I Wish They’d Left It Alone

If someone at Square Enix had called me—"Marcel, what do you want from a Secret of Mana remake?"—I’d have given a clean answer: keep the sprites, scale them up to 4K, record the score with a real orchestra, smooth the rough edges, and if you absolutely need somewhere to put your creativity, add dungeons. New stories. That’s it.

Nobody called. What we got instead is that 3D polygon aesthetic that’s been quietly bothering me since the Final Fantasy remakes on the DS—plasticky, vaguely mobile-game-ish, gesturing at charm without actually having any. The music has been fed through a production program until it no longer resembles itself; whatever warmth the original compositions had is gone, replaced by something flat and compressed that I don’t want near my ears. And the dialogue—the genuinely weird, specific personality those old SNES text boxes had—has been ironed completely flat.

Who was this made for, exactly? Nostalgic players wanting to walk back into the world of the Mana tree? Younger players discovering the legend of the sword for the first time? I’m not convinced it fully serves either group. But if none of those complaints land for you, Secret of Mana is out now on PlayStation 4, PS Vita, and PC. I’ll be over here with the SNES original and my complicated feelings about what it meant to play it at twelve.