Aad
Member
Spam freeze magic as soon as you enter the room, you will defeat him before he can use magic attacks.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Help, I'm terrible at: Secret of Mana
- Thread starter maxcriden
- Start date
Spam freeze magic as soon as you enter the room, you will defeat him before he can use magic attacks.
The name is SPIKEY... but I prefer the German name as well... ;-)
Yeah, sounds more badass than "Spikey"
But that one was tough. We used to level up on the Werewolfs.
You don't. You get magic very soon after that fight. Aad is probably thinking of the second fight with the color-swapped version?
spiky tiger is like the ornstein and smough of Secret of Mana. get past that rest of the game's a breeze
been awhile since i played so i'm iffy on what advice to give, but my protip is to take advantage of the girl's buffer spells. for years i totally ignored how valuable her skillset is
been awhile since i played so i'm iffy on what advice to give, but my protip is to take advantage of the girl's buffer spells. for years i totally ignored how valuable her skillset is
The whole thing that makes him so hard is that you don't have magic yet.
Rapscallion
Member
I was playing the game for the first time last week and after making it to the 4th or so boss I gave up. Really disappointed me.
the game is cool looking and interesting, but it has some aged conventions that I didn't care for. If you're not at a high enough level bosses can literally kill you in one or two hits, regardless where you are on the map or what you do. I've never played an action RPG that gives bosses 100% accuracy and gives such little recourse to defend or strategize.
Might try its sequels.
the game is cool looking and interesting, but it has some aged conventions that I didn't care for. If you're not at a high enough level bosses can literally kill you in one or two hits, regardless where you are on the map or what you do. I've never played an action RPG that gives bosses 100% accuracy and gives such little recourse to defend or strategize.
Might try its sequels.
Secret of Mana is very much more of an RPG than it is an action RPG. You need to approach it from that angle. However, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances. First of all, it is possible to hit multiple normal enemies at once with your physical attacks. A well place charge attack can kill two or three enemies at once. You can dodge the non-spell attacks of enemies. So if you keep your distance from certain bosses, you can avoid taking some damage. While you can't dodge the spells used by bosses, they can't dodge your spells in return. Magic makes the game much easier when you get it.
I recommend against using charge attacks if you are fighting a fast-moving boss who is doing a lot of damage to you. Keep your distance, then close it to deliver a basic attack, then move away from the boss. Hit and run attacks like that will decrease your odds of being hit by dodgeable attacks. If you do want to use charge attacks, use one that has good reach or let's you close in rapidly.
I suggest dividing up the weapons among the three characters, so you have only one character using each weapon. That will concentrate the weapon skill exp that characters get. If you want to use a weapon your character doesn't have assigned, just swap which character you are using. Pay attention to the properties of your weapons as well: certain specific weapons are particularly effective against certain kinds of enemies. You can find a list of these properties in the menu, and they change as the weapons are upgraded by Watts.
I recommend against using charge attacks if you are fighting a fast-moving boss who is doing a lot of damage to you. Keep your distance, then close it to deliver a basic attack, then move away from the boss. Hit and run attacks like that will decrease your odds of being hit by dodgeable attacks. If you do want to use charge attacks, use one that has good reach or let's you close in rapidly.
I suggest dividing up the weapons among the three characters, so you have only one character using each weapon. That will concentrate the weapon skill exp that characters get. If you want to use a weapon your character doesn't have assigned, just swap which character you are using. Pay attention to the properties of your weapons as well: certain specific weapons are particularly effective against certain kinds of enemies. You can find a list of these properties in the menu, and they change as the weapons are upgraded by Watts.
We had the same problem, every one wanted to be Sprite, gets so OP if you level up the magic.
malboroking
Banned
I remember there being a sorta bug in the game where if you time your healing item/spell just right (right before getting hit with magic) you will avoid all damage from the spell. It's kind of hard to time it correctly, there's very little notice when the enemies areally casting, but I've actually beaten the tiger without taking any damage back when the game was new (I think, maybe my memories are playing tricks one me =P)
Edit- That tiger is one of the hardest bosses in the game, so once you get past him it's easy breezy for quite some time.
hydragonwarrior
Member
Yea I remember this game serving me hard up until the
fight but it starts getting easier ... actually by the end you'll feel so OP you'll wish there was more challenge
But yea this and especially Spiky Tiger will be tough without good gear - it's almost a requirement to get the best gear for your characters before going through tough places, which means grinding a lot for money.
As for the 100% gauge, I think how it goes is wait till it goes to 100%, hear the "click" then slash. And repeat.
I remember a friend telling me there was a dash attack, but I'm thinking he was just joking around...
Jabberwocky
But yea this and especially Spiky Tiger will be tough without good gear - it's almost a requirement to get the best gear for your characters before going through tough places, which means grinding a lot for money.
As for the 100% gauge, I think how it goes is wait till it goes to 100%, hear the "click" then slash. And repeat.
I remember a friend telling me there was a dash attack, but I'm thinking he was just joking around...
Meant to update this. A couple weeks ago we gave up on the game, which was difficult because we very much enjoyed some aspects of it, but ultimately we felt it was more stressful than fun. Thanks to the tips ITT we beat Spiky Tiger, and then went ahead and got magic and made our way through the fire dungeon area that has no save points, except in the dwarf village beforehand. We got to the boss of the area and got crushed again and reading online and trying to do so a bit ourselves made it clear even with magic we'd have to keep grinding experience to make the boss fight manageable, and it was just stressful and demoralizing and we'd already been through the Spiky Tiger rinse and repeat grind so we decided it just wasn't the game for us. Regardless, thanks again all for the help and we did really enjoy parts of what we played, the game was just overall not well-suited to us.
ReyVGM
Member
If you are going to keep playing those older games, remember that they pretty much require grinding in some parts. You need to increase your weapon power, your magic (by spamming it a lot), and the regular experience too.
If you are playing them expecting to beat every dungeon or boss in your first try (without grinding), then those games are not for you.
It's not unusual for RPGs/Adventure games of the era to expect an hour or two of grinding every now and again. Also, if you enter a dungeon and there's no save point, then you exit the dungeon and save at any town. That's kind of normal and expected in that era.
I appreciate your thoughts on it, thanks Rey. I guess I am just not interested in games requiring a lot of grinding outside of normal enemy encounters. Like in M&L games I don't mind it at all because if you just fight every enemy you encounter you generally don't need to grind, and battling is incentivized by challenges in the more recent of those games. I should clarify it's not that I expect to beat every dungeon or boss in the first try, it's just that... hmm, how can I put this...
I haven't really played any ARPGs before this. I think in the few JRPGs I've enjoyed I haven't generally had to encounter hitting a brick wall of lack of XP making a boss impossible, except in Paper Mario: TTYD. So this is a new experience for me perhaps. I want my failure in a dungeon or against a boss to be due to lack of figuring something out or lack of skills to fight the enemies, not for an artificial barrier of XP to mean that you fight a boss and they have an unavoidable attack (magic in this game) where you die after just a few moments.... also it doesn't help that your invincibility frame is exceptionally small in this game after getting hit, and your recoil is unusually poor, like, you get hit and you can't pause and use a health item and it takes a while to get up and then you get hit some more and can't get out of the way. It feels bad and stressful to me. I should stress that I really like a lot of kinds of difficult games and challenges, it's just for some reason I find the challenge and difficulty ITT (and potentially others like it) to be particularly stressful and... I don't know if I'd feel quite as stressed if this happened in a turn-based setting, because even though I don't enjoy turn-based games as much generally and don't tend to play them much, in battles you don't usually (in my limited experience) have this same kind of action-contingent situation.
I guess it's hard to explain but the stress of Spiky Tiger and other bosses and some enemies just pulverizing you and then needing to re-do stretches of the game that are time-consuming and difficult even when leveled up is just not fun for me. So perhaps some of these older games as you said just aren't for me, but I'm hoping to find some that are, because I know there are a lot of celebrated ARPGs out there, like Terranigma, that I've wanted to check out.
Apart from one or two bosses that can be some RNG bullshit type of deal, the game really isn't difficult at all, no. Well, back then it wasn't.
If those are the bosses I faced, perhaps I got some really bad RNG.
ReyVGM
Member
Yeah, I didn't find SoM particularly difficult back then. But then again, I always made a habit of grinding for a few minutes whenever I entered a new area with strong enemies.
I do understand that SoM has bad hit detection and not being able to heal while being knocked down sucks, but other than that, I really wasn't bothered with anything else. The music alone made me enjoy the game more than it should.
Getting killed in bosses in games from that era is completely normal. Fortunately or unfortunately, in RPGs the barrier is always experience. If you can't beat a boss, then grind and raise your levels. It's actually very rewarding when you raise a few levels, go back to the boss and beat it right away.
Maybe you should try Chrono Trigger, Final fantasy 3, and Mario RPG then. Those are easier and require little to no grinding. Mario RPG was so easy that I had to stop buying armor so I could feel some kind of challenge.
I do understand that SoM has bad hit detection and not being able to heal while being knocked down sucks, but other than that, I really wasn't bothered with anything else. The music alone made me enjoy the game more than it should.
Getting killed in bosses in games from that era is completely normal. Fortunately or unfortunately, in RPGs the barrier is always experience. If you can't beat a boss, then grind and raise your levels. It's actually very rewarding when you raise a few levels, go back to the boss and beat it right away.
Maybe you should try Chrono Trigger, Final fantasy 3, and Mario RPG then. Those are easier and require little to no grinding. Mario RPG was so easy that I had to stop buying armor so I could feel some kind of challenge.
I appreciate the recommendations, thank you. I think Mario RPG would be right up my alley. But, to be fair, I don't only like the Paper Mario and M&L games for their (perhaps relative) ease. The TTYD boss we still never beat because we were somehow plenty leveled for the rest of the game but got demolished at the final boss. It's one thing when a whole game is like that, but the pacing was really odd there. As to Chrono Trigger, I don't care for the aesthetic and when I tried it that was too much of a turn-off. I'll check out FF3, I've never played a FF game beyond a few minutes of an FFX demo on a PS2 demo disc from OPM back in the day (and I suppose this game semi-counts as one also).
Regarding grinding, I should clarify also that after we died to Spiky Tiger we did a lot of grinding, far more than a few minutes, and our difficulties with the fire dungeon boss were seemingly requiring the same. If it does get much easier after that point, it wasn't compelling enough to us personally I guess for us to stick with it through that. Perhaps our innate video game skill for this kind of game is just not up to par, but, it took a lot of leveling up (we probably spent an hour at least) to go several levels against the werewolves and cyclops thing near a save point. We'd fight, leave, rinse and repeat. It's that level of tedium and then having the boss battles crush you alongside the hit/recoil issues mentioned above that felt just stressful more than anything. I'd like to think and hope there are 2D ARPGs where grinding isn't at a premium but I genuinely don't know if there are. I guess maybe I like better loosely defined ARPGs where you don't level up, but I think the combat feel makes a difference to me for sure. I may not be good at this kind of game, but I'm good at other kinds of games and I'd hope some ARPG could be more in my wheelhouse. I guess I 100% understand why RPGs should have experience as a barrier in turn-based battle setups, but I don't understand as well why that would be necessary for ARPGs. But, I'm just kinda rambling, so, I'll stop there.
Tried playing this with my daughter last night and we really struggled. Tripping the story elements in just the right order was our first peril. Seemed she walked in circles for hours before we got a 2nd character so I could play.
2nd issue we saw was, no save right before the bosses. We ended up having to traverse several areas after a boss rekt us before we could try again, often using up valuable resources and time.
3rd was bosses. Just so hard. We tried for an hour to kill off the 2 werewolves in the witched grounds, they just regen'd/healed faster than we could damage them, and getting stunned with both next to you was auto-death. In Reading through this thread seems we need to do some
power leveling to make this easier, but that really would not help with items 1 & 2 above.
Still looking for a good coop RPG for us to play.
2nd issue we saw was, no save right before the bosses. We ended up having to traverse several areas after a boss rekt us before we could try again, often using up valuable resources and time.
3rd was bosses. Just so hard. We tried for an hour to kill off the 2 werewolves in the witched grounds, they just regen'd/healed faster than we could damage them, and getting stunned with both next to you was auto-death. In Reading through this thread seems we need to do some
LOTS OF
Still looking for a good coop RPG for us to play.
Going to somewhat hijack this.
Started playing the game today and I just beat Spikey. Holy fuck, what in the goddamn bullshit this was. I think my character was level 8? I had to use all my healing items on the guy so he would somehow survive this fucking thing.
This game and knocking you down is such bullshit. Getting knocked down and being stuck in some damage loop because the game doesn't let you get back up is incredibly irritating. If this boss was the hardest thing in the game I'm glad I'm past it. Gonna have to grind some when I can I suppose. Playing alone too so the AI party members don't really do shit besides die.
Going to try and continue with this game, but fuck if it wasn't frustrating.
Started playing the game today and I just beat Spikey. Holy fuck, what in the goddamn bullshit this was. I think my character was level 8? I had to use all my healing items on the guy so he would somehow survive this fucking thing.
This game and knocking you down is such bullshit. Getting knocked down and being stuck in some damage loop because the game doesn't let you get back up is incredibly irritating. If this boss was the hardest thing in the game I'm glad I'm past it. Gonna have to grind some when I can I suppose. Playing alone too so the AI party members don't really do shit besides die.
Going to try and continue with this game, but fuck if it wasn't frustrating.
Manmademan
Member
Shocked that people consider this one hard. I remember knocking it out in about a weekend when I rented it from blockbuster back in the day.
Y'all need to play some 7th saga
Y'all need to play some 7th saga
This was pretty much out experience too. We ended up giving up on the game, mild spoilers for a little beyond where you are, in my last post ITT a couple posts up. If you stick with it, I hope it gets to be a better time. I'll be curious to hear what you end up thinking of it.
entremet
Member
RenegadeXV8
Banned
OP I'm curious what games you normally play if you thought Secret of Mana was too difficult.
The only thing that is giving me problems so far was that boss and the fact that you basically have no invincibility frames when you're knocked down/getting back up. If a game has a moment where you can be stuck in a loop of being unable to attack or dodge until you die, that's a flaw.
I intend on continuing, I'm guessing that I'll probably only focus on one character since the AI ones don't help at all really. I'll try to post here when I make some headway into the game.
I hope so.
sixteen-bit
Member
That tiger boss was the scrub killer.
Funny you mention the first boss seeing as you literally can't die from it, Jema resurrects you each and every time you die .
For the AI you can actually configure their behaviour in a submenu. You can buy revive item at pretty much any item shop, they look like goblets/bowls.
And yeah, once you make it past Spike it really doesn't get worse and you're on your way to get healing magic soonish
.For the AI you can actually configure their behaviour in a submenu. You can buy revive item at pretty much any item shop, they look like goblets/bowls.
And yeah, once you make it past Spike it really doesn't get worse and you're on your way to get healing magic soonish
Gotcha. I will be interested to hear how it goes for you, I hope better than it did for us. The regular enemies seemed to get more doable IIRC but the next boss just had us give up. The flaw to us was exactly as you said.
Rodolink
Member
Sorry to unearth this, but just started my SNES playtrhough of Secret of Mana, and I reached Spikey just with the guy all the others as ghosts, I was level 12 and managed to kill it, "easily" although with shame, it was just a battle of HP, I just bought a bunch of chocolates and candies, delivered a 35 - 60 hit each time after he stomped on me, (then healed and repeat) he fell down eventually and I only wasted 4 candies and 1 chocolate.
Virex
Banned
Why not just create a new thread?
Rodolink
Member
Oh I don't know, I guess I should have :/ was just reading this.