What a masterpiece that game was and on so many levels, just listening to the intro theme is enough to call up the best of nostalgia in my gamer heart. Thanks for that video

one of the best sound track in a game I can remember. "The color of the summer sky" from the village... unforgetable.

Just beat this game finally last year after playing it many times as a kid. This was one of the first games I ever played, what a way to start a gaming journey.

This game changed my life -- if not for Secret of Mana, I would have never met the girl who would eventually become my wife. I joined a Secret of Mana fan army in the late 90s, which is what got me engaged enough in that era of the Internet to discover the webcomic Bob and George once that got started. I was a moderator on the Bob and George forums, and that's where I met my wife.

Can’t believe this game turned 30 the other day

The big secret on Secret of Mana, the game was originally designed and planned for the SNES-CD, built to make use of the space on a CD. When the SNES-CD deal fell apart, Secret of Mana had to get cut down. And if you compared Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger, there are some similarities in graphics. Secret of Mana supposedly had time travel mechanics also included, which all of those cut elements went on to inspire Chrono Trigger. To help support the "SNES-CD game that got cut down", the story and character development (leveling up characters and equipment) starts off slow moving from the start of the game to reaching the Empire. Starting from The Empire, the drop rate of weapon orbs and collection of the last 4 elements along with the story pace picked up fast, suggesting content was cut and what was kept was rearranged to fit a plot. If you want to compare back ground layers, you need to see the Pure Land. Can you imagine what this game could have been if it had a 600+ MB CD to store everything. The artwork would not need compression, just fit the resolution. The extra hardware power from the SNES-CD system would aid the flight. How much more story content there would have been? There is also the music tracks being closer to CD quality.

Also, this game had surround sound support I believe!

I'm still hoping a beta of the Akira Toriyama Snes CD-ROM Project Secret of Mana was constructed from will surface someday.

I really wonder how this would have been if the SNES CD add on was released.

Games like this were truly meant to be played on an analog CRT television when referencing the pixel art, while it is still just fine on a modern flat screen or LCD display theres naturally going to be artifacts in the image being rendered for a resolution or display it was never designed for which is the mean reason I still keep with me a magnavox 13 inch CRT from 2005 it was one of the last years they still made analog displays before everyone completely switched over to now modern displays.

This is the reason why I love your work, you don't regurgitate facts of games but break everything down and it makes for a downright interesting video that satisfies my thirst for "how's" and "why's".

I still have yet to see anyone on any channel ever cover the script and story difference between secret of mana in America and Japan as they are significant.

I prefer the NTSC USA opening. The tree appears (implied) way larger. This game is a masterpiece. I still play/listen (like so many other people)

A true classic of my childhood and a game I'll always cherish- I don't usually know much about tech or coding, but I do remember the mapscrolling and getting annoyed by it... so if nothing else, you helped me put one old mystery to rest here :)

They dropped the ball wuth that remake🥺

I quite liked Secret of Mana.... but I loved Secret of Evermore. Evermore is one of my childhood favorites.

It does look nice and feels very Zelda. I don’t think I knew about this on the *Snes* back in the day.

Thank you for this. It annoys me that the KZfaq algorithm didn’t show me this (or your more recent video) despite me being subscribed and instead shows me more “popular” stuff from people I’ve watched also but not subscribed to. I feel like that’s disingenuous to both the subscriber and the person who puts in all the hard work (aka you!)

The pre-blurred image of the UK/US versions would account for the faster decoding, for sure. Much lower dynamic range / less pixel changes.

When will you do Chrono Trigger? The effects may not be console stretching but it's Chrono Trigger.

I love this series but I do really wish they had made the screen scroll sooner. I feel like I’m pushing the screen blindly. Still, I’m extremely excited for the mana pack for theatrythm in the next couple of days! The music is just so good and the graphics so pretty.

game archaeology? Absolutely peak.

Now I need your take on Illusion of Gaia and Soul Blazer. :)

Wow, better than Seiken Densetsu 3? No way!

Seems like if they had more time they would have started with the original art, much like the Japanese release, and altered it themselves. Even zoomed in there was more to work with in the original art that could've been brought over to the SNES.

This is fascinating, I always wondered what had happened to the title screen, for one. I'd like more of this

Gebelli also built a similar globe view for FF II on NES. Performance wasn’t so good though

10:04 Interestingly, the dialog box floats above the red mist layer and above the landscape layer. Does the SNES indeed support three layers or did they use sprites? Also, its sequel - Seiken Densetsu 3 - looks even prettier, IMHO.

I find it ironic that I was *just* looking into the Mana games yesterday. The timing on this video couldn't have been better. What I was looking into was how the Sofdec video compression works on DS (because it's not the same format as other systems used) but I didn't find anything. I found it really impressive how Children of Mana got both a decently high quality (3 megabyte) ADX file and a 12-megabyte 2 screen FMV running really smoothly with no obvious visual issues like screen tearing (and without making the video look like a sequence of low quality JPEG images like Mobiclip usually did). Only somewhat obvious issue I noticed is the limited color palette (but that's not very easy to notice on the original hardware).

The entire Seiken Densetsu series are beautiful magical fantasy rpgs. The GBA remake Sword of Mana is very beautiful too

Fantastic game, a bit unpolished compared to Zelda & Nintendo's own, but a must play for the SNES. Interesting fact about alot of the dungeons, they are full of empty rooms. This was due to the game originally being developed for the ill fated SNES CD, as a result they ran out of space and some content had to be removed.

Fond memories

It's called the Secret of Mana for a reason, mate.

Compression typically works by finding common repeating patterns and mashing them down, for instance, if "0000" appears quite often it will assign it a single byte keyword of sorts in a lookup table and reduce any appears of the 4 bytes into one byte. The stretching of the image creates a lot of repeated patterns with 4 or 5 pixels(at 1 byte per pixel here at 8 bit colour depth) in a row, and that would almost certainly create patterns that would compress better. Can't say if that's why they did it, but it would make sense.

First time ever seeing a KZfaq video listed as having "No views"

Yeah, that translucent cloud effect is probably unachievable on any other system at that time.

Nawww the Chrono Trigger intro is better

........BOY......... Remove the sword... BOY: Who are you... and what is this sword doing here? I am Kratos

Looks similar to a more action oriented zelda game

Americans again thinking they are the entire West. In Europe, it was called Mystic Quest

Terranigma is way better.