In which we make our way deeper into Elinee’s castle and get a lot of abuse from werewolves.
Recording interrupted by random wifeperson appearance.

In today’s episode… we die… a lot.

Part 2 of our hardcore SoM playthrough sees our hero make his way over to the Dwarf Village to free them of Tropicallo and meet up with Popoi the sprite.

This part is somewhat longer than most, still to this day working on getting the timings right.

Not too long ago, forum member Sene posted a thread called Secret of Mana Challenges. In this he details a hardcore mode for Secret of Mana to make the game more difficult:

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)

So to sum it up:
– No Armour
– No Offensive Magic against bosses
– No Glitching
– No Mana Magic against the Mana Beast.

Challenge accepted, says Kassidy. I’ve started playing through the game in this manner and, I agree, it’s quite a bit harder than I expected. Not only that, but I’m video blogging / let’s playing / documenting the agony. Above is the first instalment of this series, with more to follow soon.

A few days ago, Secret of Mana: Genesis, an arrangement album of tracks taken from Secret of Mana, was released by Square Enix. It contains 16 tracks arranged by Kikuta himself, though they do not deviate very far from the originals. His intent with the album is to keep the original feel of the songs and refine the sound to make it more beautiful. He says it was a difficult challenge, but he’s happy with the end result.

You can find the album on iTunes, or can purchase the CD from retailers such as YesAsia for around $30.

The tracklist is as follows:

1. Genesis: Angel’s Fear (title screen)
2. Fantasies: Tell a Strange Tale (Empire towns theme)
3. Friends: Always Together (Overworld for waterfall)
4. Wilderness: The Boy Aims for Wild Fields (Overworld around Pandora area)
5. Memories: Colour of the Summer Sky (happy town theme)
6. Fairies: The Fairy Child (Salamando’s / Happy Kakkara theme)
7. Mystics: What the Forest Taught Me (Upperland forest)
8. Avengers: Danger! (boss theme)
9. Winds: The Orphan of the Storm (you beat a boss)
10. Gremlins: Flight Bound for the Unknown (Flammie theme 1)
11. Prophecies: Premonition (Flammie theme 3)
12. Machineries: Steel and Traps (Undergruond City, Scorpion Army, and such)
13. Secrets: Give Love it’s Rightful Time (Mana Fortress inside)
14. Ballads: Pure Night (Pureland)
15. Mass: The Prayer of the Arctic Circle (Boss Battle v Mana Beast)
16. Truth: The Second Truth from the End (Ending theme 2)

Most of the site should be functional again. The board is up and running.

I have decided to ditch the gallery and find another gallery script to use. The last one didn’t really satisfy my needs even if it was most download gallery plugin for WordPress. I hope I can find a gallery that has the functions I want for Seikens.

So the move to new server went almost accordingly. I hope most of the site is working. The board is down for the moment, but it will be back later

Hey everyone, belated holidays to you all, things have gotten super busy for me since grad school started so I haven’t had time to update the site at all. I don’t expect I’ll be able to update the site much until the summer or so, so expect things to keep pretty slow around here.

Anyway, OCRemix released another Christmas themed album and you can find it here. One track from the album is by Rozovian, who I’ve mentioned before in a few updates (he’s heading up the secret SD3 album, more news on that soon… possibly). It’s a remix of A Cold Beat from Heroes of Mana, and it’s the first HoM remix I’ve heard myself. Check it out! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the album too.

Into the White – Rozovian – Heroes of Mana
[audio:https://www.seikens.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/02-Rozovian-Into-the-White.mp3|titles=02 Rozovian – Into the White]

Tool Assisted Speed-runs are those done with the assistance of programs that allow the player to re-record segments, edit them, time actions on a frame by frame basis to manipulate luck, and all sorts of other funky things that wouldn’t strictly be possible when playing normally. The aim of these is to get to the end of the game, from a clean state, as quickly as possible, though sometimes speed is sacrificed for entertainment value.

While very often this is seen done for platformers, it isn’t limited to that genre alone. In this case, SD3 has finally been TASed, and completed in just under 3 and a half hours by praetarius3. You can watch it on YouTube here, or download from the tasvideos.org page here. Also, if you want to understand some of the things going on a bit better, check out the author’s comments here.

When watching the video, turn on closed captions in YouTube to get some background as to what is going on, as this plays on a non-patched version of the game.

So, in my determination to study up for a test I have tomorrow I neglected to put up the MMM update at a decent time today.

And that’s how I picked this track!

If you can put up with the Rising Sun bits you can really enjoy the Fighting Arena and Endless Battlefield bits of this piece. I really like how it starts out all happy and carefree as the Rising Sun appears over the story and then suddenly you can imagine the Hero of FFA and his hardships fighting for Dark Lord’s enjoyment in the Fighting Arena. Then he escapes out onto the Endless Battlefield with a mission to save the world, and another Rising Sun appears because a new day has begun in his life. Yeah that’s pretty deep right? Ok maybe not, but I’ve always thought this album could use a Fantasia-esque animation to go along with the music. The only problem I see is that it kind of covers a lot of ground once you get to the Parting and Decisive Battle track.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: Determination – Kenji Ito – Seiken Densetsu – Let Thoughts Ride on Knowledge
Arranged by Takayuki Hattori