What They Did to Secret of Mana

If someone had asked me what I wanted from a Secret of Mana remake, I would’ve had a straightforward answer: keep the pixel art but upres it, get an orchestra to play the music, polish it up without losing the charm, maybe add some dungeons if you want to get creative. That’s what I would’ve said.

Nobody asked.

Instead we got this odd 3D polygon remake—the kind of thing that’s been haunting every classic game port since the Nintendo DS era, and I’ve never quite liked it on sight. It looks hollow. The music is worse: it sounds like someone ran the original soundtrack through an electronic blender and this dull techno remix came out the other side, everything musical about it drained away. The text got the same treatment. Whatever weirdness and personality lived in those character moments—gone.

It makes you wonder who this was even for. The people who loved the original aren’t going to feel right about it. New players won’t know what they’re missing. So it’s just floating in this weird middle ground where nothing quite lands. I think about it sometimes—why we keep remaking things that didn’t need remaking—but I guess that’s just how it works now. The original’s still there if you want it.