/vr/ - Retro Games

Back when the game wasn’t even 10 years old we sort of thought it’d be a classic, but as time went on nobody really missed it.

>>5138293
>we
its a classic. you are an idiot and revealed yourself.

>>5138290
Good artstyle, good music, fun gameplay. It was an action rpg where you had multiple weapons and each had a different playstyle. Coolest thing about the game was that it was an RPG with co-op, though it sucks that it takes so long to get a second party member. Did Terranigma and Seiken Densetsu have english releases? I know Secret of Mana had one since I have a copy, but I don't think I've ever seen those two in stores when I was a kid.
What's your problem with changing characters? You know the select button switches between the three, right?

>>5138382
Changing characters is fine, I mean the fact that seiken densetsu 3 let's you choose 3 out of 6 characters, instead of the set 3.

My favorite parts of it were the various weapons and the music, but the music isn't as good as any of those other snes rpgs I mentioned, and the game discourages you from using a bunch of different weapons because you level up your skill with them so my ai characters used default weapons the entire game.

>>5138382
Terranigma was released in English but only in Europe. SD1 was released as Final Fantasy Adventure.

>>5138382
Terranigma came out in Europe, Seiken Densetsu 3 didn't get an English release Translation patches for both have been out forever though.

>>5138290
It is pretty glitchy, but back then it didn't really bother me. It probably helps that the game isn't very hard so when it does fuck up it's not a huge problem. I replayed it a few years ago and it's still my favorite of the Mana games, but I think that is more a statement of the overall lack of excellence in the series rather than SoM being that amazing itself.

As for why it's retained it's popularity and fond memories, it's a fun adventure with an interesting world and is one of the few action rpgs on the system. Like a lot of old games it's rough around the edges, but sometimes that's part of the charm.

Is there a consensus on Secret of Evermore?

>>5138414
Definitely worth playing but contentious beyond that.

>>5138459
Fair enough.

>>5138290
I never got to play it very much as a kid (got to play co-op at a friends house) and I recently picked up a used copy and I had a nearly identical experience to OP. Its a flawed game yes, but It certainly did a lot of cool shit for the time and I see why people still like it.
There are alternate paths for some sequences, a huge ass map to explore, the music is the tits and the world is very well realized. Gameplay however has healthy amounts of Jank.

>Tiger boss.
>Get immediately stun locked and team is decimated
>Reload
>Boss doesn't stun lock me this time
>Instead he plays shy and stays up where I cant reach him
>Equip bow
>1-2 damage with about a terribly low hit chance
>Get wrecked by undodgable fire magic
>Try 5 more times, same result
>OH WELL LETS GO GRIND SOME MORE
>Come back, try again
>Miraculously he never once hops up where I cant reach him
>Stays low and I hit him reliably
>He only uses magic a few times and that pinball attack once
>Easy win
>I about fucking threw my snes out the window.

Also It had quite a few visual glitches from magic here and there and weird AI behavior. There is something weird going on under the hood that I don't care for at all.

Also one thing that irked me is how many palette swap bosses there are. There are at least 8 of them, and that's like a third to a half of all the bosses in the game.

>>5138474
Some say it's better than all the Manas others say it's worse. Either way if you like these games it's worth a play.

Secret of Mana is one of the games where I felt it didn't hold up and wasn't as great as I remembered when playing it again many years after the first time. So when people say it's up there with CT or FF6, I tend to disagree.
The thing that really is up there with those games is the soundtrack, and the graphics and art style are still nice to look at. SoM just has these annoyances that prevent it from being on the same level overall IMO.
Still a game worth playing. Overstating its bad parts has become this meme where people pretend it's literally unplayable which isn't the case.
>>5138390
>Terranigma was released in English but only in Europe.
>>5138398
>Terranigma came out in Europe
Nitpick: in PAL regions, to be precise. I am pretty sure Australia had it, too.
No official English NTSC, though.

>>5138478
The tiger is fucking cancer, but that's the only really bullshit part of the game.

>>5138290
Secret of Mana is the best game ever made and I have never played it so OP is a faggo

>>5138290
Friendly remainder

>Secret of Mana was originally planned to be a launch title for the SNES-CD add-on. After the contract between Nintendo and Sony to produce the add-on failed, and Sony repurposed its work on the SNES-CD into the competing PlayStation console, Square adapted the game for the SNES cartridge format. The game had to be altered to fit the storage space of a SNES game cartridge, which is much smaller than that of a CD-ROM. The developers initially resisted continuing the project without the CD add-on, believing that too much of the game would have to be cut, but they were overruled by company management. As a result of the hardware change, several features had to be cut from the game, and some completed work needed to be redone. One of the most significant changes was the removal of the option to take multiple routes through the game that led to several possible endings, in contrast to the linear journey in the final product. The plot that remained was different than the original conception, and Tanaka has said that the original story had a much darker tone Ishii has estimated that up to forty percent of the planned game was dropped to meet the space limitations, and critics have suggested that the hardware change led to technical problems when too much happens at once in the game. In 2006, Level magazine claimed that Secret of Mana's rocky development was Square's main inspiration to move their games, such as the Final Fantasy series, from Nintendo consoles to Sony consoles in 1996.

>>5138695
Yea and then they made Seiken Densetsu 3 which had the multiple storylines, a bigger world and more detailed graphics so whats up wit that?

I feel like any good reputation SoM has is largely people who played it as a kid and never played it again.

>>5138695
This makes a lot of sense.

>>5138694
More like you played it for an hour at a friends house and hasn't shut up about it since.

>>5138290
it's an aesthetic experience, when it came out this game was anime af and looked and sounded fantastic, if you're not entertained by going to weird places and seeing weird things it's probably because you've never just had a friend to play it with

>>5138746
not him but I believe its because cartridge space had improved since then and this can be seen when you compare the size of the rom files. SoM is 1.6mb and Sieken is 4.2mb. This also explains why they didn't bother localizing it to the west and the next gen was right around the corner.

>>5138684
You're supposed to be able to reliably beat the regular enemies before fighting the boss, which in this case is a bunch of werewolves.

If you can't own werewolves what are you doing trying to fight a giant magical fucking tiger? come on man

>>5138290
> why is it one of the best snes rpgs?
One of the ONLY Snes RPGs to see a western release. Have you seen how laughable westerners Top 10 SNES RPG lists look like? Literally every shitty RPG that got localized + Zelda.

>>5138771
Its not a leveling issue it the drastically random nature of attack spam. Sometimes an enemy is pushover and other times the same enemy will rock your shit in.

>>5138290
The gameplay and writing in the SNES "mana" games are barely mediocre. The music and graphics are great.
The only people recommend them is because "muh multiplayer".

>>5138290
Most retarded kind of thread that exists on /vr/.

>hey i'm a zoomer and didnt play this game when it was new
>please explain the zeitgeist surrounding this game at launch for why so many people liked it 20 years ago in a context I'm literally incapable of understanding from having not personally experienced

>>5139182
Better for someone to have tried a game you like than to not have just because it is an old game, isn't it? Or is it just muh sekrit club

>>5139203
They should just try it now, liking it if they do or not if they don't and not worry about why people 20 years previous may have enjoyed it more or less.

>>5139203
Better zoomer retards not play them at all. If you play a classic game that came out for a generation older than yours and you don't get it, chalk it up to the age disparity. It seems mostly only zoomers don't understand this. Half the 30-something people that make up /vr/'s userbase don't go making threads shitting on PacMan and Pong despite being too young to have experienced them when they were new and the greatest thing ever. It's always 18-20 year olds bitching about their first experience with an SNES/PS1 game and why people think they're so great.

>>5139213

>>5138774
You just can't git gud because you're a stupid baby

>>5139203
I literally don't give a shit what other people think until it seems like it will become my problem or benefit

>>5138290
How are you even supposed to kill that fucking bird? I couldn't find any way to hit it with weapons so I just spammed magic until it died.

>>5139291
Magic basically. I was disappointed that a bunch of the bosses do that, that boss, it's palette swap, vampire, its palette swap, the giant and its 2 palette swaps, the slime and its palette swap, the tiger and its palette swap.

>>5138290
Secret of Evermore is better

>>5138695
What was the original multiple endings genuinely curious

>>5139245
Nigga, I got shit to do. If the game is bullshit random it doesn't matter how good I am.

>>5138414
I liked evermore more. It's an all right game. Probably kind of dated now but back in the day it was incredibly good

>>5139337

One had you fucking the world with the Mana Fortress.

>>5138290
As much as I love secret of mana on snes, the REMAKE was better balanced and less grundy which makes it more fun.

>Everyone complains about the tiger boss
>Not this fuck right here

This piece of shit gave me so much trouble as a kid

>>5139569
No I fucking hated that boss, and the palette swap. It is unpredictable whether you hit it or not which is dumb because it is an eye in a wall, a stationary target

>>5139576
read the status screen you fucking moron

>>5139351
do you honestly expect anyone to believe that anything you do is of any importance or merit

>>5139767
No :)

>>5139765
For what purpose

>>5139996
You probably fucking whinge and moan about not hitting in Morrowind too right

>But I can clearly see it hitting the monster!
like you think there is an actual real world inside the screen like an actual moron

>>5139569
This one's not so bad. You kill the two side eyes with weapons and cure yourself with candy along the way. When you get down to the last eye and the wall starts moving, just spam attack magic until it dies.

>>5139569
this boss fucked my run with my brother and sisters. I was in love with this game and wanted to be good, but I didn't quite understand the mechanics back then (thought it was more like Zelda and not so numbers driven). I even cried when we couldn't defeat this damn wall. And I couldn't touch this game for years until I learned that you were supposed to wait for 100% attack power and that 99% attack power was just as ass as 1% power. That and we didn't level magic up because it took so long and cost me "magic points", which I wanted to preserve (stupid I know).

Also I hated the weirdo-creep-music in that whole level and bascially shit my pants in that foggy-ass temple. I just wanted to get through with it, and to the 4 season forest because it looked so nice and interesting. But alas the wall stopped me dead in my tracks - fittingly.

I only I had read the instructions carefully, but the game kinda worked - I thought it to be a lot harder than it actually is. Since - I believed - that 80% attack power is actually 80% of the full damage. But it's not. You HAVE to wait for 100% and that *blink* otherwise you will do 1-2 damage instead of 20. That was also the reason I "died" multiple times in the first boss battle which you CANNOT loose. I felt like the dumbest kid in the world.

>>5140039
>Since - I believed - that 80% attack power is actually 80% of the full damage.
If that's how it actually worked, the system would have much more potential.

>>5138414
It's garbage.

>>5140039
pic related.
also first we didn't know how to get 3 player system to work (it was christmas eve) and so my mother had to call Nintento-hotline to learn that we just had to push select. It was an insane experience all around, me barking commandos and my (smaller) brother and sister doing their best to do it right, at least once we got to their characters, girl and sprite.

Despite the games cons and flaws, I still enjoyed the game for what it was. I just took the time to grind and level mana spells and the game was a cake walk. I enjoyed the music most of all. Up beat at times and then melancholy at times especially Ice palace theme, gives me chills.

I always like Primm/Purim whatever her actual name is. She's pretty hot.

>>5138290
I dropped it after the first boss. I thought the whole "wait around to attack in an action rpg or else you will miss more" mechanic was retarded.

>>5140121
>Primm/Purim whatever her actual name is
Her name is Girl, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

>>5140032
>just spam attack magic until it dies.
The quote that should have been on the back of the box

>>5140039
>That was also the reason I "died" multiple times in the first boss battle which you CANNOT loose.
It's actually quite common to die there. For some reason, that boss will either never really attack, or it'll go completely berserk and absolutely slaughter you, in which case you'll probably die a few times. It's weird.

>>5140365
i'd really want to know what the mechanic behind this erratic behaviour is, programming-wise. Is it a random "aggresiveness"-counter which is set at the beginning of the game, or once the game is reset? Or is it some weird pixel-manipulation you are not even aware off (speedrunners use it in dwarf-town for item spam or something), or is it time-based, SNES-cpu-cycle based - what is the root to the weird "roundbased but also realtime" engine?
Some autist go right at it!

Also is there more info about all the cut content for the SNES-CDi-version?

>>5138382
>Did Terranigma and Seiken Densetsu have english releases?

You know Terranigma has an English release because you are using the English release name. Dumbass.

>>5139317
Secret of Evermore has worse hit detection.

>>5138290
You're not alone. Some things get love based on nostalgia or the fact that you had to be there at the time.

I played it fresh not long ago and I didn't even bother finishing it (which is pretty rare for me) because it bored me to tears which surprised me since I liked Secret of Evermore so much.

>>5138290
Daily reminder that your CPU allies are only useful if you set them right with the action grid.

>>5140745
Are you sure? I couldn't hit absolutely anything in fucking SoM but I've never had issues getting hits in SoE. The boss in OP is a prime example of something that was complete bullshit to try and hit with anything but auto targetting magic.

>>5140879
I was wondering this the entire game, where to set them. Also how high to have them charge up.

>>5140894
The far upper left corner will make your CPU characters aggressive and attack all the time, while the far lower right will make you CPU characters stay back from the enemy and not attack. Far lower left will make them attack, then attempt to back away from the enemy. I personally place them to attack all the time to make battles faster. You only need to worry heals with the bosses.

>>5140881
Evermore doesn't have an evasion system iirc

>>5140897
I used some were in the middle left throughout the whole game, if I ever play through it again I'll try more aggressive.

>>5140881
It's one of those classic "fuck perspective"-fights where you technically have to slash into thin air in order to hit its upper body.

One thing that also pissed me off was that the gauge is kinda deceptive.
Even when it shows "100%" your weapon isn't fully charged and deals only a fraction of damage and instead you have to wait for the beeping and the percentage to disappear in order to actually attack at full power.
It may be just like half a second difference but it's still irritating as fuck.

>not playing using the superior improvement hacks

Vanilla game has a lot of flaws but the music more than makes up for that in my opinion. BUT, after playing the improvement hacks and the randomizer (randomized bosses and enemies) I don't think I can play the original version.

Updated versions include, Ai partners not getting stuck as well as having better intelligence for attacking/defending. You can select the difficulty curve you want, meaning enemies can be stronger or weaker.

zHade and Moppleton are the creators of these improvement hacks.

http://secretofmanaancientcave.blogspot.com/

>>5141361
I tried patching it and they did not work on my flashcart. The scroll hack worked but characters sometimes got stuck and I had to reset to fix it, after losing about 2 hours of progress I just stopped using the scroll hack

>>5141361
Woah I was just going off of an old 0.19 version linked on some forum like a year ago, maybe this would work. I'd be sad if it did since I went through the whole game before seeing this blogspot.

>>5138290
It's the weakest entry in the Mana series and I really think that the remake should have been more liberal with added characterization, plots, etc. especially since it's well known that the game was chopped up because of the SNES CD drama. At least we got the nice Mana artstyle.

>>5142846
>Weakest entry
>Not Dawn of Mana

Gameplay-wise it's a mediocre product with a lot of wasted potential. What it boils down to is a top-down beat 'em up with emphasis on RPG growth and pseudo ATB-based action. There's no smooth sailing with this one, attacks miss often no matter how leveled your weapons are, you need to grind magic for it to be remotely useful, your companions are often a liability even if you set them carefully on the action grid. The circle menu is disorienting and the text in the NTSC release is barely readable with the shitty transparent message windows.
Can't see any reason to love this game besides art, music and nostalgia.

People are shitting on this game but none of the Mana games have good combat. None of them, not even Final Fantasy Adventure.

>>5141423
Do you have the correct ROM?

>>5141434
Was this also you?


It's really well done and I have beaten the game with both improvement hacks, zHades which improves the vanilla game, as well as Moppu's randomizer which he is constantly updating.

They both have discord channels and post regularely with updates and improvements they are working on.

>>5143106
>>5142846
for me it's
Secret of Mana>>>Sword of Mana>>>SD3 and Children of Mana>>>>>>>>>>>>>>(probably the Playstation Game but I haven't played it)>>>>>>>>>>everything else lumped into a pile of shit right here that was so bad I can't even finish the games.

>>5138290
I traded for this game back in 2nd grade. Compared to everything else out at the time, the music and graphics in a league of their own. It's peak comfy, and as a kid it didn't need the greatest gameplay to keep me sucked in.

It's also pretty well-paced. You're always going somewhere new and doing something interesting. That's also important to a 7 year-old.

I certainly haven't revisited it as much as later games like FFT, but the things it does are unique and I feel anyone who goes through it once will have a good time.

>>5144437
FFA's combat system may not be much but it's literally as good as the GB can manage.

>>5144637
It's nice to see some appreciation for Sword of Mana but why do you rate Secret of Mana so high?

You should really get around to playing Legend of Mana. It's not for everyone, and it's one of those games you'll either love or hate but it's a really incredible game if it works for you.

>>5139213
Heh, that's so true. I'm one of those 30 somethings and I can't into Pong or a lot of those really old pioneer vidya, especially the home versions, but I would never shit on them because I can imagine how mindblowing they must've been when there was nothing before it.

Pacman is fun though. I totally get Pacman being such a gigantic hit. It's a fun and engaging game.

>>5138414
>>5138459
>>5138507
It's only worth playing if you are American or just really into Americana. Otherwise it's a fucking dogshit game with puke worthy atmosphere. I really hate it because of the false advertising from back in the day. It's got nothing to do with the Mana games aside from ripping off some of the mechanics. A total joke of a game. A bad joke.

>>5144814
Was the game even advertised to have any links to Mana? The developers just wanted “Evermore” as the name but the “Secret of” was tacked on by the higher ups.

>>5144437
>>5144706
Also, the pseudo-FF world has more charm than Secret of Mana one.

>>5138290
Got stuck right after killing this bird. Where the fuck is the desert cannon? I will never know.

Fuck this game. I like the first one better for the gameboy.

>palm trees of eight
Nevermind they're both shit. Can't speak as to the third one though. The beginning made me too indecisive to start playing.

>>5138290
Still one of my favorite SNES games. I have some beefs with the magic system and the second half of the game, but overall it's great.

>>5144778
I am very biased. I absolutely love the Music in Secret of Mana. The game could be absolute trash but I would play it for that soundtrack alone. The only songs I don't like are the Lich Boss music and to a lesser extent the regular boss music.

I am also a huge fan of leveling up skills by using them instead of by adding skill points. Now add the fact that I can play with 2 friends and it makes it a perfect game for me even though it has a lot of problems.

>>5144873
After killing this bird you go up and get the wind magic. Then you go back down to the forest and go all the way left and use your magic on the orb which opens a path to go up towards Matango. You kill the boss there and then you leave Motango and go right into the canon that sends you to the ice country. Then you beat the ice country, come back to the forest and take the canon to the fire temple this time.

>>5145039
I really liked the boss music but hearing it like a third of the game it got really old. Really like the lich song tho.

>>5145047
Those two songs felt so out of place to me. Like, the entire game you are hearing these awesome melodies that put you in the mindset of being in a mystical forest and far away snow land and creepy palaces. Oh I also didn't like the Ruins music either. Those three songs all felt like they came out of left field and were just a bunch of guys banging on drums and metal containers lol. Everybody I talk to seems to like those songs but boss music from literally any other game sounds way better to me.

Secret Of Mana is better than any Zelda game in terms of an action RPG.

Zelda is far more cryptic and boring.

>>5145874
That's because they're different genres. Zelda isn't an ARPG.

>>5147683
Right, its a stupid boring fetch quest.

>>5148647
I don't even like the Zelda games but that's a pretty spergy outlook.

>>5148680
Don't you get tired of dungeon cawing?

>>5148789
What makes you think I like dungeon cawers?

>>5148789
>dungeon cawing
>cawing
Get out of here you fucking bird.

>>5148789
>dungeon cawing
>mfw

>>5149376
lol I didn't notice that I made a typo there! CAW CAW CAW