Secret of Mana Plus

What it is

Secret of Mana Plus adds content to three places that felt thin in the original. The Wind Palace and the Moon Palace become proper dungeons full of monsters, and the Gold Tower and Gold Isle chapter gets extra maps and more story. The new areas bring variant enemies with their own stats, spells and colours, new bosses, cutscenes woven into the main plot and a few hidden treasure rooms elsewhere in the world. The rest of the game is left as it was.

Version 2.1

• Six difficulty modes: easy, normal, hard, impossible, and two turbo modes that drop the stamina gauge for faster combat
• Smarter boss behaviour, mixed-case text and longer character names
• Comforts such as keeping the Pure Land open after you finish it, a rope in the Mana Fortress and an optional solid text box background
• Multiplayer works without a separate patch

Included improvements

The hack bundles community patches by Moppleton (more consumables per stack, allies free to leave the screen edge, elemental and species damage), Kethinov (faster spell levelling) and Regrs (boss AI). Credits also go to TheCrashTestGenius for script work and testing, smKer for the map editing tools and Ace_Aileron for testing.

Playing it

The patch is applied to your own copy of the North American Secret of Mana, in the difficulty variant you prefer, following the instructions on the hack's database page linked below.