A Vibrant Journey – Visions of Mana Review
Visions of Mana is the latest entry in the Mana series. Like its predecessors, it has a very vibrant and whimsical atmosphere and extremely addicting action combat. Although it’s a AA game in its budget, it really stands out and makes an impression compared to most other JRPGs on the market. Although decades have passed, the series is extremely faithful to its roots and this game is definitely a JRPG at its core.
The artwork in Visions of Mana is phenomenal. The main cast of 5 characters are all very uniquely designed to be a variety of races around the world. Each of these playable characters have 9 job classes, which is a unique outfit for the character. These class designs are some of the best class outfits I’ve seen since Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea.
These classes are based on elemental magic in the game, namely fire, water, wind, earth but also more interesting ones such as light, dark, wood and moon. Each character and class has its own nuances and as you unlock more passive and active skills in each class you can then keep them as you change classes, somewhat like Final Fantasy 5’s job class system.
The system makes it very fun to experiment and it’s never overly complicated. Characters each generally have 3 different kinds of weapons (depending on their class) but they each have only 1 armor and you can purchase better gear as you progress through the game.
The premise of the game is simple. It’s about representatives of each element (called Alms) going on a pilgrimage to sacrifice themselves to the Mana Tree along with Val, their Soul Guard, so they can prevent a calamity. It’s very similar to the premises of Tales of Symphonia or Final Fantasy X.
The introduction to the game is very boring and cliché, with characters acting extremely one-dimensionally and being fine with the culture of their world. All I can say without spoiling is that the game does subvert this in Chapter 3 and there are amazing twists afterwards with characters actually having personalities afterwards and the plot really picking up.
Up until that point the game is admittedly boring with you just recruiting each member of the main cast and going through their character arc. The game’s plot does fall a bit towards the end, with recycled assets, dungeons and a boss that is overly edgy and boring but the story is more than sufficient and tends to be on the more emotional side rather than logical side.
Unlike Trails of Mana, you don’t have to pick a protagonist. The story you experience will be the same no matter what with Val as the protagonist. It was disappointing in the previous game because your plot would change depending on your protagonist, meaning you’d have some plot arcs that would be introduced but not concluded – like if you wanted to see Belladonna’s conclusion you’d have to pick Hawkeye or Riesz as your protagonist in Trails of Mana. I was saddened at first that you couldn’t choose between different protagonists, but when I played through the game I realized that the writers wanted to narrow their scope and focus on writing a story on Val.
The gameplay is the high point of this game. It’s action combat where you choose your character’s class, upgrade their class abilities and level up, as well as increase your level. In battle you can do simple combos and it’s fun to juggle enemies.
The game is on the short side, taking us about 30 hours to get through the story including an extra chapter of post-game. The game didn’t require any grinding and generally you’d get a full level up or two from just defeating each boss.
The Japanese voice acting is amazing. The English dub is somewhat poor such as Careen’s country accent. I can understand why the developers did this because in Japanese you can dialects that sound like country accents as well (like a Kansai dialect). The lip-sync in certain scenes can be bad for the English dub as well.
I was disappointed there were only 5 party members. Although it’s impressive there are so many possible classes for each character and all kinds of abilities and builds, I really would’ve liked to see more party members. There was one important character who tags along who I felt could’ve definitely been a full-fledged party member.
The dungeons and cities are colorful and fun to explore. Unlike most games everything is marked on your map such as treasure and elemental job points, meaning you don’t actually have to search every nook and cranny – but you can turn off the hints and maps if you don’t like this. I found this to be amazing because I wanted to get all the treasures to build my characters but didn’t necessarily want to explore everything.
Each dungeon is uniquely designed and has an elemental gimmick where you activate an ability, such as wind blowing you across a gap or a fire rocket shooting you across the map to name a few.
The dungeons have a lot of soul and it was fascinating to see the ideas the developers came up with – this game had no bland dungeons at all and the gimmicks are easy to navigate through without feeling labyrinthine. The world is connected together and you can eventually unlock a boat and an aircraft. This is one of the few modern JRPG releases that actually has a world map to explore! The developers really did remember the roots of this franchise.
The soundtracks are great, though the sound effects can be loud during battle. We had to turn down the sfx in the audio settings so the combat sounds didn’t overwhelm us.
One big criticism we had is that the game does nag and handhold you a lot. For instance, the cast of party members tell you too frequently to check your equipment and buy items when you have a chance. Often this is integrated in the story cutscenes as well. I felt that they could’ve just done this in the beginning and endgame portions instead of all the time.
I don’t think that it’s even possible to become soft-locked in this game. The save points are very plentiful, especially before boss fights, and the game lets you warp to any landmark you visited anytime, so I don’t understand why the game had so much handholding. Some parts of the story have especially poor pacing.
Sometimes the gameplay loop would involve going to a story NPC, having a cutscene, then going to another story NPC, back and forth several times. I think that the flow could’ve been improved because it felt very annoying to keep getting the gameplay interrupted every few minutes. It sounds like a silly complaint, but if the cutscenes were group together and longer instead of going back and forth it would’ve been more fun to play.
The NPCs and sidequests are bad and generic. We tried a few sidequests and they’re just generic “kill 10 monsters” and most of the NPCs don’t have any plot relevance. It could’ve been improved if there were less sidequests, and if they were instead more substantial with unique content rather than generic checklist tasks.
It’s an old example that is used frequently nowadays, but games such as The Witcher 3 really raised the standard for what sidequests should be in modern games. On the other hand, the story important characters and main cast are phenomenal and are all uniquely designed and have fully fleshed out personalities and quirks.
You don’t need to play any of the other Mana games to understand this game’s plot because it’s a stand-alone plot with only a few references to the previous games such as the flamingo-like birds and the mana tree. It’s neat that the developers included references to Final Fantasy, such as having a moogle status condition and black mages as enemies.
If you played the demo of the game on PC in the past it had stuttering issues, where any time the game loaded something new it would freeze up for a few milliseconds to load it. But the full release of the game runs flawlessly with no stuttering issues because it preloads the shaders when you start the game.
I didn’t like how the endgame recycled assets, such as the levels and the bosses. The endgame has a boss rush where you fight leveled up versions of old story bosses and it can be repetitive. The endgame level curve is bad since it’s so compressed. The final region is recycled and you keep fighting bosses to get guaranteed levels, for us it was level 50 to level 66.
The ending is extremely satisfying, but it does take some repetitive gameplay to get to that point. There is an extra chapter that is post-game with fully voiced cutscenes that is a side story taking place before the ending that was fun to play through – this post-game recycles bosses again but in this case since it’s extra content it’s fine.
Visions of Mana does have a limited budget and does make a few mistakes, but it’s still a very fun JRPG to play and the action-based combat is very addicting. I think its stand-out points include the job system, where you can make so many different kinds of builds. Although the graphics aren’t cutting-edge, the visual direction is astounding and this game has some of the best character designs and beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. The story does start off generic and will make you want to roll your eyes at first, but when the plot gets going it really gets going. If you love JRPGs and are willing to overlook a few missteps, I’d strongly recommend checking it out.
Visions of Mana
Our Score: Excellent
Pros
- The character and dungeon artwork is phenomenal.
- The character job system have a lot of gameplay nuances and allow you to make many kinds of builds to suit your playstyle.
- Although the story starts off slow, it gets amazing, with really great twists subverting the JRPG genre.
- The endgame recycles a lot of content, both in level design and with bosses.
- Sidequests and NPCs are painfully generic.
- Only 5 playable characters are available.
– Brandon Harris
Reviewed on the PC
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Visions of Mana can be incredibly slow paced and oftentimes boring, making you wanna skip dialogue. I agree the side quest are generic and just defeating a certain number of monsters or fetch and retrieve quest that can be somewhat repetitive at times.