Secret of Mana (1993)
If you grew up with a Super Nintendo gaming system in your childhood home, you might remember this bad boy:
1993’s Secret of Mana was one of the first J-RPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games) to feature a real-time combat system. Wikipedia has this to say about the game:
'Retrospectively, [Secret of Mana] has been considered one of the greatest games of all time by critics.'
When I first played it in 1996, I definitely said to myself
'Holy shit. This has to be one of the greatest games of all time'.
Like all the JRPGs of its era — and maybe all JRPGs, period— the scale of the narrative in Secret of Mana is truly epic. It speaks of forbidden knowledge entombed in the ruins of lost worlds; of advanced civilizations buried by their own hubris; of the hero-myths that sprout from soils enriched by cataclysm with the passage of untold eons.
To consider such heady material as a seven-year-old was awe-inspiring.
The magnitude of the story arc went a long way toward securing Secret of Mana’s place in the hearts of those who grew up with it. Besides that, everything is adorable but peppered with gravitas. High seriousness breaks through pastel brightness:
Dungeonposting downloaded an emulator to play Secret of Mana for the first time since childhood.
We didn’t get very far with it— sadly, we might be too old to enjoy it. As children, though, we were the target demographic.
Like the Mana Tree itself, Secret of Mana towered above the rest of the forest as a peak experience:
Anyone who had seen Hayao Miyizaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), about a technologically advanced civilization that turns a flying fortress into a superweapon and brings about its own downfall, would recognize the inspiration behind Secret of Mana right away; they tell the same story, even if Secret of Mana is remixed well enough to dodge a lawsuit.
A quick scan of the YouTube comments reveals that full-grown adults still sometimes burst into tears while playing Secret of Mana. This is a high compliment to the poignancy of the nostalgia it evokes— but I wonder…
Are they weeping for the lost ages of their childhood, …or the lost ages of the earth that Secret of Mana is redolent with?
It’s a story that never gets old: Secret of Mana tells the timeless tale of holy barbarism oppressed by the evils of civilization; of nature violated and turned against itself; of paradise lost, regained, and lost again. Indeed, the real reason I’m writing this— the thing that brought me back under the shade of the Great Mana Tree after so many years— is Hiro Isono’s breathtaking depiction of that paradise:
We can argue that the gameplay of Secret of Mana, which was groundbreaking at the time, didn’t age that well— but the cover illustration Hiro Isono did for the game is fucking eternal.
Looking at it makes me feel like the great World-Trees of mythology were definitely real. We have never seen a more compelling illustration of Yggdrasil. Hiro Isono tapped in to something powerful— it’s as if he split the vein of our collective amnesia to bring the ancient earth where giants roamed screaming back to life.
The early days of gaming were a golden age for fantasy art— like our primeval ancestors who dwelt under the shade of Mana Trees, we didn’t know how good we had it.
Perhaps because in-game graphics were uniformly bad, companies were heavily invested in visual artists that could hype up their products and make their 8-to-16-bit worlds more immersive and believable. Some of the finest moments in high fantasy illustration to date were an immediate consequence of these marketing efforts; and Hiro Isono’s Mana Tree stands out, even in a sea of high-caliber work.
Who is Hiro Isono?
Hiro Isono is credited alongside Shinichi Kameoka as one of the two artists to who worked on Secret of Mana. Besides the cover art, it’s unclear to me what else Isono-san 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 or his work except a handful of examples. There isn’t even a Wikipedia page for Hiro Isono.
I learned from a Japanese gaming website that he passed away at the age of 68 on May 28, 2013; 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 reproduce nature in excruciating detail.
From his presence on the Secret of Mana team we can infer that the theme of technology’s destructive power runs through his work. The specter of the inhuman devestation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs that were dropped the same year he was born might be the black mirror his neo-pointilist masterworks were graven upon:
If fleeing the wrath of unbridled industrial prowess drove Isono into the damp bosom of Mother Nature, his canvases (?) also demonstrate technology’s power to heal. His work is like if Henri Rousseau were a Shinto priest painting prayer flags pixel by pixel:
I am operating under the assumption that Hiro Isono was a digital artist— because if he was, Isono-san shows us the way to a real Secret of Mana—
it’s the technology of the human soul; mind, body and spirit.
Intentional magic. Technology is just an interface.
We have the power to create harmony and resonance in any medium—
Isono’s pieces all look like they were built up atom by atom.
They make my eyes vibrate like I am 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 of the Amazon River Basin.
Here is his official website, which someone out there is lovingly maintaining:
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