Secret Of Mana (1993)
Wikipedia says,
‘Retrospectively, [Secret of Mana] has been considered one of the greatest games of all time by critics.’
When I played it in 1996 I definitely remember thinking, ‘this is one of the greatest games of all time’.
Like all Squaresoft’s JRPGs in that period (and maybe all Squaresoft JRPGs, period), the scale of the narrative is massive. It encompasses eons and buried civilizations, forbidden knowledge and cataclysmic events. Even to think about such things as a seven-year old was pretty awe-inspiring.
I didn’t see Hayao Miyizaki’s Catle in the Sky (1986) until 2021 or something, but if I had seen it I would have recognized it immediately in Secret of Mana.
They are basically the same story. An advanced civilization harnesses powers of a divine or magical providence to build a floating fortress that is also the ultimate weapon. A weapon so powerful it enrages the gods.
In Castle In the Sky, the creators of the floating continent had abused its powers to tyrannize the planet.
In Secret of Mana, the crimes of the advanced civilization are unspecified— are the gods mad because the people used mana, or because they used the power of mana to build a sky-weapon?
Whatever the particulars, this kind of story that never gets old—either because it’s crazy, or because it’s just crazy enough to be true.It’s a pattern familiar to us from stories like the sinking of Atlantis or the confounding of tongues at the Tower of Babel.
Secret of Mana tells the ancient story of holy barbarism oppressed by the evils of civilization, of nature turned against itself, of a paradise lost and a paradise regained.
I recently downloaded an emulator and tried to play Secret of Mana for the first time since childhood. I didn’t get very far with it. I might be too old to enjoy it. As a child, though, it was a peak experience. That’s why I bought a hard copy when I was sixteen and held onto it for over a decade, even though I didn’t have a Super Nintendo.
The cover art is as memorable as the game itself, and might have had a lot to do with why the game made such an impact. Reading through the Youtube Comments, it looks like full-grown adults are sometimes cry while playing it. I feel like that is a pretty high compliment.
Secret of Mana was also one of the first JRPGs to feature a real-time combat system, which was a pretty big deal at the time.
The early days of gaming were a golden age for fantasy art. The in-game graphics were uniformly bad or shallow so companies spent a lot on visual artists to help hype up their products. Going to such great lengths to make their 8-to-16 bit worlds feel more genuine had the effect of making marketing efforts would often double as bonafide aesthetic experience.
That’s why, decades later, I went looking for the name of the artist who did the cover art for Secret of Mana. Whoever it was,I really took them for granted. I took that whole period for granted.
The artist’s name is Hiro Isono.
Hiro Isono is also credited alongside Shinichi Kameoka as one of the two artists that worked on Secret of Mana. Besides the cover art, it’s unclear to me what else he contributed to the project. Character design? Environments? Did he do pixel art? Was this giant mana tree done on a computer, or is it hand-painted? I don’t know. I can’t find anything about the man except his work.
There isn’t even a Wikipedia page for Hiro Isono.
I learned from a gaming website that he passed away at the age of 68 on May 28, 2013, and that he was born in 1945. He graduated from Aichi Univeristy of Education’s Fine Arts department in 1968. He would have been old enough to remember the post-war reconstruction of Japan. Maybe that’s why he used computers to worship nature.
From Secret of Mana we can gather that themes of technology’s destructive power run throughout into his work.
Perhaps he meant to demonstrate technology’s power to heal. If so, he was successful. His work is like if Henri Rousseau was a Renaissance artist who worked in pixels.
(Again, I don’t know what medium he used, here. Are these paintings? Are they digital? For the life of me, I can’t tell.)
Maybe Hiro Isono meant to show us the real secret of magic, the real Secret of Mana, which is perhaps the same as the secret of intentional magic: it’s the technology of the human soul, mind and spirit. Technology is just an interface. We have the power to create harmony and resonance in any medium.
These pieces all look like they were built up atom by atom. They make my eyes feel like they are witnessing Van Der Wahls interactions in real time on an old cathode ray television. They make me think of what it would be like to experience nature as a blissed-out machine conciousness. Like a fully sentient machine on molly who is dreaming.
Here is his official website, which someone out there is lovingly maintaining:
