Phew. Alright.
It’s taken me several attempts to start writing this. I’ve mentioned before that SD3 has some significant emotional attachment for me; forgive me, but I can’t talk about one without talking about the other. Suffice it to say, a game that can root itself so firmly into ones memories is something special.
I first played SD3 15 years ago, which was also my age at the time (and that, in itself, is hard to think about). I remember being utterly mesmerised by… well, everything; in every aspect, it was a shining gem in SNES’ crown, especially for the RPG-obsessed proto-punk young BB was.
I had a best friend at the time, who was perhaps even more into RPGs than I was, but lacked the means to play SNES games, and so my role in his life was to provide the real goods. Chrono Trigger was first, obviously, but not long afterwards I had to introduce him to this obscure diamond. It was the summer holidays preceeding my impending move away and out of his life, and so every day without fail he walked two miles to my house to play games and drink all of our Dr Pepper.
And then… I moved away, and life happened- a whole lot of it. We drifted apart, of course. Somehow, I never found my way back to SD3 after that, despite being a nostalgic sort and a retro-head. I wasn’t avoiding doing so, it just never happened. Even when going through the enitre SNES library to add music to my playlist, I somehow skipped SD3.
In recent times, said friend decided to entirely cut me from his life. Not sure what triggered it- we hadn’t really spoken for a long while but maintained that surface-level contact through social medias and the like, and then one day he was gone from all of them. Just a few weeks later, entirely unrelated, I got a whim to listen to the SD3 OST again, having not listened to any of it since I played it… and somehow could remember every track, each one hitting me with another wave of melancholy nostalgia.
And then 3 days later they announced a remake and a re-release at E3, and I was super weirded out.
It’s finally come time to confront all of the above- the dice have decided. So let’s talk about the game itself for a moment, and allow it its new name Trials Of Mana to represent this new start.
It’s the sequel to Secret Of Mana which I covered previously, and ultimately couldn’t stomach. It’s a very janky game, with echoes of Trials present but none of them refined into anything playable. I was immediately very nervous that I was misremembering how good Trials was, but thankfully most of the wonkiness was fixed for the sequel. Most notably, combat makes a great deal more sense now, although there are still times my character will just steadfastly refuse to do anything while enemies wail on her and more than once it’s taken a few seconds for an enemy to realise I just killed it. It’s much smoother than Secret was, and my companion’s AIs are a lot stronger too.
Visually the game is an absolute tour-de-force- some of the most beautiful landscapes SNES has to offer- and the story is fairly ambitious with six different plotlines threading together and ending in different places depending on which character you choose at the start.
Finally, and most criminally overlooked- the music in this game is fricken incredible.
Fin Or Bin:
For some reason they made Charlotte (or Carlie as I knew her) tawk wike dis, which is going to be super obnoxious in the remake when every line is voice-acted. But for this play-through, I’m gonna go put Boulevard Of Broken Dreams on repeat, re-read all six Harry Potter books, and make some new memories as I Finish Trials.