I’m in EB Games with my father. I don’t remember the year, but I believe it was sometime between the latter end of the Super Nintendo’s life and the next generation of consoles. It might have been the start of the Nintendo 64’s life, though. I’m looking at old Super Nintendo games because I can’t afford the Nintendo 64 yet. I’m in the back when I find this game, in box, called Secret of Evermore. I was thinking “Hey, isn’t this that game people love? Secret of… Was it Evermore? I thought it was a different… But it’s Squaresoft and the screens on the back look right. Ring menus, weapons… thought it was multiplayer but this one isn’t… This has to be it, right?”
I was wrong. I was not holding Secret of Mana. Instead, I was holding what might be a lost Mana game, in this reviewer’s opinion.
Now, a lot of people know how the rumors go. Just like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is why we didn’t get Final Fantasy 5, people blame Secret of Evermore for why we didn’t get Trials of Mana. These arguments never really held water to me because, frankly, neither of them are bad games. Sure, Mystic Quest wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. It was super simplistic, sure, and the game treated us like we were idiots, but I still found it to be a fun and relaxing experience, even now.
Secret of Evermore, on the other hand, people blame for why we didn’t get Trials of Mana, like Secret of Evermore has no right to exist. I would argue that those people are foolish because they can’t see quality.
I am including this game in the retrospective because this game was my introduction to the Mana series, with a game only tangentially related to the series, if you were feeling generous to call it such. Most people just call it a knockoff and a wannabe, but it’s a high quality one.
Made by Squaresoft of America, Secret of Evermore was an American made game in the same vein as Secret of Mana. It featured a ring-based system, real time combat with attacks that charge up over time to inflict more damage, multiple weapons to use, and a large world to explore. However, Secret of Evermore took some liberties to make it’s concept work.
Gone is the multiplayer, as you get only one companion in the game, your dog. This dog is capable of sniffing out items for the game’s “magic” system, alchemy, and fighting enemies at your side. He is incapable of using weapons, so the only person who you worry about is the hero. Moreover, the weapons have been changed to only have four real classes of weapons; swords, axes, spears, and the bazooka. Every weapon had their own charge level, so if you wanted to master them all, you’d have to use them all.
The setting is also incredibly varied, taking after a multitude of time periods, from the prehistoric age to archeological arabian to medieval england and, finally, a futuristic space station. And the various weapons are themed after these settings as well, use gradually more and more advanced materials, with the most basic from the prehistoric age basically being a sharpened rock on a giant stick.
The soundtrack is just as varied, though it more pushes for atmospheric music, as some areas feature no real music, but you’ll still hear the growling of dinosaurs, the chirping of crickets, or the horrifying calls of…
Frogs. Yes, frogs. They’re an early game enemy and you will learn to hate them.
The game’s real genius, however, comes in the alchemy system. Rather than using the magic system of Secret of Mana which, let’s be honest, became a little too large over time, with all sorts of spells that were borderline useless, and then taking all those spells and shoving them onto a single character, Squaresoft of America opted for a different kind of system. As you play, you can find and purchase alchemy ingredients. These ingredients are a consumable resource that allows you to cast spells. For example, the first spell you get, Flash, uses 1 Wax and 2 Oil per cast. So long as you have these ingredients, you can cast the spell as many times as you have ingredients. And you get a lot of spells, which can do things from raising your attack, defense, damaging opponents, to healing yourself wounds and status ailments.
This system would be great if certain spells weren’t hilariously inefficient. Take Flash for example. It uses 1 Wax and 2 Oil. Both are common ingredients, but the later Crush spell uses 1 Wax and 1 Limestone. Since you can only carry 99 of each ingredient, this means that you can only carry 49 Flash casts at once while you can carry 99 Crush spells instead. This is important because, like your weapons, your alchemy formulas also level up the more you use them, though certain spells get no real benefit, like Cure, which heals status effects. The higher the level of the spell increases the effect, where applicable. Damage spells do more damage and healing spells heal for more while buffing spells increase their effect.
But not all spells are created equal. According to my research, spells like Flash are simply inferior to many of the other later formulas you get. All spells can level up to a maximum level of 9, but Flash’s damage range is 162-304 points of damage. Compare that to Crush, which gets 156-306 points of damage, nearly the same, as low as level 5. At level 9, it deals 436-696 points of damage, more than double the potential of Flash. Crush is simply a better spell in every way. But then, I can’t hold this against Secret of Evermore. When you get late into, say, Final Fantasy 6, you’ll eventually hit a point where you will never cast Fire ever again, since it doesn’t deal enough damage. Instead, you’ll always be using Fira or Firaga, or even the Ultima spell. Old spells become obsolete, so this is less a problem with Secret of Evermore and more a problem with the genre.
That said, I wish mastery did more. Perhaps if you could reach a level of mastery that reduced the required ingredients, that would have been pretty good.
There is also armor to be found for your hero and dog, with quite a few of them to collect. But I did find some of them to be a rather big pain in the butt to get. A good example is right at the beginning of the game. You can buy a set of grass equipment, including a body armor, hat, and bracelet for the hero and a leather collar for the dog. For the first area, the Bugmuck Swamp, this is fine. But by the time you start fighting raptors and frogs, it really starts to show how bad it is. Thankfully, if you know where to go, you can get a set of Shell armor, hat, and bracer, and a Dino Skin armor for an optional fight in a cave. But the game never tells you a Dino Helm and Claw Guard are also available, if you go back to town after defeating the snake boss in the swamps near the mammoth graveyard. Go back to town and the people who sold Grass equipment will now have Dino gear, making the battles in the volcano, the final area of the Prehistoric area, much more manageable.
Or you could make the entire thing moot by exploiting a glitch to underflow your defense with the Defend formula, giving you 65,500 defense, making you almost immune to damage. You can also do this with the later Atlas formula, which boosts your attack stats, to have massive attack power, but it also makes attacking at 100% power bring out really low damage numbers, but attacking at low percentages deal 999 damage every single time. It makes for an… interesting experience.
All in all, it feels like a Mana game, if a different one, with a different setting, one that’s more historic and futuristic than most games, changing out the swords and sorcery for swords and science. Expect to find flying machines and rockets instead of the typical flying dragons in this one. If you can set your expectations accordingly and open your mind to a game being able to be a Mana game without being made by the same team, or using the exact same setting, you will probably enjoy this game.
Highly Recommended
The Professional Protagonist 