Visions of Mana Review

Visions of Mana is the cutest game that lets you do almost everything I love in an RPG. When I walked up to the giant monkey boss with floppy bunny ears and a giant club, I thought I’d hug the goofy thing if it were a stuffed toy. Unfortunately, his club wasn’t as huggable as the rest: I slipped and died in one hit, a little too cocky for me to read his telegraphed wind-up and the glowing red AoE markers scattered across the ground before his attacks. Visions of Mana may be cute, but on challenging difficulty, it has enough bite to knock my ego down a few pegs.

Was it strictly action game, I’m sure I’d throw myself at that monkey boss until I memorized his moves and managed to squeeze through without getting hit. But Visions of Mana is an RPG, and a damn good one at that. After reevaluating my squad of fairy tale heroes and the many character classes they could equip, I tried a different strategy. Val, the typically energetic protagonist that he is, mostly led my team as a damage dealer with a greatsword. However, if I changed him to a tank class, I could assign his combat dagger…

These were the decisions that led me to victory in Visions of Mana, from the first few hours of play to the end. It’s not that these RPG systems are particularly deep; I could explain all the abilities in Morley’s Nightblade’s first class on a sticky note. But Visions of Mana strategically introduces fresh class options over the course of the game, which constantly changed my perspective on my team. When Careena unlocked her Divine Fist class, which swaps her magical fans for fiery fists of fury, my jaw dropped at the massive burst damage she could now deal. I was counting on her to handle all my buffs and debuffs, but I wanted that damage, and suddenly I had to reorganize my entire team to fill its elderly role.

Maybe I spent the entire game thinking too much about team building, but in RPGs I crave that “aha moment” when I fit all the pieces together and turn my team into a handsome death machine. In Visions of Mana I had that moment time and time again—I loved adapting to every team combination I tried, even when I was quickly moving on to try a fresh one.

What a wonderful world

Visions of Mana is a bubblegum fantasy, clear but instantly familiar. Val is a “Keeper of Souls” who must protect his ward, a member of a group called “The Alms.” They are on a pilgrimage to the Mana Tree, where human sacrifices must be made every four years to save the world from destruction. The sacrificial Alm is, of course, Val’s girlfriend, Hinna. What could have been a melancholic or emotionally elaborate adventure is never treated with the nuance it should have been. The prologue is cloyingly heart-wrenching, and then most of the cast spends the first part of the game completely ignoring the gravity of the sacrifice. This lively is eventually explained, but even in context, I rarely felt that the protagonists’ motivations were tied to how I would feel in their shoes. When I played does If we delve deeper into this conflict, we notice that some of the most dramatic moments lose their impact due to awkward dialogue and inept character animations that fall into the trap of anxiety.

Visions of Mana is stronger when it focuses on interpreting the 2D exploration of older games with wide open fields and classic dungeons. Every time I reached an open field, I stopped playing the game like an RPG and approached it like a late-90s item gathering game. There are so many treasure chests and collectibles that I still found fresh items when revisiting elderly areas. Many of the treasures required skills I didn’t already have, which often paid off with fun minigames when I returned to them. One standout game threw me into a flying-on-rails section using the Salamander elemental, allowing me to catch stray currency as I sped to a fresh destination.

These excuses to step back gave me more time to soak in the visual splendor of the environment, which translates the glowing and colorful aesthetic of Secret of Mana, its 1993 predecessor Visions of Mana, into a fully 3D environment. From farmlands covered in blue and purple crops to red canyons dotted with antique ruins atop precariously placed rocks, the world feels huge despite its relatively tiny size. The monsters are similarly packed with personality through their unique designs and animations. One of the enemies, Mad Mallard, is decked out in a giant green army hat and holds a giant ball and chain. It sounds odd writing this, but in practice the enemy designs are like someone’s wildest childhood dreams.

The linear dungeons are a joy, despite being firmly rooted in the Old Ways. Enemy groups are more numerous here, but Visions of Mana includes uncomplicated puzzles in these areas to break up the action. I found myself bouncing featherlight off mirrors to illuminate statues that unlocked fresh areas, and raising and lowering water levels so I could swim to ledges I couldn’t reach with a double jump.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, and I solved each puzzle so quickly that I’d sooner call them “brain-ticklers” than “puzzles.” But the variety of tricks kept me engaged—dungeons rarely duplicated ideas from one area to another.

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Visions of Mana rarely lets any of its ideas linger for long. It knows when to introduce a fresh overworld area or a sprawling story sequence to avoid falling back on formulaic structure. Even the combat system, which lacks the deep combos and precise dodge mechanics of other action games, feels consistently electrifying because of the way it’s integrated into the adventure. Most of the standard enemies are skippable, side quests could be saved for later when I wanted to grind, and the boss monsters feel gorgeous thanks to the sprawling orchestral music and elaborate combat animations. Attacks feel meaningful when they knock monsters back, and critical hits make a satisfying “shwing!” sound that activates the ecstatic chemicals in my brain.

The limitations of the action weren’t a drawback for me – on the contrary, they made me start to apply all the game’s systems and find solutions to the obstacles I encountered.

Like a hot cup of cocoa on a snowy day

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It’s a shame that Visions of Mana’s main story is so poorly written, because the final chapters, which focus on the personal storylines of the main cast, really spoke to me. My heart went out to characters like Morley, a swordsman who struggles to come to terms with the loss of a kingdom that was destroyed when he was a child. Visions of Mana asks questions about how we face grief and sacrifice our own happiness for the greater good, but it could have explored those themes much more. The cast of anthropomorphic teenagers indicates a story likely intended for a younger audience, but even by that standard the potential of its premise remains largely unrealized.

Aside from the writing, I could nitpick a few minor details: characters would sometimes not follow commands if I gave them while they were locked in animation. The rapid travel and side quest systems are pretty clunky. I wish I could chain attacks together a bit more seamlessly. The side quests themselves are pretty routine, harking back to MMO “kill five monsters” and “collect items” quests, but they’re largely skippable without losing too much.

These annoyances never made me want to stop playing Visions of Mana. Each lush environment was a delight, and the music is still stuck in my head as I write this. In the 50 hours I willingly crammed almost all of it into a single week, I never felt bored. Maybe it’s how elegantly Visions of Mana presents its core mechanics, or just how well it captures the charming simplicity of ’90s RPGs without feeling dated. Either way, I can’t think of many RPGs that have consistently kept me entertained from start to finish. There’s nothing groundbreaking about it, but it’s as comfortable—and even huggable—as a stuffed monkey. Without the club, of course.