If you dislike the basic gameplay of Secret of Evermore then you probably won’t like Secret of Mana either. The tone is totally different though. Secret of Mana is classic Japanese adventure/rpg fantasy. Secret of Evermore is geeky American humor and bad puns. I love the aesthetics and atmosphere of both games. It’s hard to deny that the gameplay has its warts, but I’ll take them warts and all.

Nintendo CD would probably not have panned out any better than Sega CD had, but Secret of Mana appears to be somewhat worse for having been crammed onto a weaker system than it was originally intended for. There’s a part where there is a huge difficulty spike that requires lot of grinding before moving forward. And then there’s a section where a character keeps sending you off to different places that each have a boss battle and little else. I have to assume there was stuff cut out of these portions of the game. There are also a few time you’re supposed to go somewhere and get an important item, and it’s not clear to me that the hint you’d expect is anywhere to be found.

Apparently the cut content influenced Chrono Trigger. Of course the aborted SNES CD led to Sony making Playstation on their own, and the experience of Secret of Mana getting hacked up by Nintendo let to Square going with Sony.