Nice game, but it wasn't my cup of tea.

User Rating: 7 | Seiken Densetsu 2 SNES
I love SNES RPGs. I really do. So when I saw the Secret of Mana hanging on the wall of my toy store at the local mall back in 1994, I figured it was worth a shot.

At first I was unsure what to make of it. The story seemed solid enough and the controls were easy to master, but it was missing something that would just put it over the edge for me.

After thinking about it for a while I realized that it was the tech tree design. Sure your characters get stronger and weaponse get more powerful with collecting things but it was not enough. I just wish it had more upgrades to offer.

The fighting style was like Legend of Zelda but there were 3 of you running around. You had the ability to switch the lead character but it didn't really change anything in the gameplay since they all played the same. As an example, in Breath of Fire 2 if you switched the lead character while walking around on the map, certain ones did different things. But then again BoF2 used an over head map and wasn't an action RPG like SoM. That might have factored into this but it really would have been cool to allow the different charcters to perfrom different things when you were directly controlling them.

The graphics were pretty good actually and featured some nice lighting effects and background. The music soundtrack was also pretty good.

But in the end I still just felt like there was more that could have been built into the game to put it over the top.

Good game.