More Erosion (Day 121)

After cycling through a few games last night, I eventually, mercifully drifted off to sleep. Instead of deciding on any game I'd discussed in my previous entry, I instead decided to play none other than Secret of Mana, the Super Nintendo classic. It's actually a little surprising that I haven't finished it before considering how many classic RPGs I've played and completed in my time--but truthfully I've never been a huge fan of action RPGs.

I certainly don't hate them and in fact I welcome RPG combat systems that unshackle themselves from their traditional turn-based roots, but when it comes to wandering around aimlessly slashing rabbits I tend to lose interest. As blasphemous as it might be, I've also never considered myself a Legend of Zelda fan. I have played and enjoyed several games from the series but have always felt more connected to series like Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem.

Despite all this, I think Secret of Mana might be a nice change of pace. It's simple and easy to play--and hopefully not too long. I've put about an hour into it so far and I can already tell you that I really enjoy the graphics. The sprites make put the limited color palette to good use and manage to pack in enough detail for every character to be completely distinguishable from each other while still having unique traits. Even when playing the game at a higher resolution where pixels are more clearly visible, the sprites still look quite good--not something I can necessarily say for other games on the console.

The music is also very bright, cheerful, and catchy. I have heard some praise for Hiroki Kikuta's work in the past but I have a tendency for not listening to music from games I haven't played. Once I have finished Secret of Mana (and hopefully that does actually happen) I'll probably acquire the soundtrack and add it to my collection. I'm curious as to whether or not any arranged or orchestrated versions of music from the game exists.

Despite all this, I've certainly not given up on Innocent Sin. I'll likely still be playing it sporadically along with a few other games. My personality makes it difficult for me to play and complete games to the end despite making a push in recent years to give every worthy a game a solid attempt--so jumping around from game to game seems to be a temporary antidote to that problem.

If I do indeed make it through Secret of Mana, I intend to give Seiken Densetsu 3 another try. It's a game I played a small amount of many years ago when the fan translation was first released. I enjoyed it for what it is but at the time I had little to no interest in action RPGs. There were still so many traditional RPGs at the time that I had not tried. Even 10 years ago, I had a backlog.

SD3 is similar to its predecessor, but significantly increases the number of playable characters. As far as I know, SoM only has three, whereas SD3 has 8 or 9. Each character has a class with a choice of different promotions as they level up. The characters you choose in each run seem to have an impact on the plot as well, although admittedly I don't know a lot about it. Thinking about it now makes it sound pretty fun, though.