As spring blooms all around us, imbuing life back into the frozen earth, it’s the perfect time to boot up a video game that matches the season’s energy.
Anyone looking to try a game that embodies spring would do well to check out Visions of Mana, a 2024 JRPG that celebrates life through its gameplay, its story, and even its history.
Visions of Mana: A Springtime Celebration
The most immediate way Visions of Mana showcases its liveliness is through its graphics. Visions of Mana is, in two words, visually stunning.
The worlds and characters alike are vibrant and colorful even as they run the thematic spectrum. Characters and locations all correlate to one of eight elements, and even the supposedly “gloomier” elements like Darkness are expressed with appropriately dark but still highly saturated colors and whimsical traits like mystical libraries and twisting, dramatic architecture. Everyone and every place in Visions of Mana is distinct in motif while maintaining a cohesive aesthetic.
When it comes to gameplay, Visions of Mana is a light and refreshing action RPG that expands in complexity as you customize its characters. While each of the five playable characters has their own proficiencies, such as the more magically-focused Palamena and the healer and supporter Julei, they can be further tailored to your liking. Like finding a mushroom cluster on the underside of a log, the depth of customization in Visions of Mana is a lovely surprise.
Throughout the game, you will find vessels for each of the eight elements. These vessels bestow classes upon the party members, which manifest differently on each character. As just part of one example, the first elemental vessel you’ll have access to, the Sylphid Boomerang, yields classes such as Rune Knight to Val, which grants buffs as you imbue elements into your party members’ weapons; the all-around buffer and debuffer Dancer class to Careena; and the Nomad class to Morley, with its focus on passively buffing the entire party’s critical hits.
No two characters can share an elemental vessel simultaneously, but that isn’t a problem when diversifying the group is a satisfying activity all its own — not to mention each class has a unique costume, all of which are gorgeous in their own rights. No one would begrudge you for selecting classes based on how they look and building your party around them.
Besides their costumes and stat parameters, each class has an elemental plot: a linear set of skills each character can learn using elemental points. Each class’s plot contains both passive and castable skills. The passive skills are only active when the character is in the skill’s associated class, but the castable skills can be used by the character in any class. It’s worth learning the skills you would like a character to use, then picking their class based on what passive skills and baseline stats you want them to have.
As if that all wasn’t enough, there are Ability Seeds that can be equipped to each character to give them access to additional passive skills, castable skills, and even stat buffs to work in tandem with all the other customization features.
Your party in Visions of Mana is like your own personal garden that you can tend to however you please, with the added benefit of turning over a new leaf being relatively simple. While rare Goddess Scales are needed to reset a character’s elemental plots, once you unlock a class or obtain an Ability Seed, you can swap them all between characters freely, perfectly embodying the reinvention that comes with spring, as new life emerges from the prior cold seasons.
Even the world around the cast brims with new life each time you unlock a new elemental vessel and its associated classes. While the story keeps progression linear for a good portion of the game, Visions of Mana still attempts to follow the popular cycle of “open-world” JRPGs in its own way. There are an incredible number of dungeons and settlements, all of which are enormous and bursting with all sorts of goodies to gather and scratch the never-ending itch of the explorer-collector and enhance your overall game experience.
Elementites are crystals that are dormant across the world until you obtain their associated elemental vessel. Once they light up, you’re free to interact with them to extract the aforementioned elemental points to use in elemental plots. Similarly, power spots can be activated with different elemental vessels, like riding the Salamando Candle like a rocket or slowing down time and raging rapids with the Luna Globe, offering access to new areas and rewards. Lesser Aeries are timed elemental battle challenges with special Ability Seeds as rewards, and completing enough of them unlocks a Greater Aerie with a post-game-level challenge. Treasure chests can be just off the beaten path, or hiding behind overleveled monsters, requiring you to either find a sneaky way around or come back at a later time. It’s almost overwhelming how much there is to find across Visions of Mana, but it’s hard to talk yourself out of exploring when you get to admire the gorgeous views and power up your characters with skills and equipment along the way.
Side quests also pop up like fresh spring flowers as you progress through the game. It’s already enticing enough to return to prior locations as you gain access to new elemental vessels, but it really feels like new side quests are made available after every major story beat. Although most of Visions of Mana’s side quests aren’t especially interesting from a narrative perspective, their rewards are typically worth the effort they require to complete, adding yet another layer to the game’s lush setting.
Where Visions of Mana’s story shines is instead in its charming cast and primary overarching narrative. In the world of Visions of Mana, an alm for each of the eight elements are chosen every four years to sacrifice their souls to the Mana Tree in order to keep the flow of mana going.
Among the concepts the story explores are what makes life precious and following tradition versus challenging the status quo. These may not be entirely novel for JRPGs, but Visions of Mana’s cast is so lovable that you can’t help but want to see their own solutions to these problems. There also isn’t anything innately wrong about fresh spins on classic tropes: while spring always brings with it new life, the season itself is also familiar, as we expect it after each winter.
And just as Visions of Mana is a game that encapsulates spring, the game emerged from its own winter of sorts, making its bloom all the more inspiring.
The Harsh Winter Leading up to Visions of Mana’s Release
Visions of Mana isn’t just a perfect springtime game: it also heralded a new spring for the Mana series when it was released in August of 2024. The Mana series started with beloved 90s classics like Secret of Mana, which were followed by poorly received new entries in the 2000s, including Dawn of Mana. Afterwards, the series received various remakes and remasters to mixed reception, but saw nothing entirely new for almost 20 years. The series wasn’t quite as dormant as a harsh winter, but it had definitely slowed to an autumnal crawl. But in 2024, the chill began to lift as the long, cold season gave way to Visions of Mana.
The project started in 2020 when Mana series producer Masaru Oyamada of Square Enix reached out to Ouka Studios to develop the game. Ouka Studios was a Japanese subdivision of the Chinese tech company NetEase. The game would be co-directed by Ryosuke Yoshida and Kenji Ozawa. Ouka Studios staff was also comprised of some veterans from established powerhouse developers including Capcom and Bandai Namco. Fans were excited for this return to the Mana series with an entirely new title, with what seemed to be a strong development team.
But on August 29, not even 24 hours after Visions of Mana released worldwide, Bloomberg technology reporter Takashi Mochizuki wrote, “NetEase has cut all but a handful of jobs at its Ouka studio in Tokyo” and “The few that remain will oversee the rollout of its final games, before the studio winds down.” Co-directors Yoshida and Ozawa were seemingly two of those who remained, as they both announced a few months later in October that they quit Ouka Studios of their own accord.
On Twitter, Mochizuki added that “NetEase [had] been cutting staff at Ouka for a while,” from Spring 2024 at the very least. This could explain the minor technical and graphical hiccups throughout Visions of Mana, such as party members on the overworld running around with their weapons unsheathed and elongated, which can be especially awkward when it’s Palamena brandishing an entirely straightened whip.
According to Mochizuki, the reasoning behind Ouka Studios’s closure was due to Chinese companies like NetEase wanting to back out of the Japanese market and focus instead on local titles after the breakout success of 2024’s Black Myth: Wukong. Regardless of the reason, it’s always a tragic day when jobs are needlessly lost, and it goes to show that job cuts in game development aren’t always tied to video game success or failure, as Ouka Studios staff had been plucked off like flower petals since long before the game was even released. For a game that so lovingly celebrates life in both gameplay and story, it’s regrettable how much loss is behind its development.
Visions of Spring and Beyond
In the spirit of spring, we would like to hold onto some hope: Yoshida confirmed that he was hired by Square Enix after his departure from Ouka Studios. Square Enix has become notorious among fans for having unrealistic sales expectations for their titles, but the fact that Square Enix hired Yoshida may indicate interest in his work and potentially keeping the Mana series alive to see another spring, even if it isn’t treated like a mega-blockbuster — which Visions of Mana shows isn’t necessary for the game to be successful.
Ozawa wasn’t hired by Square Enix, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the game development picture. At the start of March, he dropped the announcement for his new studio, Studio Sasanqua, named after the Japanese Camellia flower that blooms in the fall and into winter, in the face of chilling adversity. In an interview with Automaton, Ozawa confirms that he was motivated to establish the studio due to “his misgivings about the recent state of the game industry” that were “born from witnessing multiple incidences of management not taking responsibility for company projects.” Ozawa puts emphasis on how “‘management needs to protect creators,’ which includes motivating development and providing a psychological sense of security.” In the interview, Ozawa insists that he will “assume responsibility if a project fails due to poor management[,]” which comes as a breath of fresh springtime air.
Whatever the spring, summer, and beyond holds for Yoshida, Ozawa, and the Mana series, fans new and old alike can celebrate the spring with Visions of Mana. Not many games embody springtime in both their development and execution, but that’s just another way Visions of Mana is so special.
Published: Mar 19, 2025 12:58 PM UTC