, they can no longer be stunlocked by chaining spells back-to-back.
  • Once you have Luna's spells, Popoi can spam magic to their heart's content thanks to having MP Absorb to recoup the cost afterwards (even from enemies you just defeated, if you have good reflexes). For Primm she has Moon Energy at her disposal which ensures a certain number of attacks will be granted Critical Hits— which pierces most of enemy Defense and Evasion checks capable of turning even Popoi into a melee killing machine.
  • The Spear and Javelin both have weapon levels where they inflict Balloon on enemies, stunning them for a few precious seconds at no MP cost whatsoever. Since they lose the effect after upgrading further, some players will actually recommend keeping them at this level to keep the Balloon effect for longer, even if they do less damage.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Secret of Mana is considered a cult classic in many PAL regions (Europe and Oceania) and is usually ranked high on lists of top RPGs, SNES games, and even all-time video games. For starters, very few SNES RPGs were ever localized in Europe due to high translation costs (which also unfortunately excluded Australia who only got a handful of titles such as Terranigma). Some of the most highly-regarded SNES games of all times like Super Mario RPG, EarthBound, Final Fantasy VI, or Chrono Trigger were never released in Europe at all until some eventual ports, remakes, or Virtual Console re-releases, but most remained untranslated. For the occasion, the game received a sizeable marketing push from Nintendo for these regions and was sometimes even bundled with a full strategy guide. The translations are also fondly remembered for their wackiness and numerous Woolseyisms such as Claude M. Moyse's German translation or Véronique Chantel's French translation.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any enemy capable to creating more enemies fall squarely in this category. Fighting them can end up in a messy battle where you're trying desperatly to squash the Mook Maker as fast as possible and may the game have mercy on you if said enemy has resistance to magic.
  • The Blats are encountered early in the game. They can cast Balloon on the boy (your only party member if you didn't recruit Primm before entering Gaia's Navel), preventing him from acting for a few seconds, which is more of an annoyance than a threat.
  • Drops, the slime enemies, especially fire and ice ones. They are immune to melee weapons when they're splitting in two, have obnoxiously high Evasion and the blue and red variants can freeze or set you on fire respectively.
  • On that note, any enemy which is hard to hit with melee attacks due to their high defense or evasion. Some of the monsters in the remake will seemingly dodge 90% of your attacks.
  • The Possessed Chairs in the Witch's Castle may give you a hard time if you aren't careful. They're capable of trampling over your whole team, dealing a lot of damage in the process. And they will probably stunlock you too. It doesn't really help that there are two of them right before the Spikey Tiger boss.
    In Soviet Russia, chairs sit on you!
  • Enemies capable of using Engulfing attacks, like Robin Foots and Heck Hounds, as they can incapacitate a character for several precious seconds all while leaving them wide open for any attack.
• Goddamned Boss: Many bosses qualify for this:
  • Wall Face. It has three eyes, which you’ll have to painstakingly take down. Since he can take time between opening eyes, it’ll make it more cumbersome. Oh, and he’ll close in if your party doesn’t kill it in time, making it a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • The Jabberwocky. It has 950 HP, and it's not weak to either of the Elements you have at the point. It can also knock your party unconscious with its attacks, and can inflict poison to your whole party if you didn’t get the Cobra Bracelet beforehand at Pandora.
  • Boreal Face, the first boss of Ice Country, is a real handful for first time players due to the fact he deals contact damage and is nigh invulnerable against magic. While he isn't tough if you have a few levels in one or two ranged weapons until you realize this you have to deal with a boss that swap places all the time and loves to bombard you with pumpkin bombs.
  • The Ice Gigas, unlike the Fire Gigas, doesn’t use as much chain attacks, but it’s still annoying due to casting ice saber on your weapons, granting them ice elemental damage, which it is immune to.
  • The Vampire. It’s next to impossible to beat without magic, so you’ll need to use as many Fairly Walnuts as you can. He can also knock your party members unconscious, and has no elemental weaknesses^note that you can exploit, anyway; he's actually weak to Lumina, who you can't possibly have at this stage of the game.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Using the Moogle Belt or the Imp Hammer causes you to inflict or cure said condition. In-between the three seconds it takes for the items to take effect, you're invincible. This can be exploited during the final boss's charge attacks, effectively making it a lame duck unless it's in front of you (which is also the only time you can attack it).
  • Certain weapon charge levels will move your character great distances, and can therefore be used to noclip through plot barriers.
  • By swapping a max-charged, high-leveled weapon with a low-leveled weapon and back again, it's possible to charge all the way up to Level 9.
  • There's a way to "load" a saved game into the beginning segment of the game and pick up an extra Sword Orb. This allows you to upgrade to the Mana Sword without casting the Last Disc Magic.
  • There's a way to break Thanatos' AI during his fight, causing him to "headbang" repeatedly.
  • It's unknown if it's an intentional mechanic or not, but in the 2018 Remake, if you heal an ally who takes fatal damage shortly before the spell goes off, they'll briefly get the "X sees the reaper!" status before being healed. Similarly, in the original SNES version, if a heal spell is cast while a party member has 0 HP, they'll be healed, and you won't have to use a Cup of Wishes or cast Revivify.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The culmination Character Development all three characters experience during the inn conversations in the remake as they progress from Vitriolic Best Buds to True Companions.
  • In the original game, when the three characters reach the Mana Tree, and their journey's almost over, they take a moment to reflect on how glad they were to have met and come this far together.
  • When a Brainwashed and Crazy Dyluck attacks and kills Primm without warning, Randi and Popoi immediately go on the offensive.
  Popoi: Bring her back, NOW!
  Randi: You can't be serious! She LOVES you! I can't handle this!
• Hype Backlash: The game has received a noticeable amount of criticism over the years for having aged rather poorly, and that all the industry-defining features it brought do not excuse the quantity of Scrappy Mechanics that plague the game. Even the art and music, easily the most universally praised aspects of the game, have suffered from the comparaison with its previously obscure sequel Trials of Mana when it was made more easily accessible to a general audience decades later. Some would go as far as to argue that it is even worse in retrospect than Final Fantasy Adventure which has a more limited by tighter gameplay loop.
• It Was His Sled: Most people even vaguely familiar with the game know that you meet and eventually ride a giant-sized Flammie. It is such an iconic moment that not even Square-Enix cares about hiding it and puts it in several promotional material, even on the cover for Collection of Mana.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Healing power of Undies! ^ExplanationA Mondegreen of Primm calling for the "Healing power of Undine!" in the remake.
  • Liévro se fait rosser ! ^Explanation"Rabite is getting wallopped", which is the French script's unusual way to describe Critical Hits.
• Misblamed: You can't fault Ted Woolsey for the game's spotty localization. He only had thirty days to translate the entire game from Japanese to English, adding to the game's Troubled Production.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The series of explosions a boss makes when dying and the final sound effect when they disintegrate, especially if you've defeated an especially difficult and/or annoying boss.
  • The level up or weapon/magic skill level up are nothing short of wonderful to hear.
• Narm: While in 'hands grabbing from the floor' form, Thanatos' AI will occasionally glitch, making him look like he's head-banging to the music.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • A few kinds. Audio, in the form of The Curse (and Ceremony quickly turns into this given whom it becomes associated with over time); plot-wise, in the form of Geshtar the MechRider being turned somehow into a "living magical mechanism" (MechRider 3) by Thanatos. Just what that entails and what actually took place in the process of this isn't detailed, but leaving it up to the player's imagination makes it so much worse; more plot with regard to why Thanatos has to pull Grand Theft Me every so often. Dyluck explains in the Japanese script that although your enemy's soul is indestructible, the bodies he takes over are definitely not, and they start to break down once he takes over. For a super colourful, adorable SNES game, Secret of Mana is almost startlingly chaotic when you think on it for a while.
  • In the original game, the final boss, the Mana Beast, looked too cute to be considered a serious threat. In the remake, its design is legitimately terrifying.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • It's pretty hard to take Tropicallo/Boreal Face seriously when you are basically facing a giant sentient pineapple with googly eyes and Goofy Buckteeth. It's not even a particularly hard boss on its own and most of the danger comes from being assisted by Brambler.
  • The Tonpole family tree. It is actually pretty funny to stumble upon an harmless tadpole and suddenly hearing intense boss music. Even in their evolved lizard forms, it still feels like fighting slightly jacked up regular mooks due to their diminutive size.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • It's basically multiplayer Legend of Zelda. You can see how back in its heyday that would have been a big deal.
  • Where to begin? The unprecedented stunning visuals, the music, and the fact that a fair chunk of the game's plot was recycled by Final Fantasy VI, the fact that it pushed the hardware of the SNES to its absolute limit, the "Action Grid" which lets you program the combat AI of your party members (one of the first games to let you do this)... Let's just say everything that made this game great was just the baseline by the next console generation.
• Player Punch:
  • Finding out that the main character's mother was the Mana Tree, and that the ghost he saw after removing the sword was that of his father. And this reveal takes place immediately after Thanatos destroys the tree.
  • Flammie's parents. Minor compared to the first one, but still catches you off guard.
  • Just about anything involving Primm and Dyluck, but especially Thanatos forcing Dyluck to kill her (she gets better, but still), and Dyluck's final fate- sacrificing himself to deny Thanatos a body.
• Polished Port: The iOS version (which was later ported to Android) fixes some bugs and uses an interface designed to take advantage of a touch screen: instead of using an on-screen D-pad to navigate through menus, you just touch your choice as if it were a native iOS app. Sadly, multiplayer was cut.
• Porting Disaster: The initial release of the 2018 HD Remake (February 15) was the start of an unmitigated disaster. Control issues, unnecessary and corny voice acting, extra fluff that doesn't contribute to the story, poorly-programmed bosses, schizophrenic difficulty with regular enemy mobs, unreliable AI for your allies, freezing, crashing, save corruption, game breaking bugs and other issues that didn't exist in the SNES version. In short, the 2018 HD Remake was all hat and no cattle. And the price tag was obscene for a 25-year-old game. The remake didn't sell very well as a result, word of mouth and bad reviews ensuring that people would stay away from it. Square Enix realized how badly they failed with this remake and put that much more effort into the Trials of Mana remake. After a series of patches ironed out most of the technical issues (controls, crashes, bugs etc) the remake has been much better received. The voice acting isn't too bad, the extra party interaction scenes add some character development to what was originally a comparatively story-light game, and while the remixed music is hit-or-miss, at least some tracks are good and you have the option to switch between the original and the remixed soundtrack.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: It is possible to complete the game without using any attack magic. Though this will make the boss battles much harder.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If you happened to read the instruction manual for the English translation of this game, you'd find that a few of the game’s shortcomings are essentially admitted by the developers. Your characters' affinity with each Mana Spirit levels up through use. It takes many castings, however. The manual will instruct you to level up these spells by repeatedly casting them on basically nothing. You will have to level up anywhere from 1-8 Spirits for the girl, and then another 1-8 Spirits for the Sprite, resting at an Inn many times. (Weapons level up in a similar fashion but require no rest.) And you will need to do this each time a new Spirit is acquired.
  • Anyone who's played the original in single-player will quickly lose count of the number of times their AI-controlled companions have gotten snagged on an enemy or a piece of scenery, usually requiring the player to either backtrack or switch control to the other character to unsnag them. This was one of the biggest improvements made by the remake, as you're no longer forced to remain nearby to your companions, and once they're off-screen you can just open and close the menu to make them respawn right next to you.
  • Physical combat leaves a lot to be desired in this game. Technically you can attack at any time like in The Legend of Zelda, but in practice your damage and hit rate drop off so much when your stamina isn't at 100% that attacking below that level is basically useless. Enemies are also subject to the same evasion and Mercy Invincibility mechanics that your party members are, but (at least in the SNES version) the game gives no feedback on a hit unless it was successful. Did you miss the enemy's hitbox? Did the hit connect, but the enemy made their evasion roll to dodge it? Or was the enemy still recovering from the last hit (which may have been from one of your AI-controlled allies)? Or did you do everything right but not have enough damage to overcome the enemy's defense? The game tells you none of this, which can result in you watching your party flail uselessly at the enemy without any idea how to fix it.
  • Of all buff and debuff spells in the game, the only one that doesn't notify you when it wears off is also the one where you need to know this the most- Wall. If Wall wears off when you're not expecting it, you can suddenly be blindsided by an enemy attack spell that you were confident you were safe from. Even more annoyingly, you can't cast any other friendly spells on an ally, from weapon buffs to Cure Water, until their Wall wears off- and you have no idea how long this will take. This can actually make Wall a liability in boss battles, because if an ally takes physical damage from a boss and you need to heal them but you cast Wall on them earlier, you can't cast Cure Water or you risk healing the boss instead, and are forced to fall back on your limited stock of healing items. Making matters worse, buffs have different durations on different characters (Randi's buffs always wear off first), so you can't even use Randi suffering an enemy spell as a hint that Primm or Popoi can be safely targeted again. This was actually made worse in the remake, since at least in the original if all 3 members of your party had Wall on and there were no enemies on screen to receive the reflected magic then a friendly spell with nowhere to bounce to would penetrate Wall to let you prepare for action ahead of time or heal up after a fight is over. In the remake the spell is always negated. Adding insult to injury, in the remake an enemy spell cast on a player with Wall up still immobilises them while the spell animation plays out before the Wall triggers and recasts it on an enemy, while in the original Wall just let you straight-up ignore enemy magic.
• Sequel Displacement: The game is far more popular than its predecessor Final Fantasy Adventure, and would define the rest of the Mana series.
• Signature Scene:
  • Mantis Ant, the game's sudden and intense Warm-Up Boss. Between its striking design, its association with the game's boss theme, Jema talking to you and resurrecting you during the fight, and Elliott cowering in the corner, it became engraved into young players' brains despite (or rather because of) being completely staged and safe for beginner players.
  • Taking a trip with the Cannon Brothers is probably one of the most remembered aspect of this game, half thanks to the impressive use of Mode 7 for the time and half due to the sheer fun and absurdity of being a Human Cannonball.
• That One Achievement:
  • The achievement for getting all weapons forged to the maximum level, not counting the Mana Sword because that counts as maxed out when Dryad's magic is used on it. The problem is that the final orbs are only dropped by certain enemies in the Mana Fortress. And when an enemy dies, the possibility of a chest drop is random, as is its contents. This can take hours to achieve. Making matters worse, two of the weapons (the axe and the glove) only go up to level 7 through normal game progression^note it's possible the last two axe and glove orbs were supposed to drop from the two intermediary bosses in the Mana Fortress, Buffy/Vampire King and Dread Slime, but instead they're the only bosses in the game apart from the final bosses to not drop an orb, meaning you need to farm two orbs for them in the Mana Fortress to get them to level 9.
  • Possibly worse than the one for forging all weapons are the three for acquiring every piece of armour (helmets, body armour, and accessories respectively) in the game, largely due to there being a number of pieces that are rare drops from enemy chests, and in the case of 4 of them, they can only be acquired in the Pure Lands. So if you don't get them before you pass beyond the Blue Dragon's gate and finish the area, you're out of luck. And while they're not quite as rare as the weapon orbs, they're still very hard to get. Particularly galling is the Cockatrice Cap, which is only dropped by Basilisks. Their chest drop rate is absolutely pathetic (maybe 1 in 50 will drop a chest) and even then it's more likely to be a Fairie Walnut. While they normally only spawn in the Ancient City stage of the Mana Palace, don't worry, the Cap is still accessible if you finish the Mana Palace- another one spawns in the Mana Fortress. ONE. Deep in the middle of the Mana Fortress. In the middle of a room filled with other enemies you have to go through to get to it. Farming that one Basilisk is like trying to transport a ton of sand from the front of your house to your backyard using only a pair of tweezers.
  • Not the hardest, but probably the most annoying achievement is the one for visiting all locations on Flammie. Note that this doesn't mean merely visiting all locations that you can have Flammie drop you off at, you have to actually have him do so- and this includes almost every single distinct location in the game. Just counting the start of the game, there's Potos Village (right outside the gate), Potos Village Cannon Travel Center (literally just down the road), Potos Village Outskirts, Neko's and the Water Temple, and that's before you even reach Pandora! It's a grand total of 52 different locations (plus the Mana Fortress), the majority of which you have absolutely no reason to ever return to other than to get the achievement (making every Cannon Travel Center count as its own location is probably the worst part). At least the remake added popup location names that tell you when you've flown over a landing point, but it's still a major chore making sure you don't miss one, forcing you to scour the world looking for it. Adding insult to injury, the achievement is buggy and has a chance of not recognising you as having visited a location even after you've been to it several times.
• That One Boss:
  • Spikey Tiger. Spikey is a serious pain, as it inflicts big damage, moves very quickly, and most of its attacks knock you unconscious. It can also cast fire magic, against which there is no defense. And since this is the last boss you encounter before obtaining magic, you can either a) target it with melee attacks when it jumps down to your level, or b) use the bow or the boomerang, which are only at Level 1. There's also very little room to maneuver, which means that your AI-controlled party members are probably going to die in short order. Thankfully, tweaks to how hitstun works in the remake makes him a lot more manageable if he doesn't abuse the nearby towers and spam magic; the player is able to wear him down much faster instead of back-and-forth struggle of the original.
  • If you don’t know what you’re doing, Fire Gigas is one hell of a boss. He’ll decimate your party VERY quickly, as he can chain cast some fire spells like Lava Wave and Fire Bouquet that hit hard and keep you from acting at all.
  • Lime Slime. It's freakin' huge, taking up most of the screen, and touching it hurts you. Also, it has a pretty high magic defense, so your baseline strategy of spell-spamming isn't very effective.
  • Thunder Gigas. Blitz Breath is your worst nightmare in this fight for sure, causing 400+ damage to a single character. Standing in front of him when he's materialized will also cause him to slam the ground, resulting in you eating a level 7 Thunderbolt.
  • Dread Slime, too. As opposed to shrinking as its health goes down, it instead just keeps growing and growing until it fills up the entire screen. At least it can't hurt you via physical contact, but by that time you'll be stuck between one of the crystals in the arena and Dread Slime itself. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck far away from Dread Slime's weak point, so you'll only be able to damage it with magic. If you run out of MP, you're finished. (If you decide to cast Wall on your characters right away, Dread Slime's Acid Rain repeatedly lowers its own defenses, enough for physical attacks to do damage.)
  • The Dark Lich is deceptively tough. Don't attack him when his hands stick out of the floor; it's done to bait the party, and he can get a Total Party Kill very easily if you hang around his hands, especially if they can knock you unconscious. One of the only ways to win is to stunlock him with magic as long as possible, but this will leave you drained for the upcoming boss fight, which requires both Primm and Popoi to cast magic on Randi.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The remixed soundtrack of the remake is very hit or miss, due to it taking many liberties. While some tracks are fairly well-regarded, others are way more divisive.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Walrusker race that lives in Todo Village. They have no named NPC and no relevance to the plot at all. It's possible that similarly to the Mushrooms of Matango they started as regular enemies with a pacifist splinter faction (since they previously appeared in Final Fantasy Adventure as mooks) before being removed and leaving only the village with no real purpose.
  • Karon, the friendly Robin Foot who serves as The Ferryman for the Moon Palace. Who is he? Why did he deflect? How did come across this high tech ship? Why does he take people to the trippy void that is the Moon Palace of all places? So many questions that will never be answered...
• The Un-Twist: After learning that Randi removed the Mana Sword from the stone, Jema informs him that only The Chosen One should be able to do that. Jema tells you that since Randi is so young, it must be a mistake, and he was only able to remove the sword because the power of Mana had weakened. Guess what? Randi is the Chosen One due to his heroic parentage. Never saw that one coming.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Popoi has no official gender in the original game, period. The Japanese guidebook lists the kid's gender as unknown. The gender of the Sprite is a fiercely-debated topic to this day, although a few line in the English script suggest he's male. In the German translation, the Sprite is actually female and is referred to as "the little kobold girl" (die kleine Koboldin).
  • The Japanese version is...well, Japan has a lot of gender-neutral pronouns. The sprite uses 'oira' as a personal pronoun, and that one's usually used by guys, but tomboyish characters will use it, as well. The Remake, at least in the English translation, uses a gender neutral pronoun anytime anyone refers to the Sprite.
• Woolseyism:
  • Jema is definitely named after the Gemma Knights in Final Fantasy Adventure; "Jema" was a mistranslation. The remake did correct it to Gemma.
  • Gamers who are aware of the L/R shenanigans in Japanese might look at the character of Geshtar and interpret him as a cross-reference to Emperor Gestahl from Final Fantasy VI. In Japanese, the former is named ゲシュタール ("Geshutaaru" if you want to be phonetic about it), whereas the FF6 character is named ガストラ ("Gasutora"). It's very likely that this is another Woolseyism, using the same name while flipping a letter. The name of FF6's emperor was probably intended to translate to English as "Ghastla" (a pun on "ghastly"). The Japanese version of the FF6 soundtrack, bearing in mind the L/R issues, translates his name as "Ghastra".
  • In Japanese, one of the recording orbs at Mandala references Cult Q, a trivia game show. This is changed in English to a reference to Jeopardy!.

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