Seiken Densetsu 3: A Review

Video games, like anime, have become a product of international exchange. And video games have become one of our most important story-telling mediums. They reflect the interests, concerns, and commercialization practices of their respective time periods. As many of you go, I’m a classic gamer. While I play newer games (I love me some Switch games and JRPGs), I keep returning to the games of the 1990s. Of course, much of that has to do with nostalgia. Many of these games, such as Final Fantasy VI (which hasn’t been surpassed), defined how I think about stories. Despite all the books I’ve read and game’s I’ve played, these games form my basis for comparison. Villains have to compare to Kefka to be any good. Heroes have to compare to Link. Of course, my basis has expanded to include literary heroes and villains, but Kefka remains my supreme standard.

With a theme song like this:

Kefka is a bit hard to top. Sephiroth is just a pansy momma’s boy. Kefka actually WINS in the story.

*cough* I digress.

Now that we live in an emulation and fan-patch age, I’ve played many Japanese games I couldn’t play as a 90s teen. My brother and I recently attempted to play Seiken Densetsu 3, the supposed best in the Secret of Mana series.

The game committed the ultimate sin a game can commit: it wasn’t fun.

Well, it began fun. My brother and I enjoyed hacking and slashing through the game’s vibrant worlds and stellar 16-bit sprites. We saw parallels with another gem of the era: the fabled Chrono Trigger. In fact, some of the sprites appeared recycled from Chrono Trigger. All points in Mana 3’s favor. It also shared similarities with another favorite Secret of Evermore. While Evermore borrowed the engine from Mana, we played it first.The graphics and fun we had glossed over the flaws in Mana 3 for most of the game. It’s cool that you can pick 4 different stories to play through.

But then the flaws cracked the game.

We were trucking through just fine. We only had to stop to grind levels once. Pretty good for a game of this era, although you didn’t have to grind at all in Chrono Trigger, Evermore, and very little in Final Fantasy VI. Still, we expected a little. And then we got to the point where we had to face 8 God Beasts. The game had touched on it briefly in the back story, but suddenly we had a “twist” and had to fight them seemingly out of the blue. Okay, fine. Whatever. After murdering 8 damage sponges that were more annoying than challenging (one fight took up to 30 minutes with little real threat), we were ready for the ending. We fought another damage sponge, the boss before the final, in a rather challenging fight. Cool. That works.

By now we are both losing our interest. The God Beasts disappointed us with their boring designs and far too high HP. The fun factor of the game faded fast, but we were pushing through. The end was in sight. So after we killed the Darth Vader wannabe, we rushed through the door at the back of the boss’s chamber, expecting to see the final boss…

…and we entered another boring cave.

Okay, fine. Whatever. We started slogging through the cave, getting smashed in every fight by cheap instant death attacks and barrages of magic before we even leave the entrance of each room. All the while we see the same handful of enemies. Every room fights the same way.  Our frustration builds as we get lost. Eventually we look up a walkthrough.

Only to learn we wouldn’t be able to kill the final boss when we get there. You see, we had skipped the last class change because it required us to kill these demon critters for a chance at a randomized seed dropping. Then you had to go to various inns and plant them for the item you needed to change your class. My brother and I have terrible luck with RNG. A 10% change of a drop might as well be 0.1% chance. And by now we  just weren’t having fun anymore. At this point, we looked at each other and said screw it. We popped in Super Mario World and played for an hour and had far more fun.

If I can describe Secret of Mana 3 in a word: padded. So much of the game was designed to artificially expand its length. I’m no stranger to backtracking and grinding, but the game required too much of it. It would be fine if the enemies leveled with you. At least, you could remain on the power curve, but they don’t. Many enemies had too many hit points for what they were, and that’s even with exploiting their elemental weaknesses. The entire 8 God Beasts felt designed to pad the game out further. They had little to do with the main story up to that point (unless we missed something).

We both enjoyed Secret of Evermore, but the battle system of Mana 3 wanted to be turned based. Whenever you or the enemy used a skill or spell, the game paused to show the animation. In a turn-based game, that is fine, but in an coop action RPG, the constant pauses became atrocious. Battles devolved to my brother and I mashing the menu buttons in an effort to access it before an enemy attack froze us again. It ended in the game often lurching to catch up: we would attack when at 0 hp or a healing item would fail to heal someone before a fatal hit despite the animation triggering. We eventually learned to work from the queue instead of what was happening on the screen. Now, it could’ve been a result of the emulation, but I don’t believe so. It made the entire battle system dissatisfying as an action RPG. As an old-school RPG player, I prefer menu-based combat anyway.

If Mana 3 was shorter, ending before the God Beasts, we would’ve been fine with the game. After all, it took us 10-12 hours to get to that point. If you played all 4 paths, that would work out to be about the same time it takes to play Chrono Trigger and see all the endings. It would’ve been perfectly reasonable for an RPG of the time. But the game just kept going until it became a chore. Each dungeon had its own limited set of enemies, and the dungeons went on for too long. The battle system wore thin too. We found the most effective method was to just DPS everything down. Yawn.

We had liked the game at first. In fact, we had started playing it and got too busy to continue. We were 8 hours in and decided to restart so we can keep up with the story better. But the game just went on for too long. We actually became angry with the game because of the padding and our rising disappointment. It’s a shame really. Mana 3 has so much to like, yet the repetition and padding ruined the experience for us.