20 Remakes and Remasters That Are Worse Than The Original

20. Secret of Mana (2018)

16-bit, nineties RPG Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan) offers players the opportunity to step into a rich high fantasy world hovering in the space between Mana proper and Final Fantasy. We play as three unnamed heroes – the hero, the girl and the sprite child – who journey out on a quest to restore mana (a sort of magic energy) power to the legendary Mana Sword.

It’s fun, it’s cute and offers a good thirty-plus hours of playtime, with plenty of story and surprises to keep it chugging along. So it may have seemed an easy win for Square to dig this old SNES game out of the archives and remake it for modern systems. Except the systems in question are the PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Windows…

Q Studios jumped in to handle development of Secret of Mana 3D, and they managed to go too far without going far enough. The danger, of course, in turning a 2D game 3D is having to overhaul the look of the entire thing, and if you’re not careful you can lose the unique aesthetic of the original. And that’s precisely what happened with Secret of Mana, with the remake broadly maintaining the same story and gameplay but giving it sixth-gen Pokémon game graphics. The mechanics feel thoroughly out of place on current hardware, with none of the upgrades to combat or controls that could have made it worthwhile, and thus it winds up being the worst of both worlds.