15th June 2019, 2:13 PM
I picked this up the day I heard about it. There's no way I was waiting for the 3D remake (the past two 3D remakes have been kind of disappointing, losing a lot of the charm of the 2D artwork. Maybe the 3rd one will be better, but I opted for this.)
It's kind of unprecedented to see an official translation for a game THIS long after it came out, specifically the original ROM. It seems they basically hacked it, so they must have lost the source code. Still, it's done very well and looks nicer than the fan translation, with terms fitting what's been established in the series and a fitting title.
Well, that's all well and good, but there's two other titles here. Final Fantasy Adventure is an oddly titled version of Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden. It's weird the Japanese words I've picked up over the years. As you might imagine, they took the Final Fantasy subtitle and ran with it on the premise that it would sell better with that as the focus. It's a very fun single player game that makes that tinny GB speaker really sing. There's lots of surprising emotion pumped out of that system, and the soundtrack sounds amazing here too. This is the black and white original, not the JAVA colorized phone port, not Sword of Mana (The GBA reimagining), and not Adventures of Mana (the 3D remake). It's a shame it only includes this, but it's done very well. There's no Super Gameboy style options to alter the color scheme as you see fit, but it does at least provide 3 options. One is pure black and white, the second is "A1", the default color palette you see if you plug it into a SGB (Personally I'm not a fan of this scheme for the game and on the Super Gameboy I always switched it to something else) and the third is a yellow/green "dot pixel matrix" setup that goes for such accuracy it makes each "dot pixel" tiny with gaps around them to really push that original look, though I think the yellow-green affair is just a bit too strong. It also gives two screen sizes for each mode. One is a full screen look that does a slight bit of smoothing to make it blend at the higher resolution, and the other is a smaller window more like the Super Gameboy. Take your pic, but I looked very closely and honestly couldn't find any graphical oddities in the stretched mode. It does a VERY good job stretching the image in a smooth way. Other than this, the game includes 4 different regional versions, each with it's own save slot. For some reason, the Japanese original was left out. That's a very strange omission if you ask me, and I can't imagine why they bothered, considering just how tiny these emulated ROMs are. Oh, and the emulation is also very well done.
Secret of Mana properly supports 3 players on one console with linked controllers. No online mode however... If you can deal with that, it works great. Once again, the game is emulated in 4 possible languages (No Japanese), and includes two screen sizes. Other than the two screen sizes, it rotates between turning a smoothing filter on and off for four possible settings. I am not a fan of pixel smoothing personally, so I leave it off, but that leaves the two sizes. On 1080p screens, you're choosing between vertical or horizontal "shimmer" since neither fits smoothly into the native resolution of the screen. On the Switch's own 720p, shimmer seems to be eliminated in "full screen" mode. It may be best to play this on the switch for single player in that case. There's a quick save feature with 3 unique slots. This is also true of Adventure, but since that game lets you literally save anywhere already its not worth mentioning. Secret of Mana definitely benefits from it though.
Trials of Mana, here's the prize. No, it's not a 3 player game (against all logic and the will of the Goddess of Mana), but it wasn't in the original version either. I think a patch could hack it into the game properly if Square Enix wanted to take the time. The translation appears solid and professionally done, the font looking better than most SNES era translations in fact. (It's variable width, rare for SNES games.) The title is fine (much better than Secret of Mana 2, which was the internal name for Secret of Evermore anyway, not this one). The branching classes mesh well with the branching story based on which characters you pick at the start and in which order. The combat system also flows a lot more smoothly than in Secret. There's a reason that this one is the more popular of the two in Japan.
It's kind of unprecedented to see an official translation for a game THIS long after it came out, specifically the original ROM. It seems they basically hacked it, so they must have lost the source code. Still, it's done very well and looks nicer than the fan translation, with terms fitting what's been established in the series and a fitting title.
Well, that's all well and good, but there's two other titles here. Final Fantasy Adventure is an oddly titled version of Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden. It's weird the Japanese words I've picked up over the years. As you might imagine, they took the Final Fantasy subtitle and ran with it on the premise that it would sell better with that as the focus. It's a very fun single player game that makes that tinny GB speaker really sing. There's lots of surprising emotion pumped out of that system, and the soundtrack sounds amazing here too. This is the black and white original, not the JAVA colorized phone port, not Sword of Mana (The GBA reimagining), and not Adventures of Mana (the 3D remake). It's a shame it only includes this, but it's done very well. There's no Super Gameboy style options to alter the color scheme as you see fit, but it does at least provide 3 options. One is pure black and white, the second is "A1", the default color palette you see if you plug it into a SGB (Personally I'm not a fan of this scheme for the game and on the Super Gameboy I always switched it to something else) and the third is a yellow/green "dot pixel matrix" setup that goes for such accuracy it makes each "dot pixel" tiny with gaps around them to really push that original look, though I think the yellow-green affair is just a bit too strong. It also gives two screen sizes for each mode. One is a full screen look that does a slight bit of smoothing to make it blend at the higher resolution, and the other is a smaller window more like the Super Gameboy. Take your pic, but I looked very closely and honestly couldn't find any graphical oddities in the stretched mode. It does a VERY good job stretching the image in a smooth way. Other than this, the game includes 4 different regional versions, each with it's own save slot. For some reason, the Japanese original was left out. That's a very strange omission if you ask me, and I can't imagine why they bothered, considering just how tiny these emulated ROMs are. Oh, and the emulation is also very well done.
Secret of Mana properly supports 3 players on one console with linked controllers. No online mode however... If you can deal with that, it works great. Once again, the game is emulated in 4 possible languages (No Japanese), and includes two screen sizes. Other than the two screen sizes, it rotates between turning a smoothing filter on and off for four possible settings. I am not a fan of pixel smoothing personally, so I leave it off, but that leaves the two sizes. On 1080p screens, you're choosing between vertical or horizontal "shimmer" since neither fits smoothly into the native resolution of the screen. On the Switch's own 720p, shimmer seems to be eliminated in "full screen" mode. It may be best to play this on the switch for single player in that case. There's a quick save feature with 3 unique slots. This is also true of Adventure, but since that game lets you literally save anywhere already its not worth mentioning. Secret of Mana definitely benefits from it though.
Trials of Mana, here's the prize. No, it's not a 3 player game (against all logic and the will of the Goddess of Mana), but it wasn't in the original version either. I think a patch could hack it into the game properly if Square Enix wanted to take the time. The translation appears solid and professionally done, the font looking better than most SNES era translations in fact. (It's variable width, rare for SNES games.) The title is fine (much better than Secret of Mana 2, which was the internal name for Secret of Evermore anyway, not this one). The branching classes mesh well with the branching story based on which characters you pick at the start and in which order. The combat system also flows a lot more smoothly than in Secret. There's a reason that this one is the more popular of the two in Japan.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)