Visions of Mana

[b]Visions of Mana is absolutely an adorable, fun, and exhilarating experience.[/b] Gameplay is fast with acceptable amounts of breaks and cut-scenes, combat is snappy and multidimensional (can basically be played as an RTS if desired), no instance in-fight, characters are fun to follow, build diversity is there in spades, exploration is entertaining and, most importantly, this game (while touching some pretty serious topics) makes me smile like a jolly kiddo. On the QoL side, you can pause and skip any cutscene (seems such a hard feature to get nowadays). Lastly, I also want to praise the no BS approach with DLCs. After 120 hours I can only say that VoM is one of the most enjoyable action RPGs I played in the last decade. Don't let a bunch of fake-accounts/ bots (often stating absolute falsehoods) discourage you from from a nice game!

cue and fun

visions of mana is one of those games where your going to like it or have mixed feelings on it since steam doesnt have a middle of the road button ive down voted it. but will go the pros Huge and beautiful graphics character designs are nice combat is fine. bug free for the most part npcs can get lost a bit but will teleport. but turn off fsr as it can make the models look pixelated. quite easy to figuire out the controls. cons horrendous camera which causes certain ways to get up to levels with it are a chore. can enter high level area zones called ruins which at the start your like level 1 yet the monsters inside a ruin are level 52. close to end game. i am 1/3 into the game and just got to level 19. chapter 3 though the game itself has a level of 13 at this point. levelling up is a royal pain. the game knows its a grind as it has buffs to help with levelling its not as atrocious as tales of arise. but arise had better character complexity. 1 npc healing takes ages to respond. large game world with sod all in it. chests are lackluster. mainly healing items. you will develop ptsd to the world GRIZZLY !!! as Val our protag gathers honey syrup. and wont shut up lol. middle of the road pro/con thus far all the characters went to sunday school even the villians and cant swear to save there life ( literally). update after playing 29 hours some extra review. the story actually starts to properly gain traction around 15 hrs in still holds your hands and enemys are still saints that dont so much as swear. however someone in animation forgot to animate well the lips of some of the dialogue cut scenes whoops. starts to get more noticable after chapter 3-4 that some bugs start to become evident. certain boss fights can cause screen tearing because so much is going on. at max settings 1440p the game is very pretty, as stated the storys ok its pretty generic. characters are also ok but dumb as bricks kind of like those scenes from dragonballz when a enemy is transforming its kind of this is happening now. stability the game isnt to bad to run. however this game is quite cpu intensive ryzen 5700x and above. at very least a 8 core for smoothness. specs of my system 5900x 64gb ddr4 4070 super getting roughly 144- occasionally dips to 130 in large battles. gpu is being fully used.

Visions of Mana is an RPG I expected to be middle of the road with some charm and well, I got what I expected plus a little bit more I believe. In the short run: it’s solid, it has some shortcomings but it does try hard to deliver a memorable experience and in my honest opinion it does that well visually, the story can be hit or miss at times but at least it does a good enough job at keeping a solid pace and the gameplay provides an interesting system even if it does break apart a bit if you combine certain player classes together in a fight. I recommend it personally. In the long run Graphically it’s honestly quite a beautiful game, I spent so many times just stopping to explore the world and it’s honestly a world I’d love to see more of. Sadly it has one issue which is the UI’s size. There’s no option to change the size of the UI or even to turn it off. I was honestly quite sad to learn the game had no form of photomode because I just wanted to take screenshots of many places. While it looks quite good visually I will say it does need more options for tuning them. By default it’s presets are focused on maintaining a high frame rate or a high graphics quality and thats… kinda it, you have resolutions options and brightness settings but for the rest of the games graphics you got a basic “Low, Medium or High” selection… It's a little sad to see such a limited options menu here. Gameplay wise it’s quite solid but also quite flawed, what starts as a simple combat system does evolve into something more complex with each party member having access to 8 elemental classes that can vary in playstyle with different weapons or roles. It’s quite a good system when you don’t break it in half once you’ve unlocked all the elements. I found certain elements namely Darkness, Light and Water when paired together just made combat encounters a cake walk due to the special abilities that charges up from using the game's elemental vessels. All it takes is a light class to mark with the Light vessel, the darkness to use the special darkness attack to create a black hole spell and then let the water vessel apply what are effectively deadly water bombs that will explode en masse as every monster is sucked in and taking damage. Outside of combat it’s ok, traversal is mainly on foot with extra ways to get around as you progress in the story. Some of the ideas they had for using the elemental vessel gimmick outside of combat is interesting but they seemed afraid to mix and match these ideas. Many areas focus on one element to traverse or to solve a puzzle, heck some of the elements are basically never used outside the dungeon you get them in. I never saw any application of the earth vessels controller golems outside of the Gudjan mines that introduced it, water and air basically share the same job as platforming upwards, and the rest of the elements rarely get used outside of their introductions… which is sad because it feels…. Overly safe to me. It could have been amazing to see puzzles that mixed the elements, heck the element of darkness outside of combat acted as a swing or a way to move certain heavy objects so why could it be used to line up platforms for the light vessel to create a bridge of light for example? It’s just flawed in the end here. In terms of Audio… well I can say it’s not bad. It has the charm I recall from past Mana games I’ve played (which is sadly few) and while it loves to reuse some songs for a lot of cutscenes they are clearly well made. Sound effects in the game are alright as well. Nothing in terms of sound effects really stood out as bad to me but I will say some attacks in the game could overlay enough to cause some distortion, my main experience with this was with the dark elemental vessels special attack in combat). In the end the audio is ok to me. Visions of Mana is on the good side of ok to me, it’s worth a try if you’re interested in the game.

Hi, Spiel hat Spaß gemacht, wieder ein Gelungenes Spiel der Mana Reihe, gerne weitere solcher Perlen :)

A cute game with a touching story, and a near never ending supply of side quests. xD

Played like crud on Steam Deck. Typical mana game lore with its usual bad ending. Combat and exploration was mid. Square Enix has been nothing but a fail for me lately. Just not as good as they used to be.

I don't want to write a whole article. If you like ARPGs, this is a good one. Simple as.