Can ‘Visions of Mana’ Ever Catch Up to Its Rivals?

Living in your siblings’ shadow is tough, and if Square Enix’s Visions of Mana were a person, it’d likely agree. Its bigger, more famous brethren like the Dragon Quest series keep iterating on traditional RPG designs from the Nineties, while Final Fantasy is always evolving and experimenting with what the genre can be.

But the Mana series has a less defined path forward. You can sense that uncertainty in Visions of Mana (out Aug. 29) as well. Despite its smart twist on familiar storytelling and a stellar combat system, Visions of Mana doesn’t feel confident enough in itself to leave outdated ideas behind.

Save the world, lose yourself

Since launching in 1991, the Mana series has always had an identity crisis. The first game in the series wasn’t even marketed as an original franchise in North America, instead renamed Final Fantasy Adventure (despite not being a Final Fantasy game). The series’ big stand-out moment came with 1993’s Secret of Mana. It made action-RPG combat deeper and more complex than what its peers offered at the time and turned Mana a big deal for almost a decade, only to drop off into relative obscurity thereafter.

Secret of Mana’s direct successor never launched outside Japan, and the following game, Legend of Mana adopted a more inventive approach to the genre that was a bit too creative for it to catch on at the time. A poorly received Game Boy Advance adventure, shallow DS game, and middling real-time strategy spinoff later, and that was seemingly the end of the once-watershed Mana series until Square Enix started remaking and releasing them in 2018. Now, nearly two decades since the last new Mana game, Square Enix and series producer Koichii Ishii are back with Visions of Mana, though despite positioning Visions as a modern revival, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s still stuck in a bygone era.

Visions of Mana follows Val, a young warrior from a village blessed by the fire elemental, as he escorts the Alms — including his childhood friend, Hinna — to the Mana Tree. Alms are people the elemental spirits choose in a large ceremony, and their duty is to restore the flow of energy to their region and ensure prosperity for another few years. Val’s journey takes him across several continents, through dangerous lands, into sprawling cities until it reaches a climactic end. It’s a very classic roleplaying structure, with Mana references as well, including elemental spirits and sacred beasts.

That all sounds quaint, except Alms have to give up their souls for this energy renewal to happen. If they don’t, or if their region is deemed unworthy enough to produce an Alm, then the world rains down calamities on them. It’s a big problem.

Visions of Mana’s story properly begins once the main cast finally realizes that sacrificing yourself is a bad thing and tries to change the world. It’s unsubtle about its core idea of fighting against your fate to bring about a better world for you and everyone around you, and while that could easily have been a hamfisted approach, it’s actually one of the game’s most interesting themes. Visions knows the Alm sacrifices are messed up, it knows you know they’re messed up, and it uses that knowledge to convey a second central idea that sets it apart from the likes of Tales of Symphonia and other games with broadly similar narrative threads. 

Conformity, obligation, not rocking the boat or questioning your leaders — each of Visions’ major characters is a little window into the different kinds of social pressures we face in real life. Fighting fate might be Visions of Mana’s obvious theme, but just as important is its more subtle message: Living life complacently, without questioning customs, just allows all the rotten systems and people carry on unchallenged, usually at your expense.

Bigger really isn’t better

These narrative beats and character moments are what carry Visions of Mana. Its cast say their world is worth saving, but the sentiment is something you have to assume is true, since Visions of Mana lets you experience very little of it. Villages and cities have unique cultural traditions and architectural styles based on their patron elemental, but Visions of Mana just wheels you through them before it’s on to the next part of the sacrifice tour. The people you meet have trite little things to say about their lives or homes, and sometimes they need help with menial tasks such as defeating monsters, as NPCs are wont to.

The setup is reminiscent of Dragon Quest XI, but Visions of Mana is missing the personal connections Square Enix’s other traditional RPG series does so well. Sure, visiting Dragon Quest XI’s Italian-coded city and Japanese-style village has all the depth of a 30-minute travel show, but everywhere you go has some emotional significance — the home of a former partner in crime, a haven from pursuing villains, a chance encounter with a new friend. A bit more attention to these off-the-beaten path encounters would have helped make Visions of Mana’s world feel lived in and could’ve added even more weight to each character’s struggles and story.

Visions of Mana is bolder and more ambitious with the topics it raises than most RPGs, but it isn’t particularly deep and often feels hampered by sticking so closely to classic design concepts.

Square Enix opted for large, empty zones populated with a few dozen monsters, easy-to-find collectibles, and little more. Exploration never really pulls itself out of that hole, either. The continents you visit later in the game have some more interesting platforming challenges and ways to use elements you’ve collected, but the world itself still feels empty. Despite this, Visions of Mana is a gorgeous game that makes brilliant use of its rich colors, lush lighting, and stylized anime aesthetic to forge a unique visual identity that (almost) makes up for how little there is to do in each area.

Deep character customization make combat exciting

Haphazard enemy placement in a too-big world might take some of the tension out of combat, but beating up on an adorably lethal Mana monster just feels good. Each character starts with a unique fighting style that consists of a basic attack combo and special move – crashing your flying, dog-like dragon companion into an enemy, for example, or pulling off a slick counter attack at the right moment. You can use special seeds to teach characters new skills or buff specific stats, and eventually, you also unlock new specialized classes with elemental affiliations. 

Class abilities are fun to tinker with, but their most interesting feature is how they change the equipping character’s methods. A great example is the Rune Knight, the game’s first unlockable class. One character swaps his regular sword for a big two-hander, which hits hard, but the slower speed of attack leaves him open to enemy counters. Meanwhile, when another equips the wind element instead, she becomes a Dancer, ditching her dinky spear for two fans and getting several new combo chains that make her equally adept at dealing with grounded enemies and airborne foes alike.

You can get through most normal battles without much planning. Boss battles require a bit more strategy, though, and each region has a selection of optional challenges featuring much more powerful enemies and a chance to really dig into the particulars of your party build. It’d be nice if some of the plain encounters were a bit more challenging, but you can track down plenty of more difficult battles if you want them.

Character customization is extensive, flexible, and best of all, forgiving. Outside a few items that permanently increase a specific stat for one character, you can’t mess up a build halfway through the game and be stuck with some awful, ill-advised party. You can shuffle around stat-boosting and skill-granting seeds on all your characters, change classes any time outside battle, and generally just experiment freely to see what you like best. That said, with so many options, it’s frustrating that Square Enix didn’t think of adding ways to save slots for skills. Re-equipping items and assigning abilities when you change a class is hardly the end of the world, but it is a nuisance that could have easily been avoided.

Visions of Mana feels less like a triumphant new era for the series and more like a tentative step forward to see what still works and what kind of place Mana still has in the modern RPG landscape. That’s understandable to an extent, given how long the series has been dormant. The hesitation does little to help Visions of Mana forge a strong and coherent identity for itself, though. There’s a special little gem at the heart of Visions of Mana, but it’s still lost in the shadow of the greats like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.