The Shrine

Just to give a bit of insight on how I played the game. I played this game all the way through on multiplayer, and did some stuff single player that didn't progress the story.

I'll start with what I found bad:

1. The AI - when the third player is not occuppied, the AI can be extremely annoying. There is a section in the menu system where you can tell the AI what you want it to do; but this still doesn't seem to work. It is very annoying coming in to deliver a massive blow to a bos creature only to have the AI attack with a standard strike and cancel out the charged attack completely.

2. Unregistered attacks - This is somewhat tied to the previous point, when an enemy is attacked very often any other strikes on the creature are unregistered attacks.

3. Delayed damage - There is a fairly annoying bug where enemies will freeze for a moment in about 50% of the cases, sometimes up to 3 seconds, before damage registers, any other strikes on them at this time will normally go unregistered (but not always it seems).

4. Buggy bosses - Many of the bosses are buggy, the first really annoying one is the wall in Pandora Ruins, it will start moving forward against the characters, even if your characters are powerful enough to destroy it quickly, that doesn't seem to work, when the characters are close enough to attack, the wall will bump into them and they will magically turn around and attack in the wrong direction. The solution to this was magic. There was a giant slime at the end fo the game that expanded to such a large size that no one in the party could actually move, and there was no way to hit him from any point with conventional weapons. There were instances where enemies would charge off screen and get stuck there, leaving no way to strike them.

5. Magic - It is a very highly abusable system, and one of the most annoying magic systems I have ever seen in a game. I tried to make it my goal not to use attack magic throughout the game, but the buggy bosses caused me to reconsider this. It took a long time to kill some of these enemies with magic towards the end of the game, because most spells would only deliver 1 damage. For the most part, aside from heal, magic is completely useless, except in fighting off buggy bosses. For the most part, the magic system makes the game much less fun.

6. Character positions when running around - Even on a 44 inch screen, your characters are running about 2 inches from the edge of it; this results in a lot of enemies hitting the lead character needlessly, it may not seem like a huge deal, but when being subjected to this for the entire game, it gets a little annoying.

7. The story - this game is untypically simple for Square games. It is not as interesting as the first game (Final Fantasy Adventure) in my opinion; and while I originally considered Sword of Mana to be about the level of this game in this regards. Most of the dialogue in this game is completely useless one liners; in fact, the amount of dialogue that is actually usefull can probably fit on half a page to three quarters of a page of wordpad text. It is on the level of Zelda Link to the Past; just with more scenarios. This game is a far cry from Illusion of Gaia, for a comparison to a similar game released around the same time.

8. Slimes are incredibly powerful compared to other enemies of the location - Your going through, slaughtering everything, but then you hit the slimes, the first time you fight them it usually takes 10-15 minutes to kill them off; this does not occur with any other type of enemy in the game. The thing is that they are just arbitrarilly placed like any other enemy, they were meant to be the same difficulty as other enemies... While they're not really hard, they are annoying because it takes forever to kill them, and the AI player will always be running into them even if he is set to keep away.

9. The final boss - Is probably the easiest boss in the game, the most difficult part of the battle is just discovering that you have to have both magic users cast the palm trees spell on the main character.... This thing, and the Crystal in Final Fantasy 2 during the last battle were two rather vague things that Square put into their final battles, and there isn't really adequate description in the game to indicate that this is what you have to do. Luckily most of us here already played the games and know this,just an annoyance that I remembered from my childhood. Once this is discovered, the final boss is simple to defeat... It just takes a while, it is a boring fight and whoever is playing player two (and three) will find it really annoying and will likely whine about it.

10. Towns - Towns were mostly dull locations, each one felt like it was missing a lot, the best town is Empire North Town, but it isn't incredibly interesting. Most towns are very small.

11. Sometimes Orb distribution isn't as functional as it should be. For example, you might miss a bunch of sword orbs and have a really weak sword for most of the game (which happened to me this time) until you hit a treasure chest that will give you 4 sword orbs near the end of the game. This part of the game seemed buggy. Most weapons, I didn't seem to get them nearly to the level that they should have been. Not a huge deal because the game was easy regardless.

General Thoughts:

1. Difficulty - Easy, of all the similar games I have been playing recently (FF4, DQ4, Mario RPG, Suikoden), this one is the easiest of the bunch by quite a bit. It's easier than all the 3D Zelda titles, but probably more difficult than Link to the Past.

2. Time About 10-15 hours.

The Good:

1. Music was excellent, the only issue I had with it is that every song seemed to be 15-45 seconds before it looped.

2. Locations and graphics - There are some hideous places, like the bright neon green grass of Pandora Kingdom... But also some really beautiful cases, like any of the Temples, and the Winter Location which is a very nice looking place. Overall the game is fairly pretty.

3. Multiplayer - It is one of the few existing fantasy adventure games of this style that offers a multiplayer (Gauntlet games and other sorts of games just seem to lack something). Combined with the music, and graphics, and knowledge of all the bugs and issues I mentioned in the bad section, it makes for a rather enjoyable game. It has a very casual feel to it overall, I wouldn't recommend tackling the game single player otherwise you are missing the best part of the game.

Conclusion: Its a game that is worth its pricetag if you have friends to play it with. I don't regret buying it, but if you are looking for a good single player expeirence, most of the other Seiken Densetsu titles will serve you better; Final Fantasy Adventure is my top choice, followed by it's re-interpretation in Sword of Mana (I am not sure why, but I found FFA to be more interesting, and more intense, despite the fact that this one has a much more elaborate story, and much higher graphics quality, and re-interpreted music on much better hardware)... Or better yet, pick a more interesting series like Zelda or Soul Blazer.

The main reason SoM had so many bugs is it was originally made for the Sony CD addon to the SNES that fizzled and later became the PlayStation. Square had to modify the game - even taking out entire sections - to get it working on the SNES alone.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:3. Delayed damage - There is a fairly annoying bug where enemies will freeze for a moment in about 50% of the cases, sometimes up to 3 seconds, before damage registers, any other strikes on them at this time will normally go unregistered (but not always it seems).

5. Magic - It is a very highly abusable system, and one of the most annoying magic systems I have ever seen in a game. I tried to make it my goal not to use attack magic throughout the game, but the buggy bosses caused me to reconsider this. It took a long time to kill some of these enemies with magic towards the end of the game, because most spells would only deliver 1 damage. For the most part, aside from heal, magic is completely useless, except in fighting off buggy bosses. For the most part, the magic system makes the game much less fun.

Point 3 made it easy to level build most magics in the game. You could constantly attack a creature over and over again with magic to level build, and it wouldn't register the hits until much later (with a 999 point attack).

To say that magic was both useless and abusive is completely illogical. The latter is more accurate. Once you built up your spells (which was much easier to do than in Evermore), spells did an insane amount of damage.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:6. Character positions when running around - Even on a 44 inch screen, your characters are running about 2 inches from the edge of it; this results in a lot of enemies hitting the lead character needlessly, it may not seem like a huge deal, but when being subjected to this for the entire game, it gets a little annoying.

Two inches? Hell, sometimes you're at the edge and get attacked by some complete unknown from the side.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:7. The story - this game is untypically simple for Square games. It is not as interesting as the first game (Final Fantasy Adventure) in my opinion; and while I originally considered Sword of Mana to be about the level of this game in this regards.

I thought Secret of Evermore did a better job of making the story and dialogue a lot more interesting with its quirky feel. Some of the one-liners from fake B-rated movies were so corny that they were actually funny.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:8. Slimes are incredibly powerful compared to other enemies of the location - Your going through, slaughtering everything, but then you hit the slimes, the first time you fight them it usually takes 10-15 minutes to kill them off; this does not occur with any other type of enemy in the game.

Ummm...you need magic to kill those. They are resistant to weapons for a reason. If you weren't using magic, then that's why.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:11. Sometimes Orb distribution isn't as functional as it should be. For example, you might miss a bunch of sword orbs and have a really weak sword for most of the game (which happened to me this time) until you hit a treasure chest that will give you 4 sword orbs near the end of the game. This part of the game seemed buggy. Most weapons, I didn't seem to get them nearly to the level that they should have been. Not a huge deal because the game was easy regardless.

Many of the orb searching and weapon building was an extra part of the game. When I played with a friend, we would always switch out the weapons when one of them needed to be built up, and continue to use those weapons until everything was built up to the current orb levels. At that point, we had our choice of our favs until we found another orb. It was a good way of getting all of the weapons built up, and most of the orb locations seemed to be pretty easy to find.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:1. Music was excellent, the only issue I had with it is that every song seemed to be 15-45 seconds before it looped.

It kind of comes with the era of cart games and the amount of songs in place. However, the soundtrack really worked well with something unlike the type of soundtrack that I would like. Again, it was one of those games where I wasn't afraid of just standing in one place to listen to the music.

Legend of The Seeker wrote:3. Multiplayer - It is one of the few existing fantasy adventure games of this style that offers a multiplayer (Gauntlet games and other sorts of games just seem to lack something). Combined with the music, and graphics, and knowledge of all the bugs and issues I mentioned in the bad section, it makes for a rather enjoyable game. It has a very casual feel to it overall, I wouldn't recommend tackling the game single player otherwise you are missing the best part of the game.

Everybody gets into the multiplayer aspects with FPSs and MMOs, and really, nothing, absolutely nothing, captures the fun of multiplayer than playing SoM with two or three people. There's really no such thing as a multiplayer RPG, and if there was a category like that, SoM would be the only game in it. (MMORPGs are just a different case of game, so I don't think they count.)

I guess on magic, what I should have said was that if the game didn't have bugs, it wouldn't really be needed. Even though it is uneeded, it can make battles incredibly simple with just repeated chaining.

The first slimes you come across will be before you have magic. I guess it's really just a complaint that I had with the game, because they're not at all difficult to just walk past.... but if you're OCD like me about killing everything then you'll get where I am coming from =P

On Secret of Evermore, I have always felt, since its release, that this is one of the most under-rated games ever to be released by Squaresoft. There are beautiful locations, and I found the Middle Ages portion of the game to be one of the most atmospheric locations of any game on the SNES.

Also, Kupek, I didn't know that about SoM, that's rather interesting. It means that Square may have began their relationship with Sony fairly early on. At least their consideration for the CD format for whatever games they were going to develop in the future. I before considered the beginning of it to be when they were developing Mario RPG, and beginning their use of pre-rendered graphics which certainly benefit more from having all the space of the CD format.

One last thing to add, the bugs and such of Secret of Mana are so much less painful when there's 3 players.

Once you have any offensive magic, that's pretty much all you need in the game until Mana Beast, who is completely immune to magic. Well, it sort of sucks if you run into a boss that can cast Wall, if you didn't know Dispel Magic gets rid of it (it's not obvious if Dispel would get reflected by a Wall, but it doesn't). I feel the variety of magic in SoM is rather pointless since it's like 20 ways to do the same amuont of damage on an enemy.