Last semester, I finally purchased a retro game collection that has been sitting on my wishlist since 2019: Collection of Mana featuring Final Fantasy Adventures for the Game Boy, Secret of Mana, and for the first time outside of Japan, Trials of Mana, both for the SNES. The Mana games are some of Square Enix’s more experimental RPGS, as they take on more action-combat than turn-based combat like the world-renowned Final Fantasy series. In fact, in the Americas, the first game was named Final Fantasy Adventures, like a spinoff, in hopes to profit off of their flagship franchise’s notoriety, while having no actual relationship to the games. Its name in Japanese comes out as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden, its first part meaning “Legend of the Sacred Sword.”

This first game in the collection (let’s just call it Seiken Densetsu) was released on the Game Boy in 1991 to positive reviews. The Game Boy wasn’t an impressive device for the times, per se. The Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear had brighter screens and colored displays off the bat, while the Game Boy just had a monochrome display and only gained a backlit screen and color display later down the line. But what made the Game Boy trounce the competition was the games and their ability to work with less and get more out of it.

Seiken Densetsu was a prime example of that. It seems similar to the Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening at first, with its top-down perspective on a scrolling screen-by-screen map littered with enemies to fight with sword in hand, dungeons to conquer with special items, and towns to visit. But this is only the beginning of what makes Seiken Densetsu an adventure.

Hitting the start button on the new game option starts off with a rolling screen of text telling over the story so far. To paraphrase, The Dark Lord is searching for the Tree of Mana; a mythical entity in nature that grows with the “energy of will” from every creature on the planet; as legend states, touching the tree lets one tap into its infinite supply of magical energy. Guess what he wants to do with it? Take over the world.

You then name your playable character, a boy, and the love interest, a girl. I named the boy Wern, and the girl Flora (I think … I can’t remember). Wern is dropped into an arena and told to fight as a ferocious lion walks out of the darkness. This game wants to make you uneasy. You aren’t given a moment to breathe, even at the beginning of the game, where you will definitely die multiple times before defeating the boss. 

After defeating the beast, the game tells you what is going on: Wern is a fighter, part of the evil empire, and is forced to fight every day for the entertainment of the Dark Lord. Every. Day. When I read that, it reminded me of the challenge I was just put through. No time to breathe, just keep trying to kill this beast, going back at it after every failure. It made me relate to Wern. The moment I could put the controller down was the moment I felt like I was a part of the game

We see Wern comforting Willy, one of his friends, as he suffers from his prolonged injuries from battling in the arena for so long. He tells Wern that the Mana Tree is in danger, and that he should go see Bogard at the Falls and talk to him, as he is something called a Gemma Knight.

Wern escapes the castle he fights in every day and overhears a conversation between the Dark Lord and Julius, his right-hand man. He says to the Dark Lord that the Mana Tree is above the Waterfall, and the only way to reach it is for a miracle to occur with the help of a girl with a special key.

Wern is caught overhearing and is thrown off a cliff. He barely survives and begins to fend for himself against … the very cute monsters of Mana (look up Rabite it’s so adorable). Thus begins the gameplay loop of finding a town, the townspeople send you out to do a quest, you fight monsters all the way to a dungeon, find a cool weapon there, and solve whatever problem you’ve been given, leading you to continue your quest.

Or more accurately, tragically fail at your quest at every step of the way while saving only some of those around you, until a miracle occurs through your efforts to save the world. I do not wish to spoil moments from this game that made my jaw drop to the floor. But to give you a sense of the drama, here are a few quotes from an interview transcribed onto schmuplations.com, celebrating Seiken Densetsu’s 15th anniversary, originally featured in Nintendo Dream magazine from Koichi Ishii, the Director of the Mana series, and one of the first people to work on Square’s most famous series, Final Fantasy.

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Ishii: … The first Seiken owes a big debt to Zelda, which we were very impressed by. We respected Zelda, and it gave us confidence to make something where the world of the game is built as you play. In those days, what games [were] called “stories” were mostly just setting notes and outlines, but we had an idea for a game where “setsunasa” (sadness / melancholy) was the theme. It was taboo then to have a game that concluded in something other than a typical happy end.

Can you explain what you mean?

Ishii: In the first Seiken Densetsu, the first thing you do is enter a name for the heroine. I think most everyone is going to choose the name of a girl they like. Which is precisely what we were aiming for. (laughs) You spend the whole game defending this girl, but in the end, (spoilers). It’s painful, but if you think about her feelings, [but] (spoilers) is the only choice. I don’t think kids encounter scenes like that very often in their lives … These are difficult emotions. But as you get older one has a lot of those experiences.

And you wanted to use that to express the theme of sadness, as you said?

Ishii: Yeah. I was very happy when, several years ago, I got a letter from a fan who told me they played Seiken Densetsu as a kid, and now that they’re an adult they understand the protagonist’s feelings very well. We took a chance and put those elements into Seiken Densetsu: emotions you might only understand and be able to relate to later, when you’re [an] adult. Considering it was the first game in the series, it was a big risk to take.

What do you think it is about the Seiken Densetsu series that has earned the love of the fans over so many years?

Ishii: I’ve had people around me ask that question a lot, but I don’t actually have a clear answer. The way I personally see the fantasy world of Seiken, its wide open fields and blue skies, huge trees, everything living and breathing, and you’re lying there, arms spread wide on the ground, taking it all in and listening to the heartbeat of nature. I think Seiken is kind of like a filter, through which the players sift their own memories and impressions from their childhood, and perhaps that’s what’s made it so beloved.

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This is what makes Mana special. Those emotions you only internalize fully as an adult can be found in media that truly puts you in the shoes of its main characters. And making that game this action-adventure hybrid was a stroke of genius, especially for the Gameboy, a handheld mostly used by kids and teenagers. Despite how dated the game becomes, maybe even because of how dated they are, there will not be another game as raw with emotion as the Seiken Densetsu games.