Secret of Mana (SNES)

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strat
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby strat » March 22nd, 2020, 6:57 pm

Don't worry, the booby traps will get more obnoxious. But you do get some tools for dealing with them.

ThePixelatedGenocide
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby ThePixelatedGenocide » March 23rd, 2020, 4:17 am

VideoGameCritic wrote:DO IT Pixelated! Let's make this a group exercise.


Sure. If not now, then when?

Anyways, you can find the herbs right away, in your home town. They're available for purchase before and after the cutscene where the villagers order your banishment, but probably not after you leave. You can buy them in other stores, later. To access them during gameplay, just push up or down from the main ring until you see them.

Also...

Like you observed, it's easy to get screwed over in this game...but so far, that seems like a bit of psychological warfare on the part of the developers. Stun locks are scary as hell, until you realize the game only punishes you so far. Thinking about what you're doing, and avoiding panic, will go a long ways in this game.

At least, that's the report from the beginning.

So far, I've got to say I've enjoyed this way more than either Neutopia or Golden Axe Warrior. The wide arc of the sword handed me a few wins I probably didn't deserve, but the high risk/high reward gameplay made it easy to do a bit of grinding here and there.
Last edited by ThePixelatedGenocide on March 23rd, 2020, 5:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ThePixelatedGenocide
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby ThePixelatedGenocide » March 23rd, 2020, 5:38 pm

Update: Once you have sword technique level 2, and the armor from the dwarf village, the werewolves are fairly easy to massacre. They appear to stop healing each other once you've dealt enough damage.

To get to the dwarf village, attack the 2 skulls on the walls in Gia's Navel. I'm currently overpowered at level 10, with the sprite in my party.

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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby VideoGameCritic » March 28th, 2020, 6:59 pm

Man this game really sucks. Stuck in the witch's castle and the tiger either knocks me unconscious before I have a chance to do anything or engulfs me in fire. Those herbs are nowhere to be found.

strat
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby strat » March 28th, 2020, 10:53 pm

You can buy them in Kippo Village (south of Gaia's Navel) and the Dwarf Village. I could have sworn the cat in the witch's dungeon sells them, too, but he disappears after you beat the area so I can't double check.

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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby VideoGameCritic » March 29th, 2020, 11:45 am

Okay, so its the MEDICAL herbs your talking about. I can get them anywhere. I was confused.

Anyway I stocked up on them but I can't use them during the tiger boss level. What gives?

This game sucks. No wonder I rarely play RPGs!

Voor
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby Voor » March 29th, 2020, 4:37 pm

I’m in the same boat. I really want to like RPGs, but I can’t figure them out. I played a couple of hours of the acclaimed FF7, found myself invested in the story, etc; but then the battle system got too complicated for me to follow.

Maybe try Earthbound. It has an auto battle system for when you don’t feel like fooling with that.

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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby VideoGameCritic » March 29th, 2020, 5:41 pm

Finally beat the tiger. Not sure how but tried to keep my distance and used the bow.

strat
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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby strat » March 29th, 2020, 6:17 pm

Just for the heck of it, I started a new game and quickly got to the Tiger. It was a mess of healing and fumbling around. The game never really gets that annoying again, though a lot of it is still pretty tough.

IIRC Earthbound's auto-battle doesn't do much except force everyone to use "bash" attacks [Edit: It does auto-heal but I never used it enough to see that]. Final Fantasy games don't have auto-battle but they at least have a cursor-memory function so it'll point at the last command you selected for that character. In any case it's definitely more complex than Earthbound but any decent RPG is going to have a basic level of complexity (Xenogears is my personal pick for most pointlessly complicated JRPG).

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Re: Secret of Mana (SNES)

Postby VideoGameCritic » April 6th, 2020, 12:02 pm

I just beat the Wall Face. I had to power-up the magic by doing a little grinding first. Turns out the more you use magic, the higher the level you get.


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