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Square Enix’s Mana series has always been one of the company’s dark horses. It seems like no matter how much they try, none of the games manage to hit the highs of other series in the company’s RPG lineup. I mean, Trials of Mana was fun, but it wasn’t Final Fantasy level of fun. Visions of Mana is the latest effort from Square Enix to get there.
It brings backs all of the series’ RPG trappings; the familiar cutesy enemies, the Mana Tree (always a staple of the games) and of course, a lengthy quest to save the world.
Is it enough though?
What is Visions of Mana?
Visions of Mana is a single player third person action RPG developed and published by Square Enix. It is available right now on the Nintendo Switch, Playstation 5 and PC.
Our review code was kindly provided by the awesome folks at Square Enix! Thanks so much for the code!
Visions of Mana opens up with a tragic prologue that sets the tone for the rest of the game. To keep the world safe, people selected by the elemental aspects (they’re called Alms) have to sacrifice their souls to the Mana Tree. From the get go, it’s a much darker take on the Mana lore than usual.
Akin to Final Fantasy X, Alms go on a pilgrimage that culminates in them sacrificing themselves, along with a protector called a Soul Guard. Just like the Summoners do on their quest to defeat Sin in Square Enix’s seminal RPG. Likewise, our hero here (Val) is just like Tidus.
Naive, idealistic and completely oblivious to what lies at the end of the journey for him and the Alms he’s guiding, which includes his girlfriend (or at least very special friend), Hinna. He knows that Hinna will sacrifice herself but it hasn’t sunk in to what that really means for him.
Things go as you’d expect for a JRPG. Hinna and Val encounter other Alms, and they join up with the party to complete the pilgrimage together. It’s all standard JRPG fare.
…Until it hits Chapter 3.
I’m not going to spoil what happens, but it’s a turning point for the story, one that differentiates the game from Final Fantasy X. It’s a twist I honestly didn’t see coming (though in hindsight, was pretty obvious) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
It’s a bit unfortunate that the rest of the game is pretty uneven. There’s nothing as major as what happened in Chapter 3, and the story gets pretty predictable. It doesn’t detract from the fun I had so don’t be too bummed about it.
Thankfully, all the fighting you’ll be doing to get there is pretty solid.
While the basic fighting system in Visions of Mana is standard hack and slash, there’s quite a bit of depth to the customization aspects with the skills and job system.
Despite the plot saying only the Alms have access to their specific elemental powers, that’s not really true during gameplay. You can assign the different elemental aspects to any character and unlock special skills for each of them. There’s even a cool super sentai-esque suit up sequence the first time somebody dons a particular element! Each element gives your characters a specific job, and it’s super fun figuring who is best for which elemental style.
On top of that, there’s also the seed customization aspect, which also functions as a way to assign special skills to your characters. Seeds have special skills (that may include powers the elementals give) and you can mix and match them to give your character powers to complement their element.
That’s not the end of it too! You also have different special power meters, which unleash elemental super moves you can trigger!
Yeah, it sounds a bit confusing but the game slowly eases you into it all so don’t worry about it.
The lowdown is that combat is fast, furious and a fun experience, even after the 1000th fight.
That’s good because you WILL do a lot of fighting.
Despite the bonus that you get for finishing combat in style (like not getting hit, or under a certain time) they still do not give you enough XP for my liking. There’s no avoiding it. You will have to grind to stay strong enough to progress.
It’s pretty disappointing honestly if you’re here just to play the story.
Since fights are real time, you can pop-in and out of them without any loading in between.
In fact, the maps themselves have no loads other than the initial one for the region. While the loads are a bit lengthy (up to 3 – 5 seconds with our rig), the maps themselves are humongous in size. It’s all semi-open world so traversing them can take quite a bit of time.
Treasures and elemental shards (which gives points to power up your elemental skills) are scattered throughout the map and it’s expected for you to revisit earlier maps to recover shards that you couldn’t unlock before. There are also trials hidden in the maps that unlock even more, harder trials for the elemental powers you can unlock.
It might seem that there’s a lot going on in the regions, but that’s just window dressing sadly. The fact of the matter is that while huge and populated with enemies (and shards and treasure), there’s nothing much to do in it other than fight and run around looking for goodies.
It honestly gets old quick. Finding treasure is cool for awhile, until you realize that 90% of the loot you find is useless. You can’t stop though, because the treasure you avoid might just contain something useful! So you’re stuck doing a boring treasure hunt every time you get to a new map. I got burnt out of it by the fifth or sixth area Val goes to.
There are no spur of the moment quests that pop up, there are no travellers or merchants on the roads and even the buildings you find can’t be entered. The only real exploration you’ll be doing are for the ruins hidden in the maps that you can enter later on in the game.
That’s not saying there aren’t any side quests in the game. There are. Apart from a few though, they are of the fetch quest variety or go to an area and kill/find/interact with something. Does that really sound like a reason to do them?
Most of them give pathetic rewards too, which gives you even less reason to do them.
Technically, the game is sound.
On the highest setting, the draw distance for the open world is amazing! You can see far off into the distance and I didn’t even notice any glaring pop-in. The visuals look great, with sharp detailed textures for everything. With a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080Ti, I was able to play on 4K, with FSR on Balanced with a solid 60FPS. No drops, no hitches. Of course, the game is running on Unreal Engine 4, so it’s not super demanding for most gaming rigs.
Character design is a bit iffy depending on your tastes (I think Val’s face looks super weird, and I really hate Careena) and so are the character voices. I played both with both English and Japanese voices, but I ultimately stuck with the English cast.
On the ROG Ally X, the game is playable but with caveats.
Even with AMD FSR turned to Ultra Performance and the game running on Turbo (30W) mode, the game will not hit a stable 60FPS on 1080p on High or Medium settings. It will hover around 40+FPS, with dips to 30+FPS at times and increase to 50+FPS in less strenuous areas. 50+FPS is rare though, the usual will be in the mid-40s.
Cutscenes are still rendered in 30FPS, which further exacerbates the FPS inconsistency.
I got super queasy playing with the fluctuating FPS, so I recommend you do not play it on 1080p if you’re like me.
Unfortunately, the graphical options for the game do not allow any tweaking (other than the Low, Medium or High presets) so there’s no way to customize anything to coax out extra performance.
720p does maintain a stable 60FPS (for the most part) on High with FSR set to Balance mode, which I feel is the best way to experience the game. It might not be as sharp as 1080p but the tradeoff is the FPS is more stable, which makes the game more responsive.
The Bottom Line.
Visions of Mana falls just short of greatness.
It has a decent plot, with (mostly) likeable characters and looks great. The combat is fun and there’s much flexibility to it, which is always a good thing.
However, it soon become apparent that the game stumbles in other areas.
The open world, while huge, is empty and lacking in things to do. Side quests are boring. Experience points are doled out too stingily, forcing you to grind. The killer though, is the inability to tweak visual settings for a game on the PC. How is that even possible in this day and age?
For every step forward, there’s a mirrored step backwards. Ultimately, while I do give the game a recommend, the glaring issues prevalent in the game means that it will never be a classic in Square Enix’s lineup.
TLDR:
Fun game but with issues.
The Good:
- Decent English voice acting.
- Enjoyable plot.
- Great and fun combat system.
- Customizable.
The Bad:
- Repetitive.
- Boring side quests.
- Iffy character designs.
- No way to tweak graphic settings.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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