The Mana series, known in Japan as , is a role-playing video game series from Square Enix, created by Koichi Ishii. The series began as a handheld side story to Square's flagship franchise Final Fantasy, although most Final Fantasy-inspired elements were subsequently dropped, starting with the second installment, Secret of Mana. It has since grown to include games of various genres within the fictional world of Mana. The music of the Mana series includes soundtracks and arranged albums of music from the series, which is currently composed of Final Fantasy Adventure and its remake Sword of Mana, Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, Legend of Mana, Dawn of Mana, Children of Mana, Friends of Mana, Heroes of Mana, Circle of Mana, and Rise of Mana. Each game except for Friends and Circle has produced a soundtrack album, while Adventure has sparked an arranged album as well as a combined soundtrack and arranged album, Legend of Mana has an additional promotional EP, and music from Secret and Trials were combined into an arranged album. For the series' 20th anniversary, a 20-disc box set of previously released albums was produced, as well as an album of arrangements by Kenji Ito, composer for several games in the series.
The music of Final Fantasy Adventure was composed by Kenji Ito, while Hiroki Kikuta composed Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana and Yoko Shimomura wrote the score to Legend of Mana. The music of the World of Mana subseries, composed of Children, Dawn, Friends, and Heroes of Mana, was composed by many different composers, with Ito, Kikuta, Shimomura, Tsuyoshi Sekito, Masayoshi Soken, and Ryuichi Sakamoto composing Dawn, Ito, Masaharu Iwata, and Takayuki Aihara writing Children, and Shimomura composing the music of Friends and Heroes. Rise of Mana was composed by an ensemble group including Ito, Kikuta, Shimomura, Sekito, Yasuhiro Yamanaka, and Kokia. Music from the series has been performed in live concerts such as the Orchestral Game Concerts and the Symphonic Game Music Concerts, and made up one fourth of the Symphonic Fantasies concert in Cologne, Germany. Music from the Mana series has also been arranged for the piano and published as sheet music books.
Final Fantasy Adventure
Final Fantasy Adventure, released as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden in Japan and Mystic Quest in Europe and marketed as a Final Fantasy spin-off, was composed by Kenji Ito; it was his second original score after that of SaGa 2 and his first solo work. The game was released in 1991 on the original Game Boy. It was remade in 2003 for the Game Boy Advance as Sword of Mana, wherein features of the original game were reworked to be brought more in line with the direction the Mana series had taken with the later games. It also severed the game from the Final Fantasy series. Ito was also the composer for the 2003 Sword of Mana, for which he remixed some pieces from Final Fantasy Adventure as well as composing new ones. Ito's music is mainly inspired by images from the game rather than outside influences, but he never played the games themselves. Final Fantasy Adventure received a soundtrack album and an arranged album, which were later released again as a single album. Sword of Mana also sparked a soundtrack album.
Original Sound Version Seiken Densetsu Original Sound Version is a soundtrack album of music from Final Fantasy Adventure. It was composed by Kenji Ito, with the exception of "Theme of Chocobo", which was composed by Nobuo Uematsu for the Final Fantasy series. The album covers 27 tracks and has a duration of 34:40. It was published by NTT Publishing/Square on July 15, 1991, with the catalog number N23D-003.
The album was well received by critics such as Ryan Mattich of RPGFan, who termed it full of "quality compositions and timeless melodies" that created a "nostalgic listening experience". Another reviewer, in their review of the combined album, claimed that the sound hardware limitations of the Game Boy "forces composers to create strong melodies" and that the Final Fantasy Adventure soundtrack was "a perfect example of what quality Gameboy music should sound like".
Let Thoughts Ride on Knowledge
Seiken Densetsu: Let Thoughts Ride on Knowledge is a soundtrack album of music arranged from the Final Fantasy Adventure soundtrack. The original music was composed by Kenji Ito, while the versions on the album were arranged by Takayuki Hattori. The album covers 7 tracks and has a duration of 35:11. Each track covers several different songs from the original soundtrack. The pieces are arranged in an orchestral style, with moods ranging from "soft" to "powerful". It was published by NTT Publishing/Square on September 30, 1991, with the catalog number N30D-005.
The album was well received by critics such as Ryan Mattich of RPGFan, who called it "an album of epic ambition" and said that it let "these timeless melodies live on, freed from the shackles of sound hardware limitations". Kero Hazel of Square Enix Music Online agreed, saying that "those 35 minutes of arranged music are worth every penny" in their review of the combined album. Another reviewer of the combined album called the tracks a "combination of great compositions and excellent arranging" and said that the tracks "flow smoothly between each other" creating "a superb thirty-five minutes of music".
Sound Collections
Final Fantasy Gaiden: Seiken Densetsu Sound Collections is a soundtrack album of music from Final Fantasy Adventure combining its soundtrack album and arranged album. The music was composed by Kenji Ito, while the arranged tracks, which comprise the first seven tracks of this album, were arranged by Takayuki Hattori. The album covers 34 tracks and has a duration of 69:51. It was published by NTT Publishing on August 25, 1995, with the catalog number PSCN-5029, and republished on October 1, 2004, with the catalog number NTCP-5029.
The combined album was as well received as the individual albums that make it up, with RPGFan calling it "one fantastic CD" that combined the "superb" arranged tracks with the "expressive" original tracks. Kero Hazel said that the album was worth buying for either component CD alone, if one did not already have them, but that the combination together made it a "fantastic album" of "great music".
Sword of Mana
Sword of Mana Premium Soundtrack is a soundtrack album of music from Sword of Mana, the enhanced remake of Final Fantasy Adventure. It was composed by Kenji Ito, and included reworked tracks from the original game as well as new material. The second disc of the album contains piano arrangements of songs from the soundtrack, while a bonus disc included in the first edition of the album contains an orchestra arrangement of "Rising Sun ~ Endless Battlefield". The album covers 48 tracks and has a duration of 1:42:51, including the bonus disc. It was published by DigiCube on August 27, 2003, with the catalog numbers SSCX-10097~8, and republished by Square Enix on October 20, 2004, with the catalog numbers SQEX-10038~9.
The album reached #118 on the Japan Oricon charts. Patrick Gann of RPGFan enjoyed it, calling it a "truly a gem". Estimating that around twenty percent of the original tracks had received "significant changes", he applauded the increase in sound quality and said that he "enjoy[ed] the OST tracks a great deal". The addition of the piano tracks and the orchestral track made the album a "fine soundtrack" and he said that acquiring the soundtrack would be a "very, very good idea". RPGamer, in their review of the game, said that the arrangements by Ito were "quite pleasing to the ear", though they noted that the quality of the music was diminished by the "terrible speakers" of the Game Boy Advance.
Track list
Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana
The scores for 1993's Secret of Mana, originally released as Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan, and 1995's Trials of Mana, originally released as Seiken Densetsu 3 in Japan, were both composed by Hiroki Kikuta. Kikuta was chosen for Secret of Mana after Kenji Ito, who was originally slated for the project, was unable to work on the sequel due to other demands, including the soundtrack to Romancing SaGa. At the time, Square typically had composers dedicated to one game throughout its development, and so Ito could not take on both projects at once. It was Kikuta's first video game score. Both games were produced for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Despite difficulties in dealing with the hardware limitations, Kikuta tried to express in the music of Secret of Mana two "contrasting styles", namely himself and the game. The purpose of this was to create an original score which would be neither pop music nor standard game music.
Kikuta worked on the music for the two games mostly by himself, spending nearly 24 hours a day in his office, alternating between composing and editing to create an immersive three-dimensional sound. Rather than create MIDI versions of his compositions and rely on the sound engineers to create the sampled instruments (like most game music composers of the time), Kikuta made his own samples that matched the hardware capabilities of the Super NES so that he would know exactly how the pieces would sound on the system's hardware instead of having to deal with audio hardware differences between the original composition and the limited palette of the Super NES. The first track he composed as "The Child of the Fairy Tribe". Kikuta considers the score for Secret of Mana his favorite creation. His compositions for Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana were partly inspired by natural landscapes, as well as music from Bali. In addition to the soundtrack albums for the two games, in 1995, Kikuta released an experimental album of arranged music from the two installments, titled Secret of Mana +, which features one 50-minute-long track. Kikuta said in 2024 that he made the arranged album as a response to the stress of dealing with the restrictions of creating the original soundtrack, by instead creating something unrestrained and free.
Secret of Mana
Secret of Mana Original Soundtrack is a soundtrack album of music from Secret of Mana, released as Seiken Densetsu 2 Original Sound Version in Japan; the releases are identical aside from the packaging and localized English song titles. Secret of Mana was one of the first soundtrack releases in North America for the North American version of a game. The soundtrack was composed by Hiroki Kikuta. The soundtrack's music covers both "ominous" and "light-hearted" tracks, and is noted for its use of bells and "dark, solemn pianos". The title track to the game, "Fear of the Heavens", was designed by Kikuta to sync up with the title screen as it slowly faded in due to hardware limitations; at the time trying to match the audio and visual effects in a game was rare. Kikuta also started the track off with a "whale noise", rather than a traditional "ping", in order to try to "more deeply connect" the player with the game from the moment it started up; getting the sound to work with the memory limitations of the Super NES system was a difficult technical challenge. The album covers 44 tracks and has a duration of 1:06:01. It was published by NTT Publishing/Square on August 6, 1993, with the catalog number N25D-019, and reprinted by NTT Publishing on August 25, 1995, and October 1, 2004, with the catalog numbers PSCN-5030 and NTCP-5030. A remastered version of the soundtrack, also titled Secret of Mana Original Soundtrack, was released by Square Enix on February 21, 2018, to correspond with the 3D remake of the game. The remastered album contains 53 tracks across 3 discs and has a duration of over 3 hours.