There's something hauntingly beautiful about Secret of Mana's cover, a dense forest scene that hints towards the richness held within. I'm not going to argue about what the best 16-bit era Square RPG was - they've all got their merits - but I think it's safe to say one piece of cover art stands tall against all others. And, when you're a kid, when something's out of reach you tend to fixate on it. For most ordinary 11-year-olds, unless you got lucky and had a friend with rich parents, these things were almost entirely out of reach. There was always something special about Square's 16-bit RPGs of the time - something exotic, these entire universes condensed into a single cart, and that feeling was only underlined here in Europe by how expensive these things were. It's one of those games that was a constant presence on shelves of game stores - remember them! - usually nestled behind the counter, a luxurious item that was available on import those long months it took to finally come to Europe. I never played Secret of Mana first time around in the 90s, though it's lodged in my consciousness just as firmly as all those SNES classics that I did. Okay, actually I will argue with myself and point out that Yoshitaka Amano's cover for the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 6 is the greatest of them all, but Secret of Mana's art - from the late artist HirÅ Isono - runs it mighty close. Playing the surprise Switch release of The Collection of Mana recently, though, I was reminded of the power of a strong piece of cover art - and of an artform that's in danger of being lost. Maybe that's because we don't see much by way of video game boxes anymore - they're fast becoming a thing of the past, for better and for worse. We don't talk about box art so much around these parts any more.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |