Masem’s Gaming Blog

Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis is a spiritual sequel to the Atelier Iris series of role-playing games from Gust and publisehed by NIS for the PlayStation 2.  The game’s focus besides the usual combat is that of alchemy, using easily-obtained ingredients in new recipes to make more powerful items and battle equipment.  The game plays much like its earlier cousins, though adds in elements possibly inspired by other more recent RPGs such as Final Fantasy XII and Persona 3, helping to freshen up the series.  While it’s not a perfect game, it definitely is entertaining if you have enjoyed other games in the series.

Review helpfulness: (No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...

Story: B

The game is focused on Vayne, a young lad who is the son of a famous but deceased alchemist and has been invited to Al-Revis Academy to learn more of alchemy.  The school starts rather normally; he gains friends and joins up into a workshop to team up on assignments.  However, as the terms progress, some of the faculty and students take a strange interest in him, and learning that his skills with alchemy are not the same as most other students.  Vayne begins to learn more about his father, how he is connected to the Academy, and why he himself is special.

The story is very very loosely tied to the Atelier Iris series; there is one character that carries over, and the concept of mana beings, beastmen, and the like are there.  However, you need not have knowledge of those to get into this game.  Unfortunately, while I did feel attached to some of the characters (the last one that joins the group is by far one of the oddest characters in the series), there are a few typical stereotypes as found in JRPGs or anime in general: Vayne is your typical emo kid, and you have the typical female semi-romantic companion and the like.  Plus, the story really doesn’t build up until about halfway through, though just a few events hint at the end story.

Gameplay: A-

Mana Khemia is a spiritual sequel to Gust’s previous Atelier Iris series, and the bulk of the gameplay is going to be very familiar to those that have played it before.  However, it does add in some other concepts to help freshen the game, even if both seem “borrowed” from other more recent RPGs.

The game is structured around four school years, each consisting of two terms and a period of free time broken down by weeks.  Within each week, you can do various tasks such as shopping, alchemy, gathering, odd jobs, and the like, but the week progresses either by taking a course, completing fixed events, completing one of the character side quest portions, or simply resting in your bed.  Thus, there’s a aspect of the schoolyear as from Persona 3, though certainly not the point where I felt I was being pulled in several different directions.  One aspect that is nice is that terms with assignments are graded depending on how well you do (how fast you complete something, how rare an item you find, or the like, depending on the course), and if you get enough marks before all the assignment days are complete, they become free time.  Of course, if you fail to get the necessary number of marks, you lose one free day to detention work, preventing you from advancing the character stories.

Exploration is similar to Atelier Iris 3.  In the various dungeons/fields, you can see all the monsters, allowing you to swipe at them to get the initial edge in combat, or if they are weak enough, destroy them outright, or you can opt to dodge foes if possible.  The game keeps track of night and day, a full cycle taking about 10 minutes while in the field.  During the day, monsters are tame and easy to avoid, but at night, they move much faster and gain additional speed and strength in combat, so exploring at night is generally not recommended, even though for some dungeons, it is necessary to do so to get to a target point.  Of course, if not in a course, one can simply find a safe area and wait out until day fall if they get stuck at night.  Most fields have numerous places to gather materials for alchemy, including special places for fruits, vegetables, fish, and minerals.

Combat is turn based and follows much of the previous mechanics of Atelier Iris games.  Two major changes have been made in this game.  First, once you get more than 3 characters in your party (you gain 8, but only 6 total can be directly involved with battle), you have the ability to execute support actions with characters on standby.  This can either be a follow up attack after an active’s character attack, or can step in defensively to take the hit for the targetted character.  This allows you to swap out characters easily (though you can always do it as a normal action) and build up long combo chains.  The other aspect that’s new is that when you hit Burst Mode (after you have done a significant amount of hits and damage), you then work on building a special meter based on some criteria such as achieving a long chain of attacks, attacking an opponent’s weakness, or even taking damage from a foe.  Once this meter is full, then you get to unleash the unique attack of one character to do great damage.  Of course, if you can’t get this second meter full, your attacks are improved during Burst Mode while active, so it’s always a desirable state to achieve.  What is nice this time around is that each of the characters have unique sets of skills that, though you can choose to ignore, can help significantly with the game.  One, for example, is actually able to manipulate the “card timeline” (showing who’s turn is coming up next), moving and removing certain cards through his skills; another can defeat animal foes and then recall them later for better attacks in battle.  While unique character skills were part of the series in the past, I think they are better distinguished here.

All this leads to the alchemy side of the game which follows much the same as from the previous games.  All the materials you collect and buy are used in recipes to make more potent ingredients, battle items, weapons, armor, and accessories.  Basic ingredients and materials are made with the concept of an Ether level, a value from 0 to 100. This value is affected by the Ether level of all items coming into the recipe, but also can be modified by hitting the right area on a “synthesis wheel”, some areas adding to the Ether level, others detracting it.   You can also modify this by using support from your party, with both positive and negative effects.  Maximum ether is not always the best item: certain qualities are obtained in specific ether ranges for items, often with opposite effects occurring at extremes.  These effects include special abilities for battle, stat improvements, or general quality assessments that are used in assignments and jobs.  When you combine materials to weapons, armor, and accessories, you can then select one ability and two stat improvements from the core materials to attach to the final item, allowing you additional customization of these parts.  Most recipes are learned by finding them or buying them, while some extend from existing recipes by replacing one ingredient, while others are suggested by your party mates if they are there when you synthesize it.  This part of the game is generally pretty good as there’s a lot of flexibility within it, but it also somewhat annoying, in that where you synthesize your materials is in a different location (just a door down, but basically means 2 loading screens to move from one to the other) from where you make your weapons and armor.  This can mean that if you are trying to make a powerful piece of equipment, you may need to run back and forth, creating material to make a component that is necessary for a high-grade material that is needed for that equipment.  And that is assuming you have all the material: you may need to sidetrack to a store or even to the dungeon to gather more items to complete it all.  Needless to say, this part does get tedious in the late game with more complicated recipes.

Instead of advancing in levels normally, the game uses a “Grow Book”, a concept similar to the license board from Final Fantasy XII.  Each character has a unique graph of nodes based on specific items to be synthesized, with each node having up to 3 abilities that can be unlocked; abilities include improvements to hit points, spell points, new abilities, speed improvements, and so forth.  You need to unlock the items in adjacent nodes to access a given node, thus requiring you to generally synthesize everything you can.  The abilities of each node are unlocked with ability points earned in battle, thus while it is possible to explore and avoid a lot of creature battles, this will leave you lacking in terms of character growth, with the game generally requiring you to complete as much of the Grow Book as you can during each chapter to stay alive during each chapter’s final boss fight.  It is a nice concept, but it is also one of the poorest GUI choices I’ve seen.  First, it is tediously slow in its animations, even if it takes maybe 5 seconds to apply AP to unlock an ability; if you play like I did, doing all the alchemy at the start of a new chapter that I could, I would spend a good 10-15 minutes maxing out the Grow Book for each character.  Secondly, moving around the Grow Book is a bit awkward, as it only goes by the connections, not allowing you to move freely, meaning that if there’s a node just a step away from another node, but not connected, you need to walk the connections around to the target node, also making the process tedious.  The idea is nice, but one problem I found is that AP seemed to be given out too freely that it rarely was a problem to max out the Book at any time until the last chapter, with some of the abilities becoming rather expensive; unlike the Final Fantasy XII license board, there’s no much flexibility to this.

Overall, while I found the game to be rather accessible - the premise of being a school allows all the “training missions” to be actually part of the game to explain how everything works, and the game is nowhere near the difficulty of other JRPGs as I only had one boss I needed to fight a second time after dying once - it did get a bit tediously repetitive in nature in the endgame.  Start a new chapter, grab all the new recipes and synthesize the heck out of them, do the assignments, then the jobs, then the character quests, to get to the chapter’s final boss.  I think I would have preferred some less flexible class time; instead of being forced to do all the classes up front, maybe have a class/free time/class approach, or have fewer recipes immediately available at the start of a chapter.   That leads to the game feeling maybe 2 chapters too long.  But, despite that, I think after the rather weak Atelier Iris 3, the “series” has regained something of its uniqueness.

Value/Replayability: A-

My playthrough took me about 45 hrs, a generally good length for JRPGs, though again, I note that the tediousness likely could have left 5 to 10 hours off this without losing its effectiveness.  The game has multiple endings, one for each of your party’s characters depending on how you take their character sidequests, though fortunately, you start with knowledge of all recipes and the states of the Grow Books when you start a new game in this way.   Of course, this doesn’t change out the plot of the main story, so playing through many times may not be fruitful.

Graphics: B+

The game continues to use the isometric 2D sprite approach the other Atelier Iris games had, so if you’re not the type that appreciates the chibi-ness of the characters won’t find much here.  Many of the spirits are carried over from those games or modified just slightly so it is somewhat familiar though also feels like a cheap cop-out from making new ones.  One aspect that has been improved is that the graphics include some bit of perspective, so that there’s a better sense of moving about a three-dimensional world while in the field.  This gives some fields much larger views, such as ones that take place high in the trees or across bones of dragons, allowing to see paths that you need to work towards.  There are points where some of the fields seemed to get complex enough to slow down the rendered for a few moments, which would of course screw up any jumping or dodging you tried to do, but these happened in predictable places as to make it easier to avoid any problems.

Audio: B+

Music is generally pretty good; the background music varies for each fields, and while at the school, the music changes during each term so there’s not too much repetition here.  The voice work is decent, but unfortunately only about 25% of the dialog is voiced, the rest through word balloons.  Combat effects are done nicely, with spoken clues when your backup team is ready to go in, in case you aren’t paying attention.

Overall: B+

Mana Khemia is a good reboot of the Atelier Iris series: it keeps the combat and alchemy aspects of the original series, but the retooling of other aspects in light of other recent RPGs make it sufficiently unique.  It’s by no means a groundbreaking game, nor will be one to change your mind about JRPGs, but it is fun if you’ve enjoyed the other games of the series.   It’s not a perfect game as there are a lot of tedious aspects to it that could have been easily fixed, but its still quite playable.

 Loading ...

How well did you find this review helpful? (No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...