Killer Bunny Slippers

Time is like a river, and history repeats...


Anyway, after a bit of dithering, I went ahead and plugged my new copy of Secret of Mana into my new SNES.  The result has been amazingly therapeutic; a lot of my recent RPG forays have had highlights of one kind or another, but few have been able to rival the just plain fun that SoM has had to offer.


There's this dichotomy about the whole thing.  As the same time's it's serious and silly, finely-tuned and buggy, balanced and utterly broken.  This is a game where you fight for the fate of the world in the face of apocalyptic forces while bashing ridiculous enemies like animate bunny slippers with a rusty sword found in a riverbed.


A lot of stuff has already been stated and restated about SoM.  This is one of the big-time classic RPGs of the 16-bit era; gamers have been poking at it for over two decades now, and probably still poke at it for a very long time to come.  The story is fairly weighty.  A trio of plucky young adventurers set forth to seal special magical seeds and gather the support of elemental spirits to combat the forces of an evil empire under the sway of a very ancient and vile lich.  It was already a cliché when the game was released, but the whole thing was so well put-together that you really don't care and enjoy the ride. 


You've got the usual classical elements of fire, water, air, and earth, plus light and darkness.  Then you wind up with two oddballs, moon and tree/wood/leafyleafness.   All the weapons and spells have a fair bit of utility (up until the final battle anyway), and nothing really falls behind as you progress.  The monsters are a fairly diverse bunch, like the bunny slippers of doom, cartoony Thriller zombies, axe-toting goblins that skin the slippers and wear them like hats, killer floating tomato necromancers, duck soldiers, living pumpkin bombs, fish that shoot missiles, and freaky mime ghost things.  Yes, there's the usual palette swaps, but the line-up is already pretty crazy to begin with, and since this is an action-RPG with real-time combat, they had to animate the things so it's very understandable.


Overall, Secret of Mana is still a very fun game, and worthy of a place in an RPG enthusiast's collection.  The Harvest Never Rests!