Visions of Mana is my favorite retro title of 2024.
It is a surprise to no one when a guy that started gaming in the 1980’s enjoys retro titles. I can and have lined up for “throwback titles” that are meant to evoke memories of 8 and 16-bit adventures. Stick a kitsune in Super Mario Bros 3, and I’m there. Imagine a Mega Man with his serial numbers filed off, and I’m blasting away. And, of course, Chrono Trigger is and has always been one of my favorite games; obviously, I am going to fly into any Chrono Trigger-alike with the fervor of a moth divebombing a flame. I am a retro human being, so I enjoy retro games.
But if you compare the examples from the previous paragraph to today’s game, you may experience the basic ogre emotions of confusion and anger. “Surely, Visions of Mana is not a retro title,” you may say through your tusk-like teeth. “It doesn’t even have wannabe pixel graphics!” And that is true! Despite being the latest entry in a franchise that has never had any problems with showcasing retro graphics, Visions of Mana has the general fidelity of a AAA game. These are not the realistic graphics that would support the latest Grand Theft Auto or Horizon jaunt, but they are on that impeccable level where you might see a tie-in to a beloved anime franchise. And how she plays? Perfect, AAA amazingness. This is a Mana game, so you could be awkwardly guiding some sword dude across a forest maze and only using a button to swing a sword once in a while. But no! This may be the first time in the franchise that it 100% feels good to be a Mana hero. Building off of the Trials of Mana remake, Visions of Mana includes a world where you can jump, double jump, and air dash through mountains and caves. Combat is fast, frenetic, and delightfully “crunchy”. Even the sidequest system hews closer to modern titles like Xenoblade, with quest markers and logs that will help you remember that you currently need seventeen cockatrice feathers to make a dwarf’s day. Visions of Mana is a 2024 game that literally could not have existed ten (or even five) years earlier.
But that doesn’t mean everything about Visions of Mana is modern.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A hero sets out on a quest. Despite being a known “chosen one”, he has very little money, equally little experience, and nary more than a nebulous goal to his name. He must (physically) reach his target, or the world will not survive. You would think someone would spot him a twenty. Despite being a sword idiot with the same scientific curiosity as many a rock, he will wind up exploring literally the entire world on his way to glory. Shortly after starting this quest, he is joined by eclectic, color-coded companions. The process seems to be the same each time: he enters a new town, finds the town has some esoteric defining trait, and exactly one denizen exists to be the opposing force of this society. Naturally, said society is proven unjust for one reason or another, and their unique snowflake now becomes a playable character. Once your party is assembled, the villain makes their move, and the true goal of your quest comes into sharp relief. Also, right about this time, your characters all start unlocking about half of their available skills. There is a concentrated effort to stop the villain, and over the course of that section of battles, about 75% of abilities are available, and they are unlocked as your party members gradually have epiphanies about their various places in the world. Finally, everyone is riding a massive wave of good vibes, the villain has fortified their position in an enormous lair of some kind (because literally every plan to stop them up to this point has failed), and the climatic siege begins just as everyone has unlocked their complete sphere grids. Oh! But if you really want to kick that bad guy’s ass, a whole pile of special content opened up with the final dungeon, and you can put in the effort to earn some truly ridiculous swords ‘n spears. If you are going to save the world, you may as well do it with the shiniest weapons available!
Yes, that is the plot of Visions of Mana/nearly every RPG/adventure game from about 1990-1997. And by the Mana Goddess, I miss it.
I can say that my own “journey” with RPGs lasted from approximately the RPG boom of the Super Nintendo to the Playstation 2. I played damn near everything featuring a silent protagonist on the Super Nintendo and Playstation (1), but I totally fell off by the time Dark Cloud, .Hack, and Atelier Iris were hitting the shelves. And there is a very good reason I can name those games as examples: I bought them all, played ‘em for an hour or two, and then put them back on my collection shelves where they sit, unplayed, to this day. I practically memorized the ins and outs of Lufia & The Fortress of Doom (that’s the bad one), but I barely even touched Dark Cloud 2 (that’s the good one). I beat the super boss of Legend of Legaia, but did not clear the prelude of Legaia 2: Duel Saga. I have sinned against narrative and quality to such a degree that I can list these slights immediately! Please accept my apology, the majority of the Shadow Hearts franchise!
Prior to replaying Visions of Mana, I blamed life for this shift. RPGs are wordy, complicated, and traditionally require a solid 40 hours to see a conclusion. The latest Contra can be cleared inside of an hour. And, while that “latest Contra” does not merely have an hour of content (as my own playtime unlocking everything can attest), it only takes an hour to see the complete tale. And that counts for something! Many RPGs work like Visions of Mana: a fantastic world is introduced, and said world has got a problem, and you have inside of twenty hours of game to complete before you even encounter a single NPC that says, “Hey, the current state of affairs is not to my liking.” So do not discount how story length can impact the enjoyment of a game. If you are venturing around a world for ten times the length of your average movie, and everyone on that planet is telling you how much they enjoy tossing maidens into volcanoes, that just might influence your feelings on staying in this environment. And who has time to spend in a fantasy world where everything sucks forever? The real world sucks hard enough! While you may have time for that sort of thing as a kid, that trails off as you gain more and more responsibilities. So falling off RPGs as an adult always made sense in my brain, as I believed myself to simply desire “punchier” experiences that don’t require a novel’s length of foreplay.
But it turns out what I was really missing from the RPGs of my youth was goddamned Power Rangers.
I will live in your crapsack world. I will fight through your 40 hours of story that comes to the shocking conclusion that “human sacrifice is bad, being mad all the time is bad”. I will even sit through all that dialogue that amounts to, “wow, I am surprised to learn that we really do need to save the world, as if that was not the goal from the first second this world was introduced.” I will deal with all of that under the condition that the cat man will eventually wear a silly suit with a monocle. … Wait, not that. What I mean to say is that I will put up with a lot of time-wasting crap if…
- It is fun to “play around” in the world, and…
- My heroes are a distinct batch of weirdos with distinct (but solvable!) problems
And that’s all it takes! Do you know how many sidequests I completed in Visions of Mana? Practically all of them! And, once I got into the groove of the game, I started doing them immediately when I got to a new town. And it was all because the sidequest scripting heightened my heroes perfectly. I would nab 20 rabite hides over and over again if it meant seeing my squirrel princess dressed up like faux-Zorro (long story). It is dumb! It is simple! But when my dragon mascot that inexplicably has two names for the purpose of obfuscating an obvious plot twist asks for seven magilettuce leaves because it is her favorite meal, I am there. Dragon good, dragon want food. I get that! I want more of that!
And not to go full ranting old man, but modern games have a tendency to ignore these simple pleasures. Final Fantasy 15 is ultimately a simple story about dudes on a road trip (that eventually leads to the end of the world), but it is difficult to say what is the point of that world for about 90% of the adventure. And everybody on your team is wearing black! Final Fantasy 16 has more sentai-influenced teammates with its summon-assigned characters, but it is still hard to say why that is a world worth saving. And just so we are not picking on Square exclusively this week, I will note that even modern “action” games are getting into the mix with titles like God of War obfuscating why the heck you would bother helping any of these frozen yokels. Is it any wonder I bounce off of these experiences and then sulk back to the Persona series? Persona even has the good sense to not only assign the main cast distinct colors, but their own private pantheon. I’m never going to confuse Naoto for Risette!
So Visions of Mana is retro in its presentation. It harkens back to a time now forgotten when every character is just as transparent as their wiki entry. That is the red one, she is going to be spunky and headstrong, and she is going to be that way from the first moment straight through to the ending. That’s all! Simple! It’s retro, and that’s all I want.
Thank you, Visions of Mana, for focusing my vision of the past.
FGC #695 Visions of Mana
(note that our bullet points may have more in-depth spoilers than the main article)
System: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, PC, and Xbox X/S. For the record, I played it completely on the Playstation 5, so if it runs like garbage elsewhere, I have no idea.- Number of Players: Sorry! No multiplayer Mana this time. We are sticking to one player.
- Is it a beat ‘em up? On two separate occasions, you fight an “endless” supply of random enemies while riding an elevator. So, logically, this is a beat ‘em up.
- Placing the Blame: Morley the cat man initially believes that he destroyed his entire hometown as a child while playing on an important part of local (magical) machinery. It is revealed (at nearly the end) that this was a nefarious plan by a secondary villain, and Morley just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meanwhile, Val the Hero was tricked by a villain into killing his childhood friend… and… Yeah, he did that. He just has to learn to live with the fact that he screwed up royally, and the best his dead friend gets is joining the Mana Goddess as a spirit. I am genuinely surprised the writers stuck to their morose guns on that one.
- Additional Hero Complaints: Val trained for years to be a Soul Guard. Nobody taught him not to trust the first grifter he meets, though. Literally the first person he encountered outside of town! So maybe Hinna’s death is just a problem of education. Learn some sword and social skills next time.
- Get a job: Oh! I barely even mentioned the class change mechanic that gives everyone eight new outfits and an endless chain of skills. It is the most fun anyone has had with a job system since Final Fantasy 10-2. No, I will not be playing a MMORPG to confirm job systems can work in our modern age elsewhere.
Favorite Hero: Careena is my girl, as she is not only the requisite irreverent character on this quasi-religious quest, but she also is responsible for buffs/debuffs, which all but demands she have player control at all times. And added bonus: she is the rare protagonist that has a fantasy disability (she had one of her wings amputated after an injury), but never has a moment where she has to “overcome” the disability to do something everyone else can do easily. Way to go, Careena!- Favorite Threesome: In honor of the proper traveling party in a Mana game being three, my favorite boss, dungeon, and skill all appear in one place. The Passagean Tomespire is a radical magical library with shifting, non-Euclidian design. The weird geometry requires the elemental vessel Shade Sight, which, despite the name, is a friggen’ awesome grappling hook. And then the boss of the area is the demon door Zehnoa, which is an excellent callback to my most hated/loved boss in Secret of Mana, Wall Face. Not bad for an area occupied by a pack of nerds!
- Say something mean: It would be cool if this game had bosses that used recognizable, dodge-able patterns, and then your party members actually dodged those obvious incoming attacks. There is an entire section of the final boss where the guy activates laser jump rope, and it would be super fun for everybody if your partners didn’t just stand there and get walloped by every wave.
- Did you know? Those Benevodons from last week have been consistent since their introduction in Trials of Mana, but, for whatever reason, the designers of Visions of Mana decided to create entirely new Benevodons. Except! Zable Fahr, the three-faced witch of the black, maintains her status as the Benevodon of Darkness. Was she really the most memorable? Or easiest to transform into this specific battle system? I can personally confirm I wasn’t all that happy to see her…
- Would I play again: Please give us another Mana game like this, Square Enix. I know it didn’t sell all that well, and someone already fired the entire team that made it… But this was so much fun! I’ll play it again! I’ll even buy Final Fantasy DLC or something to sweeten the pot. Please!
What’s next? Random ROB is back to being random and has chosen… Blade Chimera! We have another newbie on the docket! Please look forward to it!
