“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Final Fantasy Adventure. Seiken or Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden. Mystic Quest. The first Mana game, later remade as both Sword of Mana and Adventures of Mana. Initially developed under the working title of Gemma Knights…
It’s safe to say that this game had a significant conflict of identity. It had to balance being a Final Fantasy spinoff, the foundation of an entirely new action RPG series, an admixture of The Legend of Zelda gameplay with more specific role-playing elements, and all of that wrapped up in a teeny tiny little handheld system, the Nintendo Game Boy. It’s a miracle the game turned out as well as it did!
And the titular confusions we can pin down to behind-the-scenes sensibilities, such as director Koichi Ishii’s desire to create not a game series but a world that could be explored through a variety of games. The seeds of Mana were sown early.
Part FF, part Mana, part Zelda, part… Castlevania?
Final Fantasy Adventure is a primitive experience. Given its platform and its original release date of 1991, this shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise. It’s so old that I really can’t think of an older RPG that I was old enough to play and enjoy for myself in ’91. This might just be my first RPG. I remember learning to expand my vocabulary with it, though it’s a blessing I can even read at all after the clunky localization in Final Fantasy Adventure.
This is the biggest speed bump as a vehicle for storytelling, but I still felt that the emotional beats shone through, especially since the game can be pretty emotionally manipulative. Sure, it’s difficult to empathize with the alien figures comprised of just a few black and white pixels on the screen since they don’t look much like ourselves, unless you’re able to view them as child-like and subsequently sympathetic, but Final Fantasy Adventure baits your emotions by knocking off as many of its characters as possible.
More than a hero
Don’t get too attached. From the girl that begs you to kill her before she turns into a gorgon to the sentient automaton that sacrifices itself for your survival, there’s a kind of distilled nobility, wistfulness, and austerity beneath the cheery, cartoonish facade. “Video games are for kids”, the parents and pundits of the early ’90s intoned. They didn’t know about this game’s ability to shrink down both comedy and tragedy into its barest essence.
It can have some surprisingly heavy moments. Final Fantasy Adventure isn’t just some sword and sorcery high fantasy drivel. It aimed for drama and every once in a while it hit a bullseye, or as close as it could get with the powers, format, and translation available to it.
The best example of this involves the hero of the tale, officially Sumo although I named him Red. He isn’t just some chiseled, muscular, hyper-macho bulldozer of a He-Man. Sumo is a character. Again, surprising for the time. Adventure distinguishes itself from the blank avatars of games like the first Final Fantasy with its central figure who feels. For better or worse, it’s ambitious.
Sumo expresses real reluctance to accept the weight of responsibility thrust upon him. He talks back to the clichéd old man telling him his destiny. This hero comes off as afraid, unsure of himself, virtuous but also occasionally begrudging, as well as impacted by the deaths of those around him. There’s not much room to work with in this grayscale world but it’s there, and Sumo is more complex for it.
A world of grays
As you follow Sumo on this archetypal tale, you’ll meet an array of characters and traverse a shockingly spacious map. Seriously, I had completely forgotten how large this game is considering it’s a Game Boy game. There are plentiful dungeons, entire regions to explore, hordes of enemies to battle, ferocious boss fights, cities and townsfolk, even plot twists leading toward the Mana Tree, arguably the central icon of the Mana series. There’s also room for references to Final Fantasy games. Long live Chocobot!
You’ll journey and battle on the same map–no separate screen for fights–and collect a range of different weapon types to aid you on your quest. The game demands that you cycle between weapons in order to take advantage of physical and elemental enemy weaknesses, or to interact with your surroundings, destroying rocks or walls to proceed.
This means opening and closing your menu frequently. You’ll soon find yourself pining for the innovation of a quick swap feature or some sort of hotkey for your weapons, magic spells, and items. Could such a feature have been possible on the Game Boy?
Mana from heaven
The gameplay is fluid and fast-paced enough to maintain the player’s interest, so long as they’re able to set aside the game’s decidedly vintage traits. Fans of Mana will note the appearance of familiar characters (“hey, it’s that dancing guy that runs the shop!”) and gameplay attributes that would help define the series. The multiple weapons and the action combat are all there, of course, but it’s the time-based power gauge that really sets the game apart from both Final Fantasy and Zelda. Final Fantasy Adventure is not a turn-based RPG and neither is it a hack n’ slash.
Unlike Zelda, you can’t simply waltz up to a baddie and whack it to pieces with your sword. Although this game doesn’t display damage dealt like Secret of Mana, you can rest assured that spamming attacks is the equivalent of whittling away at a foe’s hidden health bar. Instead, the system encourages players to time their action-oriented attacks as the power gauge fills in order to deal significant damage with precision.
It’s not a perfect system, with no small thanks to the wonky hitboxes that would come to plague several Mana games, but it is a fairly unique one that would come to serve as a foundation for action role-playing combat attempting to infuse a time factor into the core gameplay. This would be an answer to the more rigid turn-based RPGs.
Feels like home
For all its inventory management and backtracking, its awful English translation and clumsiness, Final Fantasy Adventure offers a substantial ARPG experience to players interested in the origins of Mana. For the modern crowd, there are quick saving and color filters and a hearty insistence that you use a guide.
It’s not every day that you get to replay a foundational game from your own past, not to mention even remember your foundational games, but this is one of mine. Replaying it after so many years taught me more about what video games are and more about what I am.
I can recommend starting with it in Collection of Mana. You’ll get a good feel for the Mana series. After all, it has a red mage in it.
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Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.
