The Mana series has a long and admittedly inconsistent history. There have been ups and downs, but games like Trials of Mana hold a special place in my heart. Decades on from that game's original release and a few years from its remake, the Mana series has another swing at a full-fledged title with Visions of Mana. As the first original mainline game since 2006's Dawn of Mana, does Visions still have the juice for something revelatory? Unfortunately, no. Visions of Mana is not a worthy successor to the series’ best nor worth the time it takes to excavate its few virtues to find that out.
Like many of the games in the Mana series, Visions takes place in a new world with similar touchstones to previous titles: There is a Mana tree, monster-like elementals governing the natural forces of the world, animal demi-humans, and the like. In Visions' world, however, these forces are constantly waning and require the sacrifice of seven souls every four years to the Mana tree. It is considered an honor to be chosen to die for the Mana tree and the vast majority of characters treat it as such, including the entire main cast, who make a point to never think too hard about it.
Visions of Mana is about going on a journey with some of the least introspective characters that have ever been written into a story. The cast never thinks long term about their own fates or the men, women, and children that have been sacrificed before them or will be sacrificed after. A traditional story about breaking the cycle and pondering their destinies just never comes, leaving the main cast feel like poorly-written caricatures that are barely involved in their own narrative.
Every single time I thought that Visions of Mana's story was going to be a layer deeper than what appeared on the surface, I was gut-punched by its aggressive refusal to take the next step. Small moments where characters could be built beyond plasticine marionettes fall flat on their face and are often never referenced again. Visions' story, without spoilers, strikes me as an alternate-universe Bravely Default wherein the game does not attempt to be subversive and instead plays deception as benevolence.
I held on to a deep hope that, even if Visions of Mana's story were disappointing, the gameplay would be compelling enough to act as a saving grace. This is an easily believable delusion until I realized how absolutely banal the interstitial areas between cities actually are. Rather than be fun romps filled with monsters and fun things to explore, they're dotted with collectible orange globules called Grizzly Syrup that number in the thousands. There's a handful of other activities other than fights, but they all involve finding or collecting items that feel randomly dropped in different locations rather than thoughtfully placed.
Collecting these items can be as difficult as the game arbitrarily decides to make it. Despite being given a generous air-dash and double-jump to utilize, areas are often capriciously blocked off with invisible walls. Think you see a treasure chest an easy few jumps away? Good luck getting there if an unseen barrier has been placed in the way. I often felt like I was being punished with tedium only for embracing the tools the game provides..
This movement frustration is compounded within towns, which have their own share of secrets and theoretical shortcut traversal, but also make the irrational decision to limit your double-jump to a single-jump. I do not understand this choice. No one is being harmed by your character jumping more often, and it makes walking around towns have the sensation of walking through sludge. Couple that with the strange inability to rearrange your party before you venture out to do more battles and exploration often results in just wanting to rush through it as fast as possible.
Bugs are not especially uncommon, either. The game crashed more than once. Enemies sometimes fell through the ground and required running from battle with no rewards to fix. For that matter, running from battle accidentally in the course of battle and immediately re-entering it with all the enemies at full-health happened occasionally, especially in tighter arenas near the end. On three separate occasions, I came out of battle being unable to walk any longer. I could dash, I could jump, and I made do with just that until I could get to a save point, but walking did not return until I reloaded the game.
Visions of Mana is not a worthy successor to the series’ best nor worth the time it takes to excavate its few virtues
The side quests in the game are unimaginative at best. More often than not, they boil down to beating a certain number of specific enemies or defeating certain enemies somewhere else. They are not retroactive, which might have made them more tolerable. Instead, they have the vibes of homework assigned by the teacher with minutes left in the class. It would be unsurprising if most players just stopped doing them as a whole by the end of the game, because they truly never improve to become anything compelling.
As action-RPGs, it would be easy to assume the Mana series' most redeeming feature would be its battles, but Visions of Mana manages to somehow prove that wrong. Battles are often quite fun early on, but at some point take a hard right turn into frustrating difficulty. As more and stronger enemies crowd the party, Visions becomes less like intermingling systems of reactions and strategy and more a hanging question of, "What the hell is knocking me down now?"
That the game has multiple varied job classes aligned to the different elements--a genuinely fun and interesting mechanic that is compelling to play around with--matters less when you cannot tell which enemy is juggling you repeatedly through an incomprehensible and unparseable cloud of 3D models and effects.
Boss fights are mostly determined by elemental weaknesses, which are usually easy to guess by realizing you are in a Wood dungeon and thus likely to fight a Wood boss. The problem is that coming in with the wrong element either means a tediously long boss fight or one the party simply won't overcome. On the flip side of that coin, correctly preparing for the right elemental weaknesses brings bosses in the first half of the game to heel entirely too quickly and without much resistance.
This dynamic had me wishing for something other than a stomp on either side of the equation, which turned out to be a wish suitable for a curling finger on a monkey paw. By the end of the game, bosses hit entirely too hard, with one late-game water boss effectively wiping out the party in two to three hits. In a game where I cannot control exactly what my party members choose to do, such as running headfirst into a swiping claw that quickly slaughters them before I can react, this can get frustrating.
The most harm done to movement and battle is Visions of Mana's aggressive input delay. Sometimes moves will dial-in fine, and other times a character will be hit by an attack they surely dodged. It does not feel good in battle nor does it make the exploration feel any smoother. The truly maddening part is the inconsistency of it, ensuring that I could never really build this issue into my timing.
The dungeons in the game last around 10-20 minutes each, usually having a gimmick or mechanic to learn. Early dungeons show you devices and apparatuses that are not only used for puzzles within that space but expand into the greater explorable world. Later, dungeon design becomes bereft of truly interesting ideas and relies on baffling choices to progress. One late-game dungeon features a switch to raise or lower the water level--except you can only raise it, the switch disappears after raising it once, and it is never used or referenced again. Situations like this scream cut content, which makes a short dungeon without anything engaging to sink my teeth into just seem incomplete.
The overall pacing of Visions is inexplicable. At times the journey has incidental goals that are constantly waylaid, though the entire party takes it beyond stride and into a dreamlike complacency. There is no gradual sense of getting stronger, either through mechanics or story, which makes a wild late-game decision to take on new foes feel utterly baffling. Again, this often feels like an unfinished game, and the pacing is a huge contributor to that perception.
Aesthetically, I do quite like Visions of Mana. Characters sometimes look like plastic dolls, but the bright colors and fun animations add to their designs. There are scenes that evoke concept art from Secret of Mana or just generally beautiful vistas and verdant fields to look upon in awe. Unfortunately, Visions of Mana looks quite a bit better in stills than in motion, with performance problems clogging not just battles but also cutscenes. Despite prioritizing framerate in the game's menu, battles will often stutter and cutscenes will drop to lower framerates without anything going on to justify it.
Audio is a similar melange of good and bad. Nothing from the musical selection is an earworm, but it is all good enough to carry the mood. The voice acting, on the other hand, fails to impress even in small doses. Not all the characters or lines are bad, but they feel like a Saturday morning cartoon that rises to the low bar of the story and not much further. The line reads are also not distinctive enough to parse everything being said during battle, nor varied enough to care what is being said during battle before tuning it out.
There are the rare bits of good in Visions of Mana that it would be unfair to ignore. There are occasional moments of brilliance in the world design and character asides that would surely be indicative of a greater story had they been followed up. Instead, the disappointment compounds when they are not used to their full potential, leaving what should be likable characters and fun discoveries to feel like shredded pieces of paper lining an editing-room floor.
I really cannot stress how much I had been looking forward to Visions of Mana as someone that counts games like Trials of Mana among my favorite SNES RPGs. But as the game's credits rolled, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was not just that the game was over, but that I no longer had to wonder whether it would turn itself around and make good on the dormant quality it never had the courage to reach up and grasp. Visions of Mana, after the credits, no longer had the capacity to disappoint me further.
There is a game here for someone willing to lower their standards enough, but trust me when I say there are hundreds of better RPGs for you to spend your time on. You do not need to waste it searching for a few nuggets buried here.