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This is an excellent hack; highly recommended to fans of the original game, especially if they thought it was too easy. At the beginning, some things are easier and some are harder, but by the end, it's straight-up harder, largely because you don't auto-dodge every single attack, and traps don't go away until much later. Bosses are a bit inconsistent, though; some are totally viable to take down with weapons, whereas others take so little damage from anything other than magic, you'll resort to chain-casting before long. The elementals are rebalanced, too; each one of them now has at least one dedicated attack spell, even Luna! Unfortunately, some of that potential is squandered a bit, as there still aren't all that many enemies who are weak against Luna or Dryad.

Stylistically, though, this hack is spectacular. Don't go in expecting a deep analysis of climate change or anything, because it wasn't meant to be that; it's more a premise for changing around the environments, and they look great! My personal favorites are the Upper Lands, Matango, and Kakkara Desert, but most of them are beautiful. There were a few that were too bright (the Pandoran ruins come to mind), but not many. Enemies have some crazy new colors, too, since their positions were changed, and they largely kept the same palette (as well as stats and item drops) as what used to be there. For example, the first enemy you run into is a howler, but it's the same color as a rabite. The only other tweak I might suggest is changing the elementals' dialogue; you get the elementals in a different order from before, and while that's mostly fine (though I would've liked to get the healing spell sooner), the way they speak hasn't changed. I know that they weren't given a lot of personality in this installment, so many are fine, but some are a little awkward, particularly Shade.

As a huge fan of the original Secret of Mana, I was excited to try a version that didn't just add a bunch of QoL features like Secret of Mana: Turbo but instead, went out of its way to provide a player a new experience while keeping a lot of the core mechanics the same.

The first thing the player will notice is that all the environments (color palettes) have been changed and the monsters who inhabit them have been updated accordingly. Because everything was well balanced, you're not going to see a huge change to the overall game but it was fun to play something that wasn't Vanilla.

The first big gameplay change is when you start to acquire magic in a much different order than Vanilla. Because of this, you won't have access to some spells that you're used to right out of the gate but you'll also be granted some end-game spells that are extremely useful early on (Spoiler: early MP Absorb is just awesome). This does make some of the earlier content a bit more of a challenge but nothing that would be considered unfair or overly difficult. I also enjoyed that the game doesn't allow you to acquire some of the best armor in the game right after you acquire Flammie so those mid to late dungeons are a bit more difficult but again, nothing too over the top.

One thing I noticed (and not sure if this was by design or verisimilar) was that weapons seemed to be far more useful, particularly end game. I found myself switching weapons much more to align to monster's weakness and critical hits were doing good damage which was a great change (again, if intended and this was prior to version 1.2 where elemental weakness was added). Magic, both usefulness and grinding, were left unchanged so don't expect anything new in that regard.

While the script remains mostly Vanilla (i.e. it doesn't use the Secret of Mana Reborn translation), a lot of the new NPC dialogue was both topical and amusing at times so it's worth talking to everyone to get the full experience.

All and all, Secret of Mana Climate Crisis is a great way to revisit SoM if it's been a while since you've played the original version. Enough has changed to make the experience feel fresh and since the core mechanics are essentially the same, there's no learning curve or increased difficulty that would make the game unappealing to novices.

Pros:

• It has different colors so it seems somewhat different
• The reordering of obtaining magic elements makes it seem different

Cons:

• The different colors (the seasons) dont appear to have any effect on what is a vanilla SoM game.
• The reordering of obtaining magic means you dont get healing spells until later on so you have to rely on items to survive which is sometimes unrealistic given how limited it is.
• The spikey cat boss is still way overpowered. If you are going to hack this game at least fix this.
• The hydra boss in the water (now earth) palace has been made grossly overpowered. He uses a fire spell that does double your characters total hp, and then chain casts it 3x on you. If the intent was to make you grind for hours to get past this then it is no longer a casual game.
• Its called the "earth palace" even though its not the actual earth palace, its just the water palace with colors changed. Why not change the palace locations so that you walk into the actual earth palace from outside the water palace?

This hack is basically cosmetic with some game breaking designs. If anyone wants to attempt to change SoM beyond tweaking some battle dynamics and colors then fix the horrendous AI and pathing.

After playing a lot to SoM Ancient Cave and SoM Turbo I would say it is quite a new experience with interesting color change for all the maps of the game. There are also many path changes to enhance the map. It is definitively a great ROM hack to play!