Before the Filter
I’ve been thinking about Secret of Mana lately, which is probably just what happens when you’re trying to feel less old. People love that game with a fierceness that doesn’t really admit argument. Say something sharp about it and you’ll hit the wall—the implicit or explicit one—that you’re wrong, that you’re missing something, that you have no soul. I don’t quite believe that. But there’s something there.
At some point Square Enix released an album with the original MIDI files from the soundtrack. Hiroki Kikuta had kept the uncompressed source files all these years, and they pressed them to CD exactly as composed: no orchestra, no reworking, no remixes. The sound before everything got filtered through hardware and emerged as something else.
The thing about MIDI files is they sound nothing like how we remember them. There’s no warmth, no character—thin synthetic tones laid bare. But there’s something clarifying about it too. You hear what Kikuta actually wrote: the individual voices, the choices, the skeleton before the hardware gave it flesh. It’s like watching a film with all the sound design stripped away, or reading a script instead of seeing the play. Not better. Different. Revealing.
I never quite bought into the idea that Secret of Mana was untouchable. But I also never wanted to be the person who said it out loud. That game matters to people. It soundtracked something real for them. Maybe the uncompressed files are for people who needed to know what was underneath—what was always there before the filters. Or maybe it’s just nerd stuff, which is fine. Nerd stuff tends to be the only stuff that lasts.