Death, Sleep, Secret of Mana, and Other Considerations

I've been consuming electronic entertainment since I was old enough to stand on a chair at the arcade and slap the flipper button (just one, I couldn't reach both sides) on a pinball machine. Gaming has come a long way since the days of Pac-Man and Gorgar, but if you didn't come of age in the 16-bit era, then I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you missed. I love my PlayStation, I love what's come after it, but the Super Nintendo circa 1991 - 1996 will forever be my personal greatest generation. Why that's important, I'll get to in a little while. Bear with me, this is a 'stream of consciousness' thing.

This will be important. Trust me.

Two weeks ago, while at work, I was utterly overcome with a feeling of sorrow. Now, normally when this happens, I have enough self control that I can 'tamp it down' until there's a better time for me to deal with those emotions. This, however, was not one of those times. I fought like hell to barely keep a lid on it, told my boss that I needed a few minutes, went into an empty office with a trusted co-worker, and just lost it. My tear ducts weren't weeping, they were vomiting. I wasn't in any physical pain, but everything fucking hurt. (Mom, if you're reading this, I'm sorry but sometimes nothing but the f-bomb will suffice).

The reason was Tom.

I've written about Tom twice before here on Steemit. He was one of my best friends in high school, a guy I spent a lot of time hanging out with both during and after school. The world eventually pulled us in different directions, and we lost track of one another as life happened, but there was always a part of me that smiled, remembering that Tom was out there, doing this thing, playing his role, being a husband and a father.

Two years ago, Tom was shot and killed in an act of senseless violence. He was 39 years old. And in all that time, he's never been far from my mind. February has been a hard month to get through ever since.

---

I brought up the Super Nintendo before, because Tom and I were both avid gamers, we both had a Super Nintendo, and playing it was an activity of common interest to us when we'd get together. Growing up as a massive D&D nerd, console RPGs were near and dear to my heart, and I played as many of them as I could get my hands on. Especially enjoyable to me were the games in the Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy series, but Tom introduced me to another 16-bit RPG for the Super NES, one that is too often overlooked in my opinion.

Tom showed me Secret of Mana.

Source: MobyGames.com

If you aren't familiar with RPGs from this period, you should know that the vast majority of them were single-player affairs. Whether in command of a lone hero or an entire party of do-gooders, it was only one person ever holding the controls, issuing the commands, doing the fighting. Secret of Mana was different: with three main characters, a second player (or even a third, if you had a Multi-Tap adapter, an extra controller, and one more friend) could jump into the action and play along with you instead of just watching while you kicked all of the ass.

Tom and I played a lot of Secret of Mana together in the spring of 1994, and while we never wound up completing the game together, we still managed to both beat it separately, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since, even after games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger came along to bump it off everybody's radar. It, in a sense, was "our" game, even though it was really owned by him. At least, I always thought of it that way. To this day, Secret of Mana brings up memories of Tom and I, sitting in front of the television at his grandparents' house, playing on his Super NES.

The other major thing Secret of Mana had going for it was its soundtrack. The sound chip housed in the SNES was a thing of beauty, capable of producing some incredible music, and if there was one thing the game's developer Squaresoft was known for, it was producing some killer music tracks for its games. Nobuo Uematsu's compositions for Final Fantasy are works of art and held in high esteem by gaming music enthusiasts. But Secret of Mana wasn't scored by Uematsu -- the man behind its ethereal, other-worldly, dream-like soundtrack was thirty-one year old first-time composer Hiroki Kikuta, who got the job after he did some sound design work for another RPG called Romancing SaGa.

Kikuta's score for Secret of Mana is jaw-dropping in its sincerity, its passion, and its beauty. Every theme, whether keyed to a particular character, enemy, or zone in the game, is perfectly crafted to reflect the events depicted on-screen. Whether you're sailing around the world on the back of a dragon, staging an attack on a high-tech fortress, or crawling through a snow-covered biome in search of Santa Claus (not kidding), Kikuta's music is there to propel you forward or invite you to explore a little longer. If you haven't already, I cordially invite you to scroll up and click on that video towards the top of the article.

The music you'll hear when you do so is a track from Secret of Mana called, "I Closed My Eyes". On the official soundtrack CD for the game, it's the 44th and final track on the disc. Its presentation is almost like that of an after-thought considering some of the multi-minute selections which precede it. "I Closed My Eyes" is a fifteen-second composition, looped once (barely), which closes out the final thirty-two seconds of the album...but it's the most powerful track in the game.

It's the music which plays after your party has been defeated. Death, in Secret of Mana, comes to the heroes on the wings of this short, somber, ethereal melody. It encourages contemplation, and ultimately inspires you to give it another try. You may have fallen, but you are not gone forever.

Now, every RPG in the world (at least, any RPG developed in the last thirty years) has a 'you lost' track which plays when the bad guys get the best of you, so it's not like Secret of Mana having one is anything special. But there's one unique element to "I Closed My Eyes" that you will find on no other death track for any other RPG. Kikuta specifically programmed this piece for double-duty: "I Closed My Eyes" also plays whenever your party spends the night at an Inn.

Think about that for a minute.

Kikuta, for the purposes of Secret of Mana, married the concepts of 'sleep' and 'death'. Despite sleep being a means to restore and refresh your characters, and death being the means by which their life forces are depleted, according to the soundtrack they are one and the same.

Light and dark.

Yin and Yang.

Sleep and Death.

---

The first time I ever heard this music was with Tom.

We were both teenagers, both sophomores in high school, so aside from appreciating the music from an aesthetic point of view, I doubt he or I gave it much thought at the time. I mean, when sleeping, it was a cute little lullaby, and when you died it was space-filler until you hit the 'Start' button to continue the game. I don't think that, at fifteen, either one of us looked very far beyond its immediate function. At least, I know I sure didn't.

But as the years went by, and I re-played the game, or popped in the soundtrack, I came to love and respect this composition more. When I think of it, I have no choice but to think of Tom. Realistically, Tom has departed this life. He has died. He's not coming back. And two years on, I'm still having a hard time coming to terms with that.

But Kikuta's music invites me to look at things a different way: sleep and death are two sides of the same coin. And while Tom has truly died, as long as my memory of him is active, he isn't that far away. He may as well just be slumbering. And sure, he turns over from time to time, reminding me of the time when he was present in my life. I wake him up again when I think of him, when I remember him, when I write about him and share my happy memories, or when, like at work a couple of weeks ago, my eyes puke and my head hurts because I still can't believe that he's gone, and that I never got to say goodbye.

Then he goes back to slumber in my memory, and I go back to my routine and my life, and the periods in between when I'm aware of his absence and when that awareness is overridden by other things slowly lengthen. The scars on this one are taking their sweet time to form, I can tell you that. I've cried longer and harder over Tom's passing than I have for some of my close relatives, who were in my life far longer, who I knew far better, and who, logically, should be far more 'important' to me than a guy I hadn't spoken to since the day I graduated high school back in 1996.

And yet.

And yet, here I am.

Here we all are.

One day, each of us will close our eyes to a sleep from which we will never wake. I hope when that day comes, the passage into permanent slumber is as peaceful, as comforting, and as beautiful as Hiroki Kikuta envisioned all the way back in 1993.

Sleep and Death.

One and the same.

Would that we all will be so lucky.