Recent reviews by Dan

Eins meiner liebsten Langzeit-Burner-Spiele. Survival in der kanadischen winterlichen Wildnis. Perfekte Balance zwischen Erkunden, Mobilität und Ausrüstungscrafting. Das Allerbeste ist aber die Atmosphäre von Einsamkeit, Schönheit, Geborgenheit und gleichzeitig Bedrohlichkeit der Natur. Absolut zu empfehlen!

EDIT:
Nach etlichen Jahren immer noch eins mehr liebsten Games. Die Entscheidung Story und Survival zu trennen war eine gute Entscheidung und bin weiterhin gespannt auf das Ende sowie die neuen kommenden Survival Inhalte.

Like the other hundreds of reviews, I'm a big fan of Secret of Mana. I loved SNES european original with it's flaws, the delayed damage and hard combat.

I too bought this remake as pre-order as soon as it was available. Now I honestly regret it.

Here are my thoughts:

Mixed - Soundtrack:
There are few good reworked but mostly bad reworked titles. I really like the remastered titletheme. But what is up with the rest. Why is there so much synthesizers, e-guitars and electronic stuff in this soundtrack. It completely warps the gaming experience in many sections of the game to the worse because it just doesn't fit. Partly it's like just techno-beating...

Negative - Sounddesign:
This one is really hard. Many sounds for enemys' idling or attacking just seem off and not consistent. Best example are the "sumsums" at gaias naval. Even so the sound design for scripted moments like, when the heroes beat a boss and stand still for and pause (i counted) 7 seconds - thinking the game crashed - only for a weird ping to tune in and continue. Or if you touch the mana seeds with the sword. No real audio feedback. In comparison this scene was really energetic in the original.
It really seems that the devs missed hard in sounddesign and coordination for scripting and sound.

Mixed - Graphics:
Like many others said already. The graphics are a real cheap rip off. Seems like early 2000's graphics from Nintendo. Missing facial animations (later in the game a few cheap ones).
The design of the characters are okay, even if Randi for example seems overly "stylish".
I really miss the "fly over region" scenes while beeing shot with the canon over to another map.
But what really annoyed me the most: Loading Screens. The graphics are real low level. There is no denying that. So why are the black loading screens for every little scene-change?

!Negative! - Character AI / Character Combat Behavior Rework
Oh, boy. What a mess. My companions always stick to some corner and stay there. Now more following, no release or respawning near my main-char. That is a really bad pathfinding and AI-design.
Even so the combat behavior. My companions die so fast, that I can't do anything about that. The reworked behavior is a big mess. Where's the old defensive - offensive chessboard. No, now you only have the option "attack some target as" or "all attack different targets". This is a real big problem. When I am at a boss fight and they are not allowed to target my target... it's hard to battle that boss alone! It's the worst AI I have encountered in games since at least 15 years. That makes me cry!

Negative - Combat
It hurts me, that the combat system got even worse with the remake. Seemingly not working hitboxes, buggy magic, glitchy combat moves.

Neutral - Added Character depth
I was pretty surprised to see some sequences I didn't know between the characters from the SNES original. This is in general an interesting thing, when done well. But here sets in the todays japanese style. Extreme Stereotype behaviors (overly exagerated emotions, behavior). The Original made a better and descent job with this.

Negative - 1 to 1 Copy
Square Enix could have made the gaming progress and course better and upgrade it.
For example: This game is birdperspective 3D. Why are the sequences still orthogonal (like Randi taking beating in the beginning or every encounter with the trader, smith and alike). Seems that every scripted or general repetetive movement was just imported from the SNES version. I can't explain it, why this could be intentional.

Negative - PC-Port / Menu
Square Enix made some "upgrades" to the Start Menu and the ring diagramm ingame. But why can't you navigate like every standard pc-game in the last 30 years, arrow keys, esc, enter. Why do i have to navigate with other random keys? Space for okay, n for back, wsad for arrows...
The ingame menu is even so bugged. The pause menu could have been exported as a standard "select/start button"-menu. But not in this remaster. That could is okay but for todays standards very confusing (it was still confusing in the SNES original).
The companion menus are bugged too. How do i know at first look which companion menu i did open? In the orignial it opened centered to that companion char. Here main-char menu and every companionmenu start centered to the screen without any notificaiton which char-menu it is. Why not even in the main-ring-menu the small char-avatar?



At the moment, this game is unplayable for me. Crashing instances, glitchy and buggy gameplay, bugs in general, as well as a real bad AI. It was a hard time to play, when your companions die because they are stuck because of bad pathfinding or inaction because of bad AI...

Seriously, did anyone beta-test this game before release? This shouldn't have been released in this state of development. It really hurts me to see a game I loved so much. And for a remake it is a big mess. =/