REVIEW: ‘Visions Of Mana’ Is An RPG For Everyone (PS5)

A game company giving its old series a new chance on modern consoles always feels nice. It lets its older fans have something new while also introducing newer fans who can help revitalize the series for new markets. That’s how Square Enix’s Mana series feels with its first new entry in over ten years, Visions of Mana. There are high expectations that it will take this long and come out on modern consoles. Despite many of those not being met, Visions of Mana still feels like a fun introduction game to RPGs for all ages while staying true to its 30+ years roots.

Visions of Mana tells a classic story of love and sacrifice—this time, with Val and Hinna, two lovebirds from Tianeea. Every four years, a new alm is selected to go to the Tree of Mana and sacrifice themself to save their village from catastrophe. This isn’t a sad event. Being chosen as an alm is an honor and is a massive celebration that each village does differently to welcome the faerie’s arrival to select a worthy alm. This year, Hinna was selected as Tianeea’s alm. As a soul guard, Val begins his journey as a knight to protect Hinna and the other alms on their trek to the Tree of Mana. But what happens when personal love and dreams collide with tradition and honor, where not completing your destiny could destroy all you love?

A tale of sacrificing oneself for the good of others is not unfamiliar with RPGs. Square Enix has told similar stories through their other properties before. What makes Visions of Mana‘s twist on this story is how it is approached, and it is also what made me fall in love with Val and Hinna very quickly. It’s their love that drives this story. And what slowly breaks down the barriers of talking about what will happen once their journey ends. Like why can’t people who are asked to make the most significant sacrifice get to question why? Why do they have to accept that any future they want will soon be all over, even while they still think what they’re doing is a big honor?

All of this is packaged very simplistically, too. While everything is spelled out, it’s also presented in a way that anyone of any age could understand while being friendly about talking about darker themes. This plays well into the art style, too. A more cartoon-y, bright world filled with cute monsters to defeat rather than dark and gloomy. But this also leads to my most considerable criticism of the story. It’s paper-thin. Once you stop to think about the implications of a sacrifice every four years, many world-building aspects break down quickly.

Take Val and Hinna’s village, Tianeea, for instance. It is a tiny village. How can they keep up with such frequent sacrifices with such a small population? How do other villages, where you know they’ve not produced an alm, still feel and become hospitable again? The sheer amount of destruction talked up doesn’t match what’s happened in the past, and the people of this land know everything. There are no mysteries about what happens if an alm doesn’t make the journey.

And then with character development, that’s also very minimal, too. Val especially starts going on this self-searching journey along with Hinna as they talk more and more about what IF Hinna wasn’t an alm. What would their future together look like? But several events later, Val and the rest of the alms seem fine going on this journey. At that point, and several points later, the story continues to feel disjointed, with conclusions that do not always feel filling while still heartwarming.

On the other, the gameplay plays into its simplicity well. Combat can quickly become deep based on how much you want to invest in learning all the different systems. Combat involves three of your five party members exploring the field with one of the eventual eight classes equipped. Each character plays very differently from the last and has three to four fighting styles depending on which element they equip. These aren’t just slight changes to combat; they involve entirely new looks, using different weapons, and using that element in their attacks.

The best examples of this are Morley and Palamena. Morley, a cat-like guy, has three different styles of melee attacks that involve finesse. One is like a samurai when he equips fire and wood. Another resembles a subtle rogue wielding three knives. The final is like a nobleman using a dueling cane. As for Palamena, who is a squirrel woman, she uses more forceful and brutal attacks. These involve her wielding a scythe, powerful boots for massive kicking attacks, and a flail.

So imagine each character having three distinct styles that can match your playstyle. On top of that, every one of the elements each character can equip is upgradable. Upgrades not only make that class more powerful but also make the whole character stronger. What’s interesting about these upgrades is they are only really upgradable by exploring the world. Finding Elementite, conquering lesser elemental challenges, awards the entire party elemental points, which can be spent on the elemental plot. This is your place to get stronger spells and upgrades to make each class even more distinct.

If you can unlock all eleven upgrades for a class, a new multi-class lets you create the character that YOU want with a mish-mash of abilities. You will probably not even get this far with a playthrough to the end credits as it is a major commitment. It’d have been nice if this was more of a focus and not an incentive for post-game/ new game plus play that requires much exploring to achieve with one class.

Combat is played in open arenas that get sealed off whenever you engage an enemy. Depending on which enemies you’re fighting, brawls can quickly get chaotic. Thankfully, more powerful attacks are pretty well telegraphed with circles on the ground to avoid. Staying out of those will keep you at least safe. Your party members, on the other hand, range from the most competent players ever to being just plain awful. It seems like the attack’s size determines just how bright the AI is.

Fights mostly aren’t to much to write home about. Again, combat is straightforward. With a light attack and a heavy attack, using those in tandem can create some combos to take out enemies quickly. But using those in tandem with spells and abilities can create very impactful moments. This also depends on enemy elemental affinities that are pretty hard to figure out without fighting them. You can brute force most fights, just… it will take a lot of extra time to do that.

Then, there are class strikes and elemental vessel attacks. Class strikes are like an ultimate ability that unleashes a massive area of attack elemental attack on every foe in the battle arena. After using almost every class strike with every character, they’re all epic in looks and impact. Even if many look similar, as the overall visuals depend on the weapon equipped, you’ll regularly walk away satisfied when they finish unless the enemies become resistant to that element.

As for elemental vessel attacks, these are more frequent abilities contingent on the element/elemental vessel equipped by that character. So you can have three on the field simultaneously, each doing different stuff, like the wood elemental vessel summoning a tree that can heal you and your allies. The Luna Globe, the moon element, creates a bubble that slows enemies. The Sylphid Boomerag can be tossed around and trap enemies in a whirlwind in the air. Over time, and after collecting enough mana in combat, you can unleash an elemental break, a grander version of that elemental vessel ability that affects the entire arena.

Elemental breaks are fine. They seem like they do very similar things, creating a giant bubble in the arena that deals damage slowly over time to all enemies and letting you quickly dash around to deal with attacks. To succeed and conquer the later game challenges efficiently, you’ll need to learn how to use all three of them together to do massive damage. The real challenge is refining your party to your advantage. Companion AI can be changed with a fair amount of options, like changing the focus of attacks, how many spells they cast, what type of spells they cast, who they should help out, etc.

I created my Julei, a little wood nymph, to be a healer. It took quite some time to get Julei to become a competent healer. He’d often focus on casting spells even though his AI was set to help low-health allies. It wasn’t until I deactivated all his attack spells that he finally started to keep all three party members alive competently. Play around with these settings to get them to work for you.

The combat’s simplicity is favored when fighting random enemies and most bosses. For 90% of the bosses you fight, quite a bit, they are easy to understand and fun to conquer. The other 10% is a massive slog that’ll take five times longer to kill. And there is no rhyme or reason for these extra-long fights, either. You’ll start a boss fight after beating one in two to three minutes, and it’ll take thirty minutes because the boss is just that annoying or has that much health. I’d expect this for a final boss in an RPG, not a random boss that isn’t even an end-chapter boss.

What’s worse is that very late in the game, bosses and areas get reused. Some of the worst bosses in the game have been picked for this section and are even longer. This whole section of the game is exciting story-wise, but the gameplay portions feel like it’s padding for time and give you a quick ten to twenty levels where you never had to grind up to this point. Why add a section that shows that levels mean almost nothing when you’re handing them out like candy? In other words, balancing is awful the later in the game you get, and changing strategy or skill will most likely not help speed up these fights to escape their tedium.

But what makes these portions and a lot of the more mundane fights fun is the game’s music and looks. The music is breathtakingly beautiful. Lots of ambient music will surely make its way onto my workday playlist for some excellent background music, and others will find their way onto my workout playlist. Then, the art style is cartoony in the best ways. Enemies are adorable or seem funnily frightening, save for the big bad. Everything about the art style adds to the idea that this is a great game that feels like Saturday morning cartoons or after-school Toonami anime for the entire family to get them into RPGs.

You can pop this game on, play bits of the story, and walk away like young kids to adults would have had some fun where they may have never been interested in these types of games. But there still needs to be more TLC to eliminate the tedium and take Visions of Mana from just enjoyable to great.

Visions of Mana simplifies modern action RPGs to fit the classic brand for better or worse. On the one hand, combat can be exhilarating as you get in the groove and make every character work in the best way for you. On the other hand, the story, while beautiful, is too paper-thin for its own good. But this culminates in a game that feels like any player of any age can enjoy it. So, while those players wanting a grand RPG may be disappointed, Visions of Mana is still a fun intro to RPGs.

Visions of Mana is August 29th on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.