The Rabite Returns, at a Price

If you didn’t love Secret of Mana on the Super Nintendo, something is wrong with you. The kid, the girl, the sprite—ring menus, weapon orbs, the way the music shifted register when you stepped somewhere new. Rabites as your first enemy: absurd and soft and somehow vaguely threatening, immediately beloved. The Mana Tree. That golden city at the end that meant something you couldn’t have named at the time but can still feel now, twenty years later. Some games get into your body and stay there.

Square Enix announced Rise of Mana in early 2014—a new entry in the series, Japan-first, iOS, free to play, microtransactions built into the foundation. The trailer was colorful and largely opaque about what the game actually was. I watched it twice and came away less certain than when I’d started. The soul of the original is its pacing: the willingness to let you wander, the three-player co-op, the feeling of a world that isn’t hurrying you anywhere. None of that maps naturally onto a free-to-play mobile structure where the monetization is threaded through the rhythm of play and progress is designed around friction you pay to remove.

What I wanted—what I will always want from this franchise—is a 2D Secret of Mana with a bigger world and stranger dialogue and more room to get lost in. Actual towns. Weird NPCs. The feeling of wandering somewhere you’re not supposed to be yet. What arrived was a mobile game with the IP attached and the color palette loosely approximated. Maybe it was great. The review scores suggested something adequate, which is the cruelest possible outcome. Adequate means I don’t have to play it, and I won’t miss anything, and the Mana Tree means exactly as much as it always did and no more.