Speaking of nostalgia, I loved Secret of Mana when I was a kid. Looking back now, I still like its characters, world, art style, and music. But the combat is just a list of things not to do in that kind of adventure game.
Can you explain? (I am just curious because it is basically the only game of its genre I ever played.)
A lot of it boils down to the fact that they were an RPG company and they tried to turn an RPG into an adventure game instead of just making an adventure game.
There's a Miss Chance: This is maybe the most egregious holdover. In a tabletop RPG, a lot of the fun and tension comes from rolling dice to determine if your character succeeds or fails at tasks, including hitting foes with their weapons. A lot of early console RPGs (like Final Fantasy) stuck with this mechanic. (The first Final Fantasy game is basically a carbon copy of D&D, right down to the monsters.) I don't think it's really necessary in a console RPG, but it's not objectionable, especially because most of these games also held over multiple attacks; even if just some of your attacks hit, you were still dealing damage to your target. And if your casters missed because they only had one attack and a poor chance to hit, well what were they doing attacking with a weapon anyway?
But in an adventure game where you actually in control of your character's position relative to your target, a miss chance is unacceptable. If you play Secret of Mana, you'll notice this a lot. You'll swing or fire your weapon and the monster will do a little dodge animation and take no damage. It doesn't even say, "Miss!" Two early examples in the game are at the ruins south of Pandora. First there are the flying tomato men, which are essentially invincible to physical attacks due to their high evasion rate. Then there are the chess knights who, if you let them cast Speed Up on themselves, will dodge all of your attacks and then hop of you and smack you to the ground.
If you want to make a monster difficult to hit, actually make it difficult to hit! Maybe it moves quickly to dodge your attacks. Or it might be protected by a shield on some sides or at certain times, making you time your attacks accordingly. Giving your attacks—which you've already aimed—a flat-out percentage chance to not deal damage isn't fun and is just bad game design.
Your Attacks Need to Charge: In an adventure game where you're walking up to opponents to hit them, you have to make sure the player can't just endlessly juggle enemies by attacking relentlessly. You have to space out the attacks to make the combat longer and more interesting. Secret of Mana does this in what might be the worst possible way. After you attack with your weapon, there's a cooldown meter that starts counting up (quickly) from 0% to 100%. If you attack again before the meter reaches 100%, your attack has a much higher chance to miss and does drastically less damage.
When I first saw somebody else complaining about this feature, I was defensive. As a system, it works and you get used to it before too long. But the reality is that it's a huge copout and almost any other solution provides for more interesting and fun gameplay. Even the next-biggest copout—a monster being invincible for a short time after it gets hit—would be worlds better because then you could divide your attacks between multiple foes, trying to keep them all from getting too close to you, etc. As it is, you hit (or miss) a monster, then run around avoiding combat until your meter charges.
Worse yet are the attacks you can charge even further for more power. While charging above 100%, you move incredibly slowly, yet have to avoid getting hit. And the punchline is that many of the attacks take long enough to execute that you're likely to miss your target entirely (because you don't connect with it, not because of the percentage miss chance).
Again, there are much better ways to handle this. Some monsters can retreat quickly when hit. Others can teleport away. Or some can force
you to use a hit and run strategy in order to avoid their counterattacks.
Magic Freezes the Action (In More Than One Way): Secret of Mana has supports up to three players simultaneously with each player controlling one of the three characters. The game was the first I was aware of to have a "ring" menu system, where you could select a spell or item to use without a big menu covering the whole screen. Of course, this was completely pointless because
the entire game paused whenever any player had the ring menu open anyway! This just kills multiplayer. Do you know how frustrating it is for the player with the warrior character when the magic-users are constantly pausing your game in order to cast spells? And if the casters hold off, it's less fun for them because they can't deal much weapon damage.
But even playing single-player, you can't escape the breaks in the action. Whenever a character or monster casts a spell, the caster and all of the targets are immobile and invincible. Or at least they don't take the damage they're accruing until after the spell is over. Then they suddenly get thrown back and take all the accumulated damage at once. One upshot of this is that it's trivially easy to kill almost any boss by chain-casting an attack spell that it's weak to over and over. If you cast it fast enough, the boss never gets a chance to attack or move. What fun is that?
