Visions of Mana Review (PS5) | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

There's always a degree of trepidation when a classic franchise returns with a brand new release. Down the years, we've seen countless properties attempt to reinvent themselves, either in a bid to reclaim a faded legacy, or to establish a fresh audience. Visions of Mana, however, feels like it's gunning for neither of these goals. While this long-awaited revival does introduce a slew of more modern features and elements of design, it sticks quite rigidly to the blueprint of past Mana titles, and traditional Japanese RPGs in general.

Visions is essentially a retread of old ideas, just brought forward into a vast 3D world. It's built to be nostalgic — a colourful reminder of what made the original Mana games so magical. It tries to recapture the sense of adventure that seemed so powerful back in the 90s — when it was just a collection of pretty sprites on a pixelated screen. And to a surprisingly large extent, Visions succeeds. It is nostalgic and it does conjure those same feelings that classic RPGs have now thrived upon for decades.

But the pursuit of nostalgia can be a double-edged sword. In running so parallel to its predecessors, Visions occasionally comes across as dated, stiff, and — most damningly — boring. In particular, its storytelling is both predictable and bloated. The plot buckles under a painfully bland cast of main characters, all of whom have a terrible habit of repeating their cookie-cutter motivations at every opportunity.

It's a misstep that drags the game's pacing down far too often. In classic RPGs, dialogue is typically kept to a minimum — the visual-novelisation of the genre hadn't yet taken hold, and characters were given just a few lines to get their point across, peppering the broader journey with flickers of additional drama or humour. Your party members in Visions are cut from the same cloth — they're supposed to be charmingly simplistic — but they're handed one hundred times the amount of dialogue.

Visions adopts an episodic approach to