Fans of the original Secret of Mana have been surprised with a complete remake of the game. No one was expecting a remake, yet it came out of nowhere. The original, released way back in 1993, was a huge hit, that the latest release was bound to make great strides.
The game is an action role-playing game in which Randi is the main protagonist who is beckoned by a strange and mysterious voice soon after which he obtains a legendary sword, which results in him being expelled from his village. He then sets out on a mission to restore the power of his village.
Forget the Lags and Freezes in Secret of Mana
Reginout System Utilities follows Google Software Principles
Issues Faced During Gameplay
The remake has replaced the original sprites which were 2-dimensional, in favor of the 3-dimensional models. This has had its own strengths such as the ability to convey Randi’s expression, or for that matter, any of the characters. However, the lack of overall detail in the graphics looks cheap on the current day hardware.
There have been various sorts of complaints regarding bugs found in the game. One of them, is that party members get stuck on walls and also stand directly in the line of fire. Some technical issues like game crashes are also heard about frequently. Some people have also reported that half of their screen goes black. This has been a nuisance for several players and Square Enix surely must be working on a fix. Surprisingly, some users have also reported to suffer from a massive drop in frames, at about 5 FPS during the intro scenes as well as while playing. This makes it almost unplayable.
Another huge bug that has been reported is that when the users kill an enemy, the enemy lags and it takes a while before it actually disappears despite being finished off by the player. This confuses the user about the status of the enemy and further kills the fun factor. There are numerous complaints about the highly erratic lag issue also. Despite being dead, the Eggplant man decides to cast a couple of more spells before kicking the bucket. Several crashes have also been reported with no such uniform trends that can convey when it happens.
Solution to Lags and Freezes
Thankfully, the brain behind Secret of Mana, Masaru Oyamada, has announced on Steam community that there is an update coming up for the Steam version of the game. This update primarily deals with most of the bugs that had an effect on the game’s progression. It can be confirmed that this update will reduce the frequency with which errors have been occurring.
The developers are looking into other issues that have been reported and haven’t yet been addressed in this version of the update. This means that work is going on to fix all the issues with the unveiling of the next update. The benefits rolled out by the current update include:
- Less errors
- The black screen bug has been fixed
- Characters no longer appear on a black buggy background
- Enemies are always mobile, unlike before under certain combos of attacks
- When with 0 HP, it will not be possible to revive characters
- Conversations are smoother with a normal ending