Having been a fan of the Mana series since I was a kid, I was more than thrilled to get a chance to receive an advance copy of Visions of Mana. I have fond memories of Secret of Mana from my childhood, and recently enjoyed playing the remaster with my family. While Trials of Mana received a re-release with the Collection of Mana and a complete remake in 2020, Visions of Mana is a brand new entry in the series.
Without having to stick to a specific story, Visions of Mana has an advantage over the Trials of Mana remake. The developers didn’t have to worry about angering fans of the original game and only loosely had to keep the themes present in older games from the series. While Visions of Mana succeeds at creating an interesting story inside a gorgeous world, many aspects of the action RPG feel shallow. It almost feels like the developers tried to cram too much of everything into too small of a space.
Journey to the Mana Tree
The underlying plot for Visions of Mana is something we’ve seen before in Japanese RPGs, and there were quite a few that seemed parallel to the Final Fantasy Series, however, the way things are approached is so casual it’s almost unsettling. In the world of Visions of Mana, there are 7 elements (Wind, Fire, Water, Moon, Wood, Light, and Darkness), and each element grants its power to a different village. Unfortunately, in order to continue receiving the element’s blessing, each town needs to sacrifice a soul every 4 years. Furthermore, if someone isn’t sacrifice, the power doesn’t simply stop but the entire village is destroyed in a catastrophe.
Those picked by the Goddess’ Fairy to become sacrifices are given the title of Alm and must make the journey to the mana tree in order to give their soul to power the flow of mana. One would expect people to be terrified of becoming an Alm, but in Visions of Mana it’s seen as an honor and everyone is excited at the idea of being picked; even parents are proud of their children who are chosen to be Alms.
While there have been plenty of terrible and questionable choices made throughout history, being excited to become a human sacrifice struck me as odd throughout my play through. Thankfully, this is at least somewhat addressed later in the game by both the alms and their parents, with not everything being as happy-to-lucky as it initially seems.
The first half of the game starts quite slow in almost every aspect. The party needs to stop at every major town where some problem is going on, which has prevent the selection of an Alm. You save the day, one of the characters has a sort of revelation and is chosen to become that element’s Alm, and you gain a new party member.
About halfway through the game, something terrible happens, which I have been asked not to discuss in detail, and the main quest shifts from simply visiting the mana tree as a group of sacrifices to saving the world. Overall, I enjoyed most of the story and could see that the writers were trying to touch on deep subjects, specifically the burden of loss, but the dialogue bloat got out of hand.
In addition to every character going through some sort of dramatic experience and character growth, there was always a need for every character to chime in and often just re-iterating what other characters had already said. This caused many of the cutscenes to drag far longer than necessary and instead of just focusing on an individual and their growth, it felt like every character needed to be the main character at all times.
Additionally, they made certain characters more annoying than they really needed to be, specifically Careena. As the dragon-lady with an attitude, Careena always found something to get worked up about and her Southern accent was off-putting as it didn’t match anyone else from the game. Also, while I liked Queen Palamena’s character as a powerful and intelligent woman, the writers decided to make her always use multiple words starting with the same letter in nearly every sentence, which quickly got annoying.
Lake Wide, Puddle Deep
In Visions of Mana, obtaining new abilities is directly tied to story progression, which means combat during the first few areas is going to be super straight forward. Each character and their equipped class has access to a normal attack, special attack, and class attack. The normal and special attack don’t have a cooldown and can be used to create manual combos, but typically the special attack is a charged-up attack or a dash attack. Depending on your class, both of these attacks can change and/or gain new properties. The Class attack is a powerful ‘limit break’ type skill that hits all enemies on the screen and can typically be used 1 to 2 times per boss fight.
Unfortunately, changing classes or learning new skills isn’t tied to leveling up or combat in anyway. Classes are unlocked by equipping one of the 7 element vessels, which are found by progressing through the story. The first couple are found relatively slowly and then the last few are basically thrown at you around the middle of the game. Furthermore, each character has an elemental trait tree, which is again unlocked by beating specific story bosses. This means certain characters will be more powerful than others for parts of the game, although the disparity is never too large.
That being said, I really liked all of the different options for each party member, which also provided access to different weapon types and unique outfits. While every character has access to all 7 elements, typically the classes fit into one of three roles. For example, Morley has a ninja archetype that can either be a powerful damage dealer, party buffer, or enemy de-buffer. Soul-guard Val can either be a supporting off-tank, two-handed damage dealer, or a strong defensive tank with polearm and shield.
One of the cool things about this system is that once a skill is learned from any elemental tree, it can be equipped by that character regardless. However, most of the strong, passive buffs remain locked to individual classes. Additionally, each character can be equipped with a variety of ability items that either provide passive buffs (20% Strength) or active abilities (Fireball).
Finally, depending on the element equipped, characters can use the elemental vessel in combat to provide a variety of effects. For example, the moon slows down enemies while increasing party member speed while light will link enemies together. One of my favorite combinations was to equip Morley with an ability that reduced enemy magic defense, link the enemies together with the light vessel, and then use a wide-area nuke with Palamena. This would often take out a strong group of enemies in a handful of attacks.
While this might seem like a lot of abilities and mechanics to memories, in practice it was all very simplistic. The Class Strike charges slowly and is rarely available during normal fights and charges maybe twice during a boss fight, and the elemental vessels have a 30 second cooldown. While waiting for those to charge, most of my time was spent spamming normal attacks or my most powerful magic spell. If my team was weak against a certain boss’ element, I would spend time changing their attack type with Val, but most of the fights were straight forward.
I think my biggest complaint was that there were so many options and potential ways to affect combat, but most of them didn’t seem to really matter besides making sure my best gear, abilities, and spells were equipped. Gear is also very basic, essentially only increasing attack and defensive power; rarely were there any side-grades besides the random weapon that increased attack while decreasing magic power and vice versa.
Another minor complaint I have is there isn’t a lot to really explore. The game mostly holds your hand through the main story with many of the side quests either requiring backtracking through a previous area or killing specific monsters along the main quest route. Chests, elemental power-ups, and combat challenges are clearly marked on your map, so there isn’t a lot of searching involved. This was a shame because many areas of Visions of Mana are really pretty or unique looking, but I spent most of my travel time going directly from chest marker to chest marker.
In the end, Visions of Mana does a good enough job at telling a deep, interesting story with a couple of memorable characters, but it also finds too many ways to detract from what’s actually important. Additionally, the ideas around the combat systems are conceptually cool, however, in practice they’re not as interesting or fun as they could have been. Finally, the strength of the bosses could really use fine tuning, as certain bosses that were supposed to be terrifying endgame challenges were a complete push over while there were that mini-bosses almost wiped my party. Unfortunately, these inconsistencies all around prevented Visions of Mana from being a truly great game.
Full Disclosure: A copy was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. Reviewed on PS5.
