But in Secret of Mana, when you select a chest to open, an animation happens for a bit where the character swings the chest back and forth against the ground to force it open. You immediately get the item when you do that. These were item drops, and to get the item, you just walk to the chest and press A. When you killed enemies in FFA, there were sometimes treasure chests dropped by enemies.

Beyond that however, even after you kill enemies, there's more waiting if they leave behind treasure chests. This slows down combat, since there's no use in attacking until the bar is full. However in Secret of Mana, if your bar isn't at 100%, your attack does very little damage, usually 0-1 dmg, which is effectively almost nothing. But you didn't need to fill the bar your attacks were still very functional otherwise. For example, if you're using an axe, in FFA the axe would act as a boomerang if used when the bar was full. In FF Adventure, all filling out the bar does is make your already useful attacks more useful by adding an ability to it. When you first get the sword, the game has this percentage bar that fills up. The pixelart is really pretty, the music is pleasant, characters can move in a more natural manner.I thought I was in for something that feels super good to play. The first thing I noticed when starting Secret of Mana is that its pretty and its a lot more fluid and mobile. But playing it, I'm not getting those positive feelings. From what I understand, its a somewhat loved classic. I thought 'wow, if this was good, I bet Secret of Mana will be great!'. That all said, after beating it and starting Secret of Mana, I was expecting to get a much better experience. It reminded me of a clunkier 2D Zelda, and honestly I like it better than the first two Zelda games. Started off playing through Final Fantasy Adventure and my overall thoughts were that its a pretty good if somewhat aged game. So last year I got the Collection of Mana for Switch.

Secret of mana rom clean