Visions of Mana (PC) Review

A New Vision

Despite its early success on the SNES with the classic release of “Secret of Mana”, the Mana series has always been relegated to the second tier of Square games and even though there have been many releases for the series over the years, it has never managed to break past that status.

I personally believe that if Seiken Densetsu 3 (known as Trials of Mana now) was released on the SNES in the states, it would have enjoyed a much larger notoriety but that’s a what if situation at best.

However, given my love for the Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 (played with fan translation), I always wanted the series to break out of its second fiddle standing into the mainstream, to be more in line with Square’s other big series like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. After seeing promising trailers for their latest release, Visions of Mana, I went in hoping that this might be the entry to take the series to that next level.

The characters have good chemistry with each other.

MSRP: $59.99
Platform: PS, Xbox, PC
Voice Over: JPN or ENG
Length: 30~ hours

Every few years, a Faerie comes to visit each of the towns associated with an elemental to bestow an honor to an individual, making them an Alm. With the help of the soul guard, the alms journey to the mana tree to offer their souls to the Goddess of Mana so that they can stave off calamity. As the newly appointed soul guard, Val and his childhood friend Hinna, who was chosen as the Alm of the fire embark on a journey to find the rest of the alms and make their way to the mana tree. On their journey, they begin to unravel the truth behind this practice that they’ve taken for granted for generations and begin to question if there is a better way.

Despite the rather serious themes of sacrifice and loss, the story presented in Visions of Mana felt decidedly juvenile, playing out more like a Saturday morning cartoon than anything to say. That is not to say that stories in Saturday morning cartoons can’t be good, but this one in particular felt a bit too predictable and never took its themes into interesting directions that I haven’t seen explored better.

Luckily, the characters themselves fared better, thanks in part to the constant banter that would happen while exploring the world. While I can’t say that I loved each of the characters, they played off each other well and managed to build a good chemistry between the cast which went a long way in getting me more invested in how things played out. Special mention to Val and Hinna, two childhood friends that shared the excitement of exploring new places together while underneath at all, I could feel their deep sorrow knowing that at the end of their journey, they could no longer be together.

The world is vibrant and full of color.

The world of Visions of Mana is broken up into areas, some larger than others and it was fun to explore all these areas as I gained more mana vessels, I unlocked new powers to be able to navigate previously unreachable areas and gather resources/challenge elemental shrines where I couldn’t before. It’s a bit of a strange decision for them to have marked every point of interest that I could interact with from the get-go but while that took away from me discovering things on my own, it also did save me a ton of time in backtracking for no reason which evens things out in my book.

There was a steady sense of progression as I unlocked a new elemental vessel, which not only unlocked new powers I can use to explore the world but also new classes for the characters to take on with their own unique active and passive skills. Even though I was only able to take advantage of passive skills of a class while actively using that class, I could mix and match all active skills regardless of the class that I was currently using.

There are a lot of classes to choose from with their unique passives.

Given the myriads of choices, I had a lot of fun looking through which classes have good synergy with each other and as I could only field three characters out of five and could instantly switch between them on the fly, I made multiple team comps that excelled at certain things. One comp was able to kill packs of enemies within a few seconds and another that was focused on boss fights with focus to recovery/tanking that could basically never die. This was expanded further through equipping ability seeds which grants various effects from stat boosts to unlocking the use of powerful spells, otherwise inaccessible to the character.

Having said that, while I enjoyed the customization, I felt the ARPG combat itself was a bit clunky with the lock on dropping off by itself for no reason frequently and moves that should track the enemy or body part of a boss that I’ve locked on to not going where I want to. Things got better when I decided to directly control the fast moving, triple weapon wielder Morley, but even so, I could never shake off the feeling that I wasn’t able to move/attack in the way that I would like.

It’s also unfortunate that the combat felt pedestrian playing on Normal and bumping the difficulty up to Hard seem to only make my AI dumber somehow as they were dying off constantly, forcing me to revive them over and over again or just ignore them entirely and just win using one character, which I doubt was the developer’s intent with Hard mode. I think it would’ve made a lot more sense to reduce the damage that the AI took when they’re not in direct control or making them more competent in dodging instead of just standing still in red circles as they expand, counting down to their doom.

Everyone else is playing Street Fighter when Morley is playing Marvel vs Capcom.

In terms of the PC port, Visions of Mana continues Square Enix’s tradition of barebones ports with no UW/DLSS support, and the graphics option being relegated to vague Low -> High without any granular control. They did have FSR so there is at least some option for people trying to play on lower-end hardware.

Having said that, in terms of performance, I found the experience rather pleasant, being locked at 120 FPS with smooth frames without the typical stuttering that plagues many Unreal Engine games nowadays. I did suffer two crashes during my 30~ hour playthrough but thanks to auto-save I did not lose much progress and feel in terms of stability, this is fairly solid, not requiring a day one patch to fix any particular glaring issue.

Traversing the world was made easier through various “mounts” unlocked through the course of the game.

While Visions of Mana did not end up being the title that will take the series to the next level due to its issues with clunky combat, pedestrian difficulty and lackluster story, it’s still a solid entry to this long running series and a step in the right direction for what I hope will be continued to be improved upon for the next entry.

Fun Tidbit: I was happy to see that the series has not forgotten its roots and still has elements of the original games like the dancing merchants.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.

Good
  • Lots of classes to mix and match
  • Fun character interactions
  • Vibrant world to explore
Bad
  • Clunky combat
  • Lacking challenge
  • Uninspired storyline
7.5
Good
Written by
Jae has been a gamer ever since he got a Nintendo when he was just a child. He has a passion for games and enjoys writing. While he worries about the direction gaming as a medium might be headed, he's too busy playing games to do anything about it.