Secret of Mana Soundtrack - Review - The Greatest Game Music (2025)

Secret of Mana Soundtrack, Hiroki Kikuta, 1993

It’s no understatement to say that for many gamers, Secret of Mana remains one of the most fondly remembered experiences of the 16-bit era. Of course, a lot of that has to do with the innate quality of the product. Square’s experiment merging action adventure and RPG elements was a resounding success, charming millions of players with its vibrant fantasy world and accessible, yet deep gameplay. But timing played an important role as well. Remember that back in 1993, US releases of SNES RPGs were the exception, not the rule (and for the German market, Secret of Mana might well have been the first localised SNES RPG ever). As a result, many gamers encountered the engrossing storytelling and vivid worlds that the best RPGs deliver for the first time with Secret of Mana.

An even rarer sight were actual album releases of game music outside of Japan. Secret of Mana was one of the very, very few SNES game scores to see a US release (preceding Donkey Kong Country by a year). Again, for many this would have been the first time they encountered game music outside of a game.

Of course, Square’s confidence in releasing this particular soundtrack in the US turned out to be well-founded. As thousands and thousands of listeners discovered, Hiroki Kikuta’s Secret of Mana soundtrack is one of the masterpieces of not just the 16-bit era, but game music history at large. It was the result of many, many months of hard work, according to Kikuta. He worked on the score for more than two years, leaving the office only twice a month. Enjoying the freedom that Square gave Kikuta on his debut game score, he spent the majority of those two years tweaking the sounds he could squeeze out of the SNES. In the process, he used tricks like achieving a three-dimensional sound by playing an instrument on two tracks and giving only one side of the stereo field vibrato.

All this effort polishing the instrument samples used for Secret of Mana clearly paid off. There’s a enormous vibrancy and warmth here, coupled with a sense of spaciousness. This melange gives the score an inviting, enveloping character that suits the musical material perfectly. The Secret of Mana soundtrack truly is a masterclass in world building, creating a fantastical realm unlike most others seen in RPGs of the area.

Kikuta eschews the bombast that most SNES RPGs dabble in, inspired as they are by late-romantic orchestral works (pay attention to how rarely Kikuta uses brass on Secret of Mana). His orchestral palette is lighter and brighter, highlighting mallet and wooden percussion, harp, acoustic guitar and solo woodwinds. It’s a creative, versatile instrumental array that creates a more intimate sound than many other RPG scores. At the same time, Kikuta’s focus on smaller ensembles doesn’t create the sort of self-consciously low-key mood that another solo instrument-heavy RPG score like Secret of Evermore aims for. Instead, Secret of Mana maintains an enrapturing lushness.

What also sets the Secret of Mana soundtrack apart is Kikuta’s astounding creativity when it comes to the melodies and harmonies he deploys. His melodies modulate far more often than one would hear on a typical game score. They are constantly in flux, evoking a wide-open, mesmerising fantasy world without having to thicken textures or turn up the volume. In fact, Kikuta’s wonderfully lyrical melodies feel like living, breathing beings – a perfect representation of the nature mysticism that saturates both the game’s narrative and the score.

Kikuta adds more creativity still to Secret of Mana‘s overall sound by liberally mixing orchestral sounds with pop, jazz and prog rock elements. Occasionally, he even incorporates material taken from Javanese music (“Ceremony”, “The Oracle”). What emerges is a musical style that accomplishes a very, very rare balancing act. On the Secret of Mana soundtrack, Kikuta manages to establish a new musical vocabulary (for a 16-bit game), while keeping the results of his experimentation extremely accessible.

Ultimately, what it all leads to – and what has made the Secret of Mana soundtrack so popular – is the very particular mood that Kikuta manages to evoke. There is a profound sense of quiet, awestruck wonder and spiritual union with nature that runs through this score, from the moment the game opens with a whale cry. Kikuta’s music matches the game’s visual style at every turn, painting Secret of Mana’s world as a wondrous, occasionally menacing, but far more often bright and optimistic realm. A track like “Still of the Night” takes Secret of Mana’s wispy, star-gazing tendencies to their extreme. The pieces uses minimalist instrumentations and material to clearly spell out the soundtrack’s attempts to reach for the sublime.

But there’s another side to Secret of Mana that initially might feel like the polar opposite of its otherworldly tendencies. Anything but constantly quiet and reverential, Secret of Mana delivers loads of quirky fun on many tracks. For example, there’s the dwarf percussion jam that is “It Happened Late One Evening” or “The Little Sprite” and its infectious, upbeat rhythms. Secret of Mana’s modus operandi might be contemplating nature’s wonders. However, Kikuta is smart enough to realise that this includes both passive marvelling and participating in the sheer liveliness and joy that animates the world and its creatures.

In the end, both the music’s mysticism and its charming eccentricities are two sides of the same coin. It’s the organic feel and earthiness of “A Curious Happening”’s odd-ball whimsy that grounds the soundtrack’s flightier, drifting moods – and is just another way to articulate the music’s embrace of nature. There is an entire unique universe evoked and captured in the Secret of Mana soundtrack and that’s why listeners have been returning to it for decades.