Visions of Mana review: the RPG comfort food you’re craving

Whenever it’s late at night and I’m still feeling a bit hungry, I always go to my local Taco Bell drive-through to pick up a Build Your Own Cravings Box: Crunchwrap Supreme, Crunchy Taco, Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes, and a medium Diet Pepsi. I know it’s not the healthiest food for me, complete with high sodium, calories, and cholesterol, but I’m not going to sit around not feeling satisfied after I eat it. It’s comfort food!

That’s how I felt about playing Visions of Mana. Here, Square Enix had the items already picked out for me: good combat, a flexible class system, fantastic art direction, and compelling characters. Much like comfort food, Visions of Mana is fun to play when you’re feeling the itch for something familiar — even if you know there are better options out there. I could’ve played an RPG with a less predictable story and fewer dull sidequests, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the taste all the same.

Breaking the cycle

In Visions of Mana, people around the world must send one person from their respective elemental villages to sacrifice their lives to the great Mana Tree every four years — otherwise, disaster will fall upon their homes. Those people chosen to make the pilgrimage are called Alms, and Val is assigned to be the Soul Guard, the person in charge of protecting them and making sure they make the journey unscathed.

The story sets a nice foundation, but most of the plot twists along the way are rather predictable. It’s very much reminiscent of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s story where romance is a huge motivator between characters. It gets to a point where it becomes a bit too heavy-handed, leaving no mystery about it’s antagonists’ motivation. It all builds to a boring conclusion.

The Mana series was originally a spinoff of Final Fantasy before it split off to become its own series, and it’s very obvious in Visions of Mana. The different elemental spirits like water, fire, and earth have essential story involvement and add quite a bit of nostalgic structure to the game. It’s almost like playing an old-school Final Fantasy game.

Where Visions of Mana’s story lacks, the compelling cast of characters make up for it. My personal favorite character is Careena, who always has confidence in her own abilities, but the lack of support from her own community has stunted her potential. As such, she joins Val in order to explore the world and broaden her horizons. The choice to have her English dub voice actor speak with an American Southern accent also really nails her small village origins.

Her journey with Val lets her overcome this, and the rest of the cast go through similar trials, making for some very satisfying and emotional character moments. Val himself goes through tremendous growth as well, as he’s able to accept the mistakes he’s made as a Soul Guard throughout his journey, but still finds the courage to venture on. It’s character arcs like these that make Visions of Mana enticing to play through despite a flat story.

Changing elements

Visions of Mana’s real-time action combat system has a few quirks of its own to help it stand out from its contemporaries. Throughout the story, the party will obtain elemental vessels that let them switch classes. The wood vessel, Dryad Sprig, unlocks the Edelfrei class for Van and specializes in aerial combat, while Careena learns the Conjurer class that can summon monsters. Each class is unique and offers different abilities that can sometimes crossover between classes. That creates some serious mix and match potential that deepens combat.

Each vessel offers a special move that any character can use in battle. Equipping the moon elemental vessel, Luna Globe, gives a character the ability to freeze time, leaving enemies unable to fight back for a bit. The earth elemental vessel, Gnome Shovel, grants the ability to create an area shield that reduces enemy damage when taking cover in it. These moves can make a huge difference in determining outcomes in battle, especially against bosses.

Characters can equip Ability Seeds found in the wild or dropped by enemies to learn new moves or even enhance their existing parameters. This allows for a lot of flexibility for characters who can’t learn specific moves from other classes. For example, only Val can learn Thunder Saber, which imbues an ally’s weapon with wind elemental damage, through natural progression.

But by equipping a Thunder Saber Ability Seed, any other character can now use it. The Ability Seeds system offers deep customization for those who enjoy tinkering with and optimizing their party members. It’s also a straightforward system, where Ability Seeds do exactly as their descriptions say and all you have to do is equip them in limited slots.

I also appreciate how simple and approachable weapons are in Visions of Mana. Just pick the one that has the highest attack or magic attack and equip it. Weapons don’t have any fancy specific abilities that make you have to sacrifice power if it doesn’t fit with a certain playstyle like in Black Myth: Wukong. It’s another part of what makes Visions of Mana feel so comforting.

A colorful world

Visions of Mana’s semi-open world showcases the game’s gorgeous art direction (the cel-shaded style reminds me of Granblue Fantasy: Relink’s colorful palette). Similar to games that heavily rely on the elemental spirit trope, there’s a wide variety of environments corresponding to them like grasslands, deserts, volcanoes, and tundras.

The open world doesn’t have nearly as much depth or hyperrealism as something like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. In fact, the art direction makes it feel like a Fisher Price version of Square Enix’s flagship RPG. It also doesn’t help that Visions of Mana’s sidequests aren’t as engaging either.

Many of the sidequests just involve fetching an item or eliminating a group of enemies. The non-player characters that provide those tasks provide some worldbuilding along with them, but their backgrounds feel superficial at best. There are some interesting sidequests that involve main characters toward the end of the game, but those are few and far between.

The rewards for completing them are still worth it, though. It’s an easy way to gain more money and earn special Ability Seeds. Thankfully, Visions of Mana has plenty of fast travel spots throughout the open world that make tackling sidequests easier. Additionally, the game’s performance on PlayStation 5 is spotless, making it a smooth adventure from start to finish.

Visions of Mana is like a snack that you eat in between your big meals. There’s enough here to satiate your hunger, like the fun combat and entertaining cast of characters, if you’re looking for another RPG to play in the meantime. It feels safe and familiar, so don’t come in expecting a novel experience.

Oh, it’s getting late as I finish writing this review, and I think it’s time for me to grab some Taco Bell now.

Visions of Mana was tested on a PlayStation 5.