Visions of Mana

Once again steam needs a "Meh" review. this is a solid if uninspired entry in the mana series. side quests trigger at odd points with lots of backtracking to low level areas for usually trivial rewards, main quest has a depressing ending. Basically I started off really liking it then finished new game plus trying to unlock a better ending or reason it existed. It starts strong but then really doesn't seem to have a cohesive idea of how to scale past the midgame. Bosses just teleport to keep them from being punching bags and challenges are either trivial or weirdly tough and require very specific builds to clear.

Great and fun cheesy RPG. If you enjoyed Trials of Mana, you'll adore this one. It's corny, saturday-morning cartooney, and I just love it. Careena is the best girl.

WHO THE F*CK DESTROYED ETARNEA, WHAT THE F*CK Not a great game, no that bad either. Buy at a heavely discounted price

[h1] Visions of uninstall [/h1] Insulting game design. From "chests" and points of interests being visible at ALL TIMES ON A MINIMAP, to DUMB "inner" voices of characters RECAPPING the events that literally happened 5 SECONDS AGO. What an insult. Exploration is no longer rewarding but rather a LIST OF THINGS to "check" and most of the items found in chests are "healing herbs". Character design is probably the worst I have seen in mana series. Don't like Hinna ( her eyes are just AWFUL ), loli dragon has way too bushy hairstyle and MC has a personality of a wet paper. Morley the cat person... what this even?! Oh man I can't even look at him. This was clearly made for a younger audience and the Developer didn't have any trust in the gamers to find things or piece story together by... you know USING THEIR BRAINS. Combat is serviceable at best. Literally they didn't learn anything from Trials of Mana. You will be steamrolling ALL THE MONSTERS doing long combos ( was playing on HARDEST difficulty BTW ) UNTIL you will get 4-5 monsters that cannot be knocked back easily. Oh boy. That's when "brainless" spamming which the game teaches you to do suddenly doesn't work. You will be lucky to hit them ONCE / TWICE before having to dodge ( BECAUSE THERE IS NO BLOCK IN THE GAME DESPITE MAIN CHARACTER WIELDING SHIELD AND SPEAR LIKE IN MONSTER HUNTER?! ) . Magic here sucks... no longer as flashy as in Trials of Mana, skills range from WHY IS THIS THING EVEN HERE? to I MUST HAVE IT and anything inbetween. There is no build VARIETY. Despite the game giving you MANY classes to choose from... you will be stuck with the strengths and WEAKNESSES of a given class. Say for example I dumped all my STR points into MC and gave him all the ATK bonuses and CRIT bonuses... Yep he hits harder BUT because he is a "tank" his lance will never hit as hard as a Pugilist of a loli dragon class... . If I had known that I would have given the points to characters that would actually benefit from. I could not make an OP character unlike in previous game Trials of Mana. This is just sad. I could go on... but this game has been disappointment. There are some positives such as environment are varied and quite nice to look at BUT THE AMOUNT OF RE-USED ENEMIES / BOSSES is abhorring. There is no replay value for me and your A.I teammates are absolute resource sinkers. They will die constantly... leaving me to finish the fight. Story terrible, characters are "safe" and the game is not worth the full price. Lucky me since I picked it up on sale. More of a rant rather than a proper review.... Just finished it. Absolutely garbage game. Story doesn't explain what happened to your party members or what happened after Val made his choice... Nothing. Combat is a STAT CHECK. Especially on Expert difficulty which is just a SLOG to go through. Wow. Im gonna go back to Trials of Mana and Legend of Mana.

IMPORTANT audio setting change: the music volume is WAY too low, so change voice and effects volume to 30%-40%, leave music volume at 100% and thank me later. Overall, the game is a great sequel to the Seiken Densetsu series. If you like the old Mana games such as Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3, I think you will probably like this game, too. The environments are nice, the music is great, and there are a lot of elements from older Mana games such as enemies and story, visual and musical elements. So that you know where I'm coming from: I played 5 Mana games and absolutely love 3 of these (Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 and Sword of Mana), while I liked the other two (Legend of Mana and Dawn of Mana). I would def consider myself a fan of the series (as evidence, I have a big poster of SD3 in my home office, and it's the only poster in my office and one of the only two posters I have in my home, the other is from Final Fantasy VII). I read some reviews by fans of the series that didn't like this entry in the series because of the story, music and some other aspects, but I'm very glad that I still played the game and I don't agree with those reviews at all. The story is good for a Mana game IMHO (these games always were more about atmosphere than intricate story design) and the music doesn't surpass the great original OSTs but is heavily inspired by them and also doesn't disappoint. IMHO, this time the devs did a great job translating the environments, characters and enemies from older games into 3D versions. Running around in the beautiful world kinda feels like running around in Secret of Mana as a kid decades ago. It's the first game for me that managed to translate pixel environments into 3D environments without losing the feeling of the originals. It's just a lot of fun to run around in that beautiful world. I found a few negative aspects though: - So many invisible walls, sometimes in the middle of environments for no real reason at all. Very frustrating, but you kinda learn to laugh about it. - Hours and hours of cutscenes that could have been shorter. It's nice that they take time to tell the story, but sometimes it's just a bit much. A bit better writing instead of just more writing would have been nice. - The last chapter feels a bit rushed. And by that I don't mean that the cutscenes are shorter, it's just like there are some important things missing. I don't get why they made the last two chapters the way they did, but I don't want to spoil anything. It's ok, just a bit strange. And that's it - if you like the Mana series, give it a try!

Absolute dog water of a game. Wish I could have refunded it. sad

I went into this game having played the demo and having not very high expectations. The characters seemed dull the combat a bit lacking. Never the less I thought i'd give it a try and let me tell you it's as close to average and something can be. If this game were a beverage it would be those giant cheap bottles of cider you find at the bottom shelf. The story is trying to ask deep questions about whether we should blindly follow tradition or whether a world built on sacrifice is okay, but ultimately it has nothing interesting or nuanced to say about it. Some of the character interactions are sweet but a lot of the writing falls flat. The story points and the reasons to actually go to explore the colourful and expansive world are paper thin. You're given all these different abilities but none feel as effective as, bonk the thing over the head until it dies. The main villain just sorta shows up... He sucks. He's not interesting and hes a googoogaga baby. All treasures and intractable stuff is highlighted with a blue dot so when you're given a new map you just head to blue dots. All the mystery and fun of exploring is removed in order to keep railroading you towards your next objective. The areas are colourful and the music is nice. But exploring feels formulaic and you just end up teleportation around. Speaking of fast travel you can only fast travel on the island you're currently on, if you want to fast travel between continents you have to make your way over there yourself then you can fast travel between the area of that continent. It's dumb and it makes my tummy hurt. As I played I wanted desperately to feel something for these characters, and I nearly did but the game is too afraid to delve deep into some of the more interesting aspects of the characters. This game isn't going to wow you. It's average, it's safe, and it knows it. Your time is probably better spent with Trails of mana, or secret of mana (the original not the remake.) It's an okay time, turn off your brain and give it a try but just don't expect the charm or vibrancy of older mana titles. Strap in for some grindy enemies and enjoy the handful of somewhat well realised characters. weeeeee

I'm a fan of the series, so it was a no brainer. That being said, with a couple exceptions historically the stories haven't been amazing and this one is no exception. Overall it's a good game, just spread over such large drawn out areas that the game tends to take a leisurely pace. Like others in the series the environments and enemies are very colorful and amazing. It seems the devs put a massive amount of effort in making them amazing, I just wish they put a little more effort into everything else. The environments are big! Maybe a little too big. You'll find it takes a long time to traverse areas, and even once you unlock multiple forms of fast travel, they only go so far so it takes time to travel from region to region. The battle system and game play isn't bad, but it isn't great. It's pretty standard hack and slash with a magic system mixed in. It serves it's purpose but you aren't going to be awed. The story and characters are a little rough, especially at the start. You can tell they devs wanted to see growth in the characters, and they succeeded, but not nearly as far as you would hope. You're going to see some pretty over used anime type tropes throughout the game, which aren't great but not bad enough to deter most people. There are a fair few bugs in the game. Most of the bugs aren't bad enough to be frustrating, but it does show the game is in a little rough shape. I believe this is because the devs were shut down shortly after launch, so no patches could be made. Still you will also find some beneficial bugs as well that may just help through some tricky areas ;). Overall the game is enjoyable despite it's flaws and I would recommend it.