Well, I finally finished Mana Khemia this morning… at 6 AM… I think I clocked in about 47 hours when I finally got to the last boss. I must say, it almost feels like the characters did nothing of severe importance. I was initially going to complain about that, but then I realized that the game didn’t really need that. I mean, the characters are schoolkids, what do you really expect them to do?

Plot

The plot is the thing I have the most problems with for this game. There really isn’t much of it. The game mostly focuses on character development (somewhat, you have to initiate it.) Take away the self-initiated character development and you have almost little plot development. You spend most of the time in the game doing assignments (unless you get A’s, in which you spend most of the time doing whatever you want.) Story events compose of about 1/7 of the weeks in the game.

This wouldn’t matter if the assignments were interesting or fun, but most of them are not. A lot of the earlier assignments actually do teach you something, but later they are just annoying. They actually feel like busywork more than anything. All of this makes the game seem not only very slow, but also very light in terms of plot.

There’s not much of a synopsis I can give for this game. The main character, Vayne, doesn’t have very many memories and lives alone with his cat. He gets invited to a school of alchemy and meets friends there. The game is just about their time in the academy and finding out more about Vayne’s origins.

Characters

This is my favorite part of the game. The characters are pretty hilarious. I don’t think I hate a single one of them, not even the main character (which I seem to hate in GUST RPGs, frequently.) Vayne isn’t the stereotypical male RPG lead; his character is pretty weak. His voice is soft (at least, his JPN voice is. His American voice is a little strong.) The other characters usually take him for a ride (which is more or less how you see character development from them.)

My favorite character is easily Anna. She’s more or less the token samurai character and, in my opinion, one of the best characters to have in battle. That’s not why she’s my favorite, though. Anna has the tendency of jumping to conclusions and taking it a bit too far. She also doesn’t let anyone stand in her way when she’s grossly misunderstood a situation. This, of course, leads to much lolz. It doesn’t hurt that her character design is so cute.

I’d say that all of the characters are amusing in some way. Either in their individual scenarios or their introductions. I won’t elaborate since I hate spoiling the fun, but I love Muppy’s introduction (specifically, how dumb everyone acts during it.)

Music

I must admit, this game has quite a few catchy tunes in it. Usually certain musical themes become annoying in RPGs after the 30th or so hour of hearing them. Fortunately, only one song became really annoying, the first battle theme. Thankfully, they eventually ditch that one with a much better sounding one.

Most of the character themes are ok, as well. The area bgm is what takes the cake, though. I think most of them are beautifully composed. Especially the one they use for the Resource Center ~Depths~, Mansion of Slumbering Wisdom. I also like the bgm for when something silly is going on: Legend of the Fool. I’d recommend that people look this soundtrack up. It’s pretty good.

Etc.

I really think Gust messed up the alchemy for this title. They took something they mostly got right in Atelier Iris and broke it. First, they made it so that you actually have to got to two different workshops in order to synthesize things, one for equipment and another for everything else. Of course, items in one location may depend on items from the other, so you may have to walk back in forth to synthesize a single item. Trust me, it gets pretty annoying at times.

They also took away the feature of synthesizing ingredients for a complex item. For example, if you’re making A which comprises of B and C, but you don’t have B, you will have to cancel the ingredient selection for A and begin making B and go back to synthesizing A. Furthermore, the game will tell you that you don’t have enough ingredients to synthesize A (even if you have enough ingredients to synthesize A’s ingredients.) At least in Atelier Mana, you would be led to a screen to synthesize the ingredients whilst synthesizing A. It would also tell you it was possible to synthesize A…

Another complain I have with the game is how slow the combat it compared to other RPGs. It takes forever to kill things which makes battles last for a bit long. The only other RPG I can think of with battles this long (disregarding the last battles in P3 and P3: Fes) is Ar Tonelico. It’s a good thing enemies appear on the map so you can usually avoid them. They should really consider fixing it for their next game (which, I guess, just came out in Japan.)

One thing that Gust did right was the idea of the Grow Book. There are no levels in this game. The stats of your characters depend on the entries you spend your AP on inside the Grow Book. The entries of the Grow Book that you can actually spend your valuable AP on depend directly on which items you have synthesized. I thought that was pretty neat and that totally made me obsessive about synthesizing stuff.

Summary

All in all, despite all of my complaining, I wouldn’t call Mana Khemia a bad game. I wouldn’t really call it a great one either, though. I think it’s simply average. It’s an average RPG. Not much else to say. I’ll probably end up getting the sequel if it ends up being localized. Now I just need to figure out what my next RPG will be…