Visions of Mana

很好玩，期待第六部！！！

One of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, but I have some mixed feelings on it. - Many of the game areas really hit the Mana aesthetic nail on the head, and more than once I stopped just to take in the vistas. In terms of music, it’s a mixed bag. Many tracks seem inspired by previous installments, especially Legends. Perhaps the most interesting feature was that the area music changes to a harder hitting riff of the same track while you’re fighting. While I thought this was neat, none of the tracks really hit me like Secret’s soundtrack did. I have a soft spot for the guitar, flute, and strings mixed with ethereal vocals that Kikuta used. -Combat is a lot like Trials. It’s decent but Visions added some features that make combat either easy or frustrating comparatively. For one, status effects are much more potent and can either cause an instant party wipe or very nearly one. These attacks aren’t impossible to navigate, and there are items that make you resistant or outright invulnerable to specific status effects. More than once I had to retreat, equip the negating item, and then go back in and finish the job. The frustration comes in how swingy the difficulty ends up being. There are harder difficulty levels too, but it mostly just gives mobs more HP and damage. You’re mostly just punching at play dough until it’s gone. Elemental Vessels were the big experimental feature this time. They’re pretty cool and I especially liked the Undine Flask. This is also partly why the game was rather easy. Some of these vessels are really strong and have short enough cooldowns that you can use them in every mob encounter. Magic is overall weaker in Visions, but you’re not likely to use it much anyway with the vessels. They’re essentially magic devices with spell like abilities. The flask shoots a jet of water out that knocks mobs back, locks them in a bubble, and makes them vulnerable. The boomerang knocks them into the air where you can jump up and combo the ♥♥♥♥ out of them. Luna Globe literally freezes them in time, and then you combo the ♥♥♥♥ out of them. They’re pretty cool overall, but they can trivialize a lot of encounters. I honestly think they’d be better in a game where the combat was more like Secret’s, where you don’t get pulled into an arena, but can free roam and fight anywhere. Some of the fights are brutal, though. Even some mobs have moves that can turn a fight upside down. Fortunately, there are telegraphs for these moves, but the Mana series is a jrpg where one of the staples of power development is increasingly impressive magic special effects. Often there was so much magical ♥♥♥♥ on the screen I couldn’t see any of the telegraphs at all. I think learning to avoid incoming massive damage is a great feature for encounters, but it doesn’t play well with gobs of special effects. The worst problem is that the player character is an aggro magnet. Even if you try to build your allies as a tank (and there are items to increase their aggro), you still end up being top on the enemy hate list in no time and spend some boss fights mostly just avoiding attacks. -I overall like the characters very much in this game. My favorites are as follows: Julei: Where the sprite in Secret was a goofball with powerful offensive magic, Julei is a goofball sprite with powerful healing magic. He makes bad music that he’s certain is great and handles his social tardation like Snoop Dog after eating a sleeve of sugar packets. I also like healers. Careena: A silly hothead with a pet white dragon. She also has a country accent despite coming from a village where nobody else does. Her martial arts classes are the most fun imo. Palamena: It should be obvious. I have no idea how the devs got this gem past Larry Fink and his yeast beasts but the curves on this woman rival Angela’s. There are a lot of outfits in this game. I like most of them, but some of them are just way too… jrpg for me. Idk what it is, but jrpg’s just love accessorizing characters to the moon and back. There are almost always elements of a character outfit I like but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, they just can’t help themselves sometimes. Morley’s Nomad class has this cool feather cap that I would normally like, except that they added 2 additional feathers that come from inside the cap and curve away from his forehead, and then it has a veil with an embroidery, on top of the fact that it’s forest green on the outside and lilac on the inside. It has all the visual energy of the Las Vegas strip in a single article of clothing. Everyone has several outfits like that. I will like the general shape or color, but the accessorizing just kills me. many outfits I would’ve liked a lot more if they just toned it down a little. Abs of Mana is still in though. Val has a lot of outfits that remind you that you need to be doing your sit ups and watch what you eat. Worse though, you can’t unlock the outfits despite unlocking the class and fully leveling it! Even Trials let you do that. Idk why Visions doesn’t have it. -Plot wise, it’s a bit out there. It’s laid out in the first 5 minutes of the game, but essentially alms are selected from the villages to be sacrificed to the Mana Tree to maintain the flow of mana in the world. It’s dark, and some character realize this but on the whole it’s treated fairly casually. It’s an honor to sacrifice yourself to keep the world from dying, but frankly I felt it needed to be more burdensome for some of the heroes. I can’t tell if things are just softer these days, or if heavier themes in games hit me harder as a kid, but I think it’s the former. Also, I really can’t stand Daelophos as a villain. Spoilers if you care,[spoiler] but he loses his ♥♥♥♥ when his gf dies and he decides he’s going to take it out on the world. I really can’t stand the lack of emotional sophistication in characters like that. He’s the reason there’s a curse on the world and people have to literally sacrifice themselves every 4 years to keep it from being destroyed. It sucks she died but part of being an adult is sucking it up and bearing your cross. I wish he was just tricked by Thanatos or something.[/spoiler] -The only other weak points of the game I can think of are the side quests and the cutscenes. I don’t generally mind side quests, but so many of them are ‘go back to this area and kill this mob’. It’s fairly standard, but really I think quests like this work better in western rpg’s, or at least ones like Skyrim. The open world with the rng encounters make for a lot of emergent gameplay that renders ‘go here and do x’ into a much more dynamic affair that can suddenly get very difficult. The cutscenes are cute but rambling. I sometimes think classic jrpg’s were so good because the classic SNES cartridges were so limited they had to cut a lot of fat. Now devs can cram whatever meandering daydreams they have into the game. I think they’re supposed to be charming glimpses into the characters but given that they’re alms and are meant to go off and literally die, they just feel tone deaf. The silver lining is that it provided talented voice actors a lot of work, and the voice acting is very good. Hinna was probably my favorite, but Val was good, too. Careena’s country accent was charming, and I appreciated Palumena’s persistent application of alliteration. -Final thoughts: it’s a beautiful game, very well polished, and more impressive than I expected. My gripes with it have more to do with trends I’ve noticed in jrpg’s. maybe that sells well in Japan, idk. Maybe my preferences are from a bygone era and even westerners prefer wads of frivolous cutscenes and outfit accessories? I give it an 8.5/10. I liked some of the experiments they did with the vessels, but they didn’t play too well with classic spell casting. Special effects should been toned down for special attack telegraphs, and mobs should’ve had more special attacks. Other than that, it's great.

I loved this game. It is truly sad that the studio closed. The game has some graphic and game play bugs which could use patching. I did not run into anything that bricked my game. One instance where two party members did not join the boss fight. A quick reload fixed it. Otherwise, camera positioning, and slow-down when the screen was really busy is the bulk of what I encountered. The story good, but odd. I really enjoyed it, but would have appreciated a more adult presentation. The subject matter is quite mature, but the presentation is quite childish at many points. Well voice acted given the script. I truly liked it, but they emulated the wrong decade: needed more 90's and less 2020's. Graphically beautiful. Bright, fun, whimsical, and fantastical. Enjoyed the entire thing. Gameplay is so much fun! Fast, fluid (mostly), and action packed. Doing specials is not quite as responsive as I would prefer, but battles and traversing the word feels good mostly. I did get sun locked a few times which is never fun in any game, but that's a style preference. Most of the customizability comes in the second playthrough, which I do not have time for (the backlog is too great). That brings me to appreciating player time. This is where this game is like a 90's game. I started this game on hard and was doing main story and side quests. After around 10 hours, I decided to switch to easy so I wasn't playing this game for 100 hours. Despite switching to easy and focusing on main story only after that 10 hour mark, this game still took me just under 40 hours total. On top of that, this game expects a second playthrough to fully level up characters and get all the powers. This game does not respect your time. If it were the 90's when there weren't nearly as many games available, this would be awesome. However, it's 2024, and I and may others interested in playing remakes like this, have jobs and a backlog of so many other games to play, let alone other things to do. A 30 hour game in total would have been awesome for this remake - wish I had the time for the side content. Personally, I'm very pleased with my main store playthrough on easy, and I'll be moving on. For those that have or want to sink their time into this game, enjoy, it really is a great game. If you don't have the time, then set it to easy, stick to main store, and enjoy your time with this game. Already so much more than a remake of Visions had to be, this is a great game, and it is sad the studio closed. Especially the way in which the studio closed. Thank you, Devs, you did an bang-up job on this one!

I usually hate the cheesy anime writing and design, but this game hooked me since the demo. Loved the chill atmosphere, similar to Dragon's Quest XI S- the art direction is stunning and it ran smoothly. The combat style is nothing groundbreaking but very engaging with lots of combinations. The writing is very corny and you will eyeroll many times but there's enough going on to keep you a bit invested. The flavor is more in the combat system and atmosphere. The only noticeable downside is the terrible side content, among the most uninspired fetch quests I've ever seen in a game: no character development, no sub-story ... just go there collect 6 things/go bring this to that block. Luckily you can skip them and still unlock abilities by other means. And it's a good thing imo or else it would have destroyed the pace. Above everything it's really the music and atmosphere that kept me going, had a great time with the game

It's really nice having an actually good non-remake Mana game for the first time in over 20 years. It's really a shame the entire studio got axed right when the game was released, because they totally understood the assignment and what makes this series fun in the first place. The art style and music capture that for the most part, just in a more modern way, and the gameplay builds on what the Trials remake was doing. I ended up liking some of the characters a lot more than I was expecting too (like Morley giving me a new appreciation for Kaiji Tang, his voice actor). They even managed to take a sort of similar initial story premise to FFX and do something with it I actually liked, so that's neat.

J'ai adoré, le lore est incroyable chaque perso à son histoire et chaque nation est super à explorer, le jeu est très équilibré. Très bonne compatibilité sur Fedora.

20