Secret of Mana Challenges

[Sene]

Sup y'all, been playing Secret of Mana for fifteen years (and probably completed the game as many times by now), and recently I picked it up again for the first time in a few years. However, it's also probably about fifteen years since the game posed any real challenge to me, so in my madness, I decided to make up a Hard Mode - the deal is: no armor allowed, and no offensive Magic against bosses (e.g. no Sprite Magic, and no Lucent Beam/Fire Bouquet/etc - defensive Magic like Cure Water must be allowed, or the challenge is completely impossible). Additionally, no cheating (no blocking spells with Moogle Belt), and no Mana Magic for the Mana Beast (doing this in normal playthroughs is already super cheap). Complete the game under these terms, and you can officially proclaim yourself a SoM-veteran! (and life hater, I suppose)

I've been playing through the game in the Hard Mode explained, and let me tell you, this ain't no joke. The enemies and bosses aren't messing around here. I've fought my way to the Pure Land (halfway through there now), and when an enemy around here lands an attack, your HP will go away in 500-point chunks. It is actually doable though, and I think I will be able to complete the game like this.

Biggest challenges in Hard Mode:
-Serpents (Great Viper and Dragon Viper)
-Hydra
-Blue Spike
-Gorgon Bull
(basically, any enemy that will cause heavy damage + unconsciousness, much because characters instantly die once their HP becomes zero - in other cases, you should often be able to heal them before they actually die)

Against tough bosses, your best bet will often be to let one of the characters (the Sprite, most likely) act as a lightningrod by standing next to the boss, while the Boy attacks and the Girl continuously heals the Sprite. This doesn't work as well if the boss is capable of causing unconsciousness though...

A slightly easier (well, who am I kidding? Much easier) challenge would be a "No Offensive Magic" challenge, or even simply no Magic at all. I think the lamest way to go through this game is to just spam spells at bosses, making them all too easy. Without armor and/or offensive Magic, your reaction when the boss starts blowing up will be "YAUSSS" instead of "huh, that was easy", and that's already kind of sweet =)

Could be fun to make a let's play with this super hard mode, but if so, that would be a project for the future.

[nick912012]

Haha, well good job getting that far in Secret of Mana Hard Mode. I've never been a huge fan of playing on emulators for some reason, but I have played a little bit of that hack, and I've seen videos at least.

I did a run through last year on the iPod touch version using Randi only, and that was tough. Fire Gigas was probably the toughest boss since Fireball did well over my max health.

That final boss fight with the Mana Beast was so exciting though. I exhausted all of my healing items, and I had 30 health left, so one more attack would have killed me. I kind of gave up, but I threw out one more charged attack, and it ended up dying. It's one of the coolest moments I've ever had in a video game.

[Sene]

Yeah, running it on an emulator, as my SNES died about ten years ago, may it rest in peace

Solo runs are probably quite challenging too, I'd imagine. Might be I'll try that next time.

In my current challenge (no armor, no offensive Magic against bosses, no cheap spell countering, and no Mana Magic) I've reached the Mana Fortress and beaten Buffy and Dread Slime (Dread Slime was laughably easy, actually) before turning back to rest. Next up: attempting to beat the game! I imagine the Mana Beast's Lucent Beams will be pretty rough - very likely OHKOs. The enemies in the Mana Fortress are much easier than those in the Pure Land, though, as there are no god damn Moushglooms jumping out of the shadows to inflict 500+ damage and unconsciousness to the entire team >:|

Edit: was defeated in my first attempt. Beat Thanatos handily enough, but the Girl became the target of Mana Beast's Lucent Beam too many times (they dealt about 680 damage, her max HP was around 650), running me out of Cups of Wishes... I think it was pretty close, though! I didn't run Dispel Magic + Analyzer to check my progress throughout the fight, but if I had to guess, the Beast was down to about 1000HP. Oh well, trying again tomorrow!

[Dr. Sheexy]

Wow, hardcore SoM sounds really neat. Thanks for the read, good luck on the Mana Beast!

A slightly easier (well, who am I kidding? Much easier) challenge would be a "No Offensive Magic" challenge,

That's pretty much how I've always played, because as a kid I always wanted to save my magic for the next boss, rather than use it at the moment. So I saved magic until the Mana Beast, and then you don't even need it, haha. XD

[Kassidy]

I think I'm going to have to try this, sounds an interesting challenge. I think the game definitely needed a magic cool-down or non-immediate casting (see SD3).

Hm... I sense a new video...

[Kassidy]

Well, I have officially started this challenge. I have just defeated Tropicallo, and am about an hour in. I'm sour about life. I died to Tropicallo. It's surprising what a difference a few points worth of armour makes.

[Kassidy]

I'm hating life twice as much now because the recording I did of that first part of the playthrough failed miserably without me realising, so I had to play through it again.... DERP! I did improve things by about 15 minutes though.

[Kassidy]

-Kassidy, powered by Tapatalk, Swype and HTC Desire... and cake.

[Hellfunk]

This is an awesome idea, I might have to try this. I just thought I'd mention that a "Hard Secret of Mana" exists, it's pretty damn hard, I never beat the final place, even using savestates. Hard mode is awesome, normal enemies one-shot you, everything is about 4 or 5 times more expensive, and cost of magic spells is increased. Check it out. http://www.hard-som.de/en/index.php

[Dr. Sheexy]

Huh, I guess I wasn't subscribed to this account of yours. I'll give these a watch sometime soon. Maybe we should have found a way to multiplayer some of it. XD

Also, when you get a bigger backlog of these maybe we should feature them on the main page.

[Kassidy]

Yeah, I think once I get up to 10 episodes it'll go on the main page. I have a huge amount of work to do on the main page that's been building up, I want to try and get on with some of that over the next two weeks.

Parts 3-5 are uploaded/uploading/encoding:

[Kassidy]

Part 6... In which I fail... A LOT.



I was feeling sick, tired, and all sorts.

[Kassidy]

10 videos later, I've just freed Salamando.

Now starting to post them on front page.

[coqui]

Awesome!

[Dr. Sheexy]

I'm definitely gonna get caught up on your videos now Kassidy, this is gonna be fun. It'll be my show while I eat dinner.