Trials of Mana

The Original

Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game. At least, relative to its predecessor Secret of Mana. The duo exist in a weird forgotten niche of Action RPGs where, after attacking, you have to wait a few seconds before you can attack again. The closest modern comparison is something like Demon's Souls or Monster Hunter where each attack drains a constantly-recharging stamina bar, with some negative consequence for fully depleting it (the far more prevalent modern system for Action RPGs just being simplified combo attack systems that lets you button mash to your heart's content to various degrees). But since the Mana games only allowed a single attack, it gave them a very distinct rhythmic feel.

Where Seiken Densetsu 3 went wrong was in trying streamline the format of its predecessor: it removed the option of 0-damage semi-stunlock enemies by mashing the attack button, it removed charge attacks (which took time to charge up, and also slowed your movement while doing so and were pretty fundamental) in favor of simply giving you charge for each successful hit and then unleashing a special attack with a single button press, and probably worst of all it stripped Secret of Mana's robust armory of 8 weapons down to 6 extremely similar-feeling characters (of which you only get 3 in a single play through).

It tried to make up for the gutting of the action part with deeper RPG systems featuring a customizable party (complete with partially different storylines and antagonists), a branching class change system, and more customizable characters by letting players allocate stats on level up. But in the end, the RPG systems don't make that big of a difference and Seiken Densetsu 3 mostly just comes off as an extremely repetitive button masher (albeit a very pretty one).

And yes. To be clear, this is a pretty fragile argument because in reality magic is incredibly overpowered in both of these games and a lot of encounters just boil down to spamming things to death with magic that pauses the game entirely (probably even more so in Secret of Mana that featured a tedious system of leveling up magic by using it). But when and if you chose to engage with the action systems of these games, Secret of Mana comes out way ahead.

The Remake

The fact that Seiken Densetsu 3 was kind of a bad game actually made the prospect of a remake far more interesting. Remakes generally only happen for games that were popular, and most popular games were at least pretty good for their time, if not outright timeless classics. This makes most remakes a boring proposition of just upgrading the visuals/audio, cleaning up a broken translation, easing a few bad elements, and then just calling it a day. Do it for a bad game, and suddenly you get to give good ideas a second chance. It's an exciting prospect.

The actual end result in the case of Trials of Mana is... hard to say. It throws away the original rhymic combat in favor of a modern light combo action game with light/heavy attacks, the number of light attacks in sequence changing the properties of the ending heavy attack (with a few different options like pushing an enemy back vs. locking in place with multiple heavy attacks). Considering Seiken Densetu 3 was already creeping into being a button masher, I can't really hate the remake for turning it into a decent button masher. The aforementioned system of every 4 attacks charging you up to do a fancier heavy attack has been replaced with a much flashier special attack system that you use less often for more screen-clearing effects. There are a few other tweaks like back attacks doing extra damage, and dodge rolls replacing the rhythm of the older system. The changes line up to making random encounters a more pleasant brainless button masher than the original game.

If that were all, I would probably still be just as bored of the remake as the original. The bosses are where it salvages the combat by essentially ripping off Final Fantasy XIV's system of indicating future area attacks with big ol' red circles, cones, and lines as well as gimmicks like "hey kill this thing real fast or you're going to regret it". Using a fairly deep well of variation on these fundamental elements they actually juiced pretty distinct boss fights out of what was "eh it bounces around a bit and casts some spells occasionally" for a ton of bosses in the original game. It would be genuinely impressive if they didn't also make your now-mandatory AI companions incapable of dodging these things like 75% of the time. It's particularly nasty on hard mode where a lot of these attacks will one shot or nearly one shot characters. It doesn't make the game unplayable, and arguably makes the RPG elements come to the forefront since you will chew through healing items like crazy on Hard, but mostly it just made me wish my party members didn't exist so I could just focus on the fun boss fight instead of constantly pausing to heal? (beating more than a few bosses with my party members dead and all revival items gone was admittedly satisfying in its own way, though).

The other element of the remake that shines is, oddly enough, treasure hunting. Most of the time when a remake transitions from 2d to 3d it doesn't make much use of the extra dimension. And looking at Trials of Mana's extremely literal re-creations of most of the maps you'd think that would be the case here. But in reality, this feels more like an early 3d game in terms of "LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO WITH 3D!". There are chests behind trees, under cliffs, behind stacks of boxes, on roofs that were never accessible in the original because now there's a jump button, etc. It's honestly some of the most satisfying looking around the world for treasure that I have experienced in a game in ages. My only complaint is that a late game upgrade marks chests on your map ,which kind of destroys it, but you get it fairly late in the game so it didn't ruin much (and if nothing else revealed that I actually missed quite a few chests despite my best efforts of poking around).

While we're heaping praise on the remake, it also makes the RPG elements work a lot better too. Stat allocations no longer just upgrade the stat, but also unlock new abilities. The passive ones are new to the remake and add a satisfying RPG system of having to make the best use of limited slots for them. It's just the right amount of extra RPG complexity that was missing from the original without bogging the game in it.

Somewhat less successful is the upgrade to cutscenes and voice acting. The cutscene direction is actually surprisingly better than most midbudget JRPGs that have fallen into "I give up let's just tell our story as a visual novel" or "rotate in place on-map cutscenes because turning animations are hard". There's actually some camera work and custom animations here and there, and the angles chosen wisely avoid showing the character's feet when they turn. They even have NPCs that look like the belong to the same game thanks to the lower budget. The problem is more that they went with what seems like an extremely direct copy of the original game's dialog, and it's often (especially exposition parts), way too wordy for voice acting. Thankfully the game also lets you skip cutscenes on a per-subtitle level, so it doesn't actually damage the pacing as much as it could have. (There's also plenty of questionable voice direction going on, like Riesz having extremely stiff delivery which was probably an attempt to translate extremely formal Japanese because she's royalty, but in English it just comes off as more like she's speaking a second language or something).

So that's a lot of praise for the remake. By all means, they drastically improved a kind of bad game. But I still can't quite bring myself to say they juiced a great game out of it. The random encounters are still incredibly boring (I very nearly quit, but the later parts of the game start throwing tons of bosses at you which turned it into the best part of the game). The much improved boss fights are still held back by poor AI. It doesn't replicate that rhythmic combat I fell in love with, but that is as much a fault of the original game as the remake. The storytelling is honestly probably made worse by the upgrades (compare the classy silent cutscene of the fairy's companions, visible only as orbs, dying by slowly drifting off screen, too tired to fly... to the remake's explicit, cartoon voices telling us what's happening with awkward close-ups that kind of sap all the sadness out of it). The remake is merely... pretty good.

Would I recommend playing it? Yeah, if you're in the mood for a light mostly brainless Action RPG. It's probably not the best one of those you could play, though. A stronger recommendation if you played the original, because it is genuinely fascinating to see how closely they adapted it while still adding things like jumping.

(There's also a new post-game added to the remake. The brief epilogues it adds for each of the characters to unlock their fourth classes are decent. The main post-game dungeon itself is horrible because it consists almost entirely of random battles on recycled maps, and those battles are the worst part of the game.)

Bonus: The Adaptation

Maybe the most interesting thing about this remake is just the weird aesthetic clash that is created by bringing it into the modern day. For instance, the new 3d character models are extremely modern anime game (which is true to their original concept art). But rather than changing the intro to some anime opening with a Japanese vocal song, it has a very faithful reproduction of the original including the classy 90's Squaresoft music. It's weird! That clash of expectations exists to some degree across the entire game (though offset by the very anime dub acting).

But maybe more interesting is coming to terms with how different pixel art versions of characters are from their original concept art. By which I mean you might look at the 3d version of Riesz here:

And go "dang, was that skirt always that short?!" (particularly in a free 3d camera game with rolls and constant cutscenes from certain angles). So you look at the original sprite:

And go "eh no not really.. though maybe if you interpret it just right.. but everything else was definitely made sexier". So then you refer to the original concept art:

And go "ok yeah that 3d model is actually pretty spot-on aside from the dramatically enlarged chest."

This general principle applies throughout the remake. In some cases it's just a matter of things like short skirt lady witch soldiers working fine in 2d, but very much not working in 3d when you have their dead bodies lying all over the place with no effort being made to deal with it. Mana is just a sexy anime game franchise now, I guess (which wasn't false for the original Seiken Densetsu 3 either, but was also mostly using it as part of Angela's character. Secret of Mana had a completely different art style too, so it's kind of just SD3's fault.).

I don't have a lot to say about this, but it is an interesting facet of remaking old games: do you go with the more detailed concept art, or are you faithful to the sprites that players spent most of their time looking at? Were these sprites different due to the practical limits of pixel art, or because the sprite artists thought they just looked cooler? We'll probably never know.