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. The only other similar title on the market at the time would have been the Legend of Zelda franchise.
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 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 eons.
To consider such heady material as a seven-year-old was truly awe-inspiring.
The magnitude of the story arc went a long way toward securing it’s vaunted place in the hearts of those who grew up with it. Beyond that, everything in the game is adorable— the high seriousness of global apocalypse breaks through pastel brightness:
I downloaded an emulator of the game recently and played it for the first time since childhood. I might be too old, too jaded, too much a product of the constant improvement of our society, to enjoy it like I once did— as a child, though, I was in the target demographic.
Like the Mana Tree itself, Secret of Mana seemed to tower above a forest of generic RPGs as a peak gaming 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; both works tell the same story, even if Secret of Mana is remixed well enough to dodge a lawsuit.
*…and anyone who had read Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by clergyman-turned-satirist Johnathan Swift would recognize the inspiration behind Miyizaki’s Laputa. Laputa is the name of the flying continent that rescues Gulliver after he is marooned by pirates off the coast of India on his way to… where else but, fucking, Japan:
A kingdom devoted to the arts of music, mathematics, and astronomy but unable to use them for practical ends, [...] Laputa has a custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground.
Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the [British] Royal Society and its experiments.
A quick scan of the YouTube comments reveals that full-grown adults will sometimes burst into tears while playing Secret of Mana. This is a high compliment to the poignancy of the nostalgia the game 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: the tale of holy barbarism oppressed by the evils of civilization; of nature violated and turned against itself; of paradise lost, regained, and lost again is timeless.
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 iconic depiction of Secret of Mana‘s lost paradise:
Even if Secret of Mana didn’t age that well, the cover illustration Hiro Isono did for the game is fucking eternal. The sheer presence of Isono-san’s Mana Tree makes me feel like the great World-Trees of mythology were definitely real. In my humble opinion, there has never seen a more compelling illustration of Yggdrasil. Hiro Isono tapped in to something powerful— splitting the vein of our collective amnesia to bring the ancient earth where giants roamed streaming back into the present from a whirling time vortex.
The early days of console gaming, from 1987 to 1997, were a golden age for fantasy art— like our primeval ancestors who dwelt under the shade of the great Mana Trees of old, we didn’t know how good we had it.
Because in-game graphics were uniformly bad, game studios 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— but Hiro Isono’s Mana Tree stands out, even in the sea of high-caliber work which came out of his era.
Who is Hiro Isono?
Hiro Isono is credited alongside Shinichi Kameoka as one of the two artists to who worked on Secret of Mana (1993). 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, and 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, or a computerized style, to reproduce nature in excruciating detail.
The specter of the inhuman devastation 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-san 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—
The Secret of Mana is like the crystal resonance that powered Hayao Miyizaki’s Laputa— it’s the technology of the human soul; mind, body and spirit in harmony with it’s natural environment
Intentional magic; Technology is just an interface.
We have the power to a better world, in any medium—
Hiro Isono’s pieces look like they were built up atom by atom.
They make my eyes vibrate— as though they were 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 prompted to dream of the Amazon River Basin.
Here is the late Hiro Isono’s official website, which someone out there is lovingly maintaining:
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