Visions of Mana (2024)

The developers of Visions of Mana, a game that released literally yesterday, are already being closed down.

Has literally nothing to do with the game's performance. Nothing to do with key staff leaving. Nothing to do with concerns of quality. Their parent company, NetEase, read tarot cards or looked into a crystal ball and decided, "Yup, I don't think this is a good idea."

Cool. Corporations sure are rational.

Things I learned about Visions of Mana, only just today:

• It was not developed by Square Enix
• It was developed by Ouka Studio, staffed by former Capcom devs and owned by Chinese Internet media company NetEase
• NetEase is shuttering Ouka, because their games have performed poorly, which apparently factors in Visions of Mana (despite literally just launching today)

Games don’t even get the benefit of a full day before they are declared a failure and dev studios are closed down by these giant media corps. It’s ridiculous.

I think I’ll pass on this one. Tried the demo and my overall impression of the game is weak. Aesthetically it’s a little too plastic for my tastes, the V.O. Is kind of annoying (even in Japanese) and combat doesn’t feel compelling enough to suck me in. While I recognize this is only a demo there are a few elements that made for a bad first impression:

1. Poor optimization: this might/hopefully will get fixed by launch, but general performance isn’t great, regardless of the graphical settings. Whether set to high, standard or low, the game regularly dips just below the selected framerate, especially when jumping into combat. This doesn’t feel like a GPU issue, but one of poor CPU realization/optimization.
2. Limited graphical settings: there is no way to adjust individual graphical settings, you just have access to one global quality selector that offered high, standard and low. As pointed out above, none of them seem to have an impact on performance, as dropping from high to low makes no discernible difference to frame rate.
3. No DualShock/DualSense controller support: for a game that’s releasing to PS5, it’s puzzling why there’s no support for anything but Xbox controllers. They must have button icons for the PS5 release, why not include them in the PC release?
4. Realtime rendered cutscenes are 30fps regardless of the framerate chosen for gameplay. An odd choice that is always jarring.

I was initially a wee bit excited, but as it seems with many of the Mana sequels, this feels like yet another that isn’t compelling enough to justify investing my time. A shame, but it is what it is.

IMO about the characters that were revealed in the trailer. Val seems like a mix of Keldric and Randi. Hinna is totally Fuji but with more modern clothes (?). Julei is a sproutling omg (also the same vibes of Charlotte and Popoi because a kid character of another species). Morley I didn't him much because he looks more a FF character and out of the place in the Mana series (also he remembers me the cat from Shrek because of these long boots lol). Palamena was a bit disappointing, why she has a squirrel tail but no ears? I also didn't like her skimpy clothing (I don't bother with it much as long as it is cute, like Angela, but in her case it look like they just planned a gown and removed her skirt). Careena though I didn't like her at first, I liked her dancing outfit so she might have some cute outfits, she also has the best design of the 3 girls, I just didn't like the one wing Sephiroth thing LOL.

Love it that the game has Niccolo, Treant, Lil' cactus, Flammie and Dudbears, I also loved the fairy, she is cute af and look so much like the fairies of LOM. But I didn't like the black dog armadillo mount thing, he looks like an oversized tiny animal and is really weird, his design would fit better if he was tiny like the rabites.