A loading screen every once and awhile would be fine, obviously the game needs to load every so often. Many of these load screens are twenty or more seconds long. Just to give you an idea, to go from the Faculty Lounge to the outskirts (where you can fight and hunt) you will have to endure four different load screens.Īnd we're not talking about short load screens, either. You now walk to the door of the faculty lounge. I'm pretty sure that if you add up my time playing this game, I spent much more time watching load screens than I did actually playing the game (or reading the poorly written dialog).
If ever there was a poster child for how to not use load screens, Mana Khemia would be it. Before long I found that the very thing I was supposed to be excited about - the game's crafting system - was making me hate the entire experience.īut as repetitious as the core gameplay is, it's nothing compared to the game stopping load times. The game's turn-based combat is about as generic as they come, and any hint at originality is stamped down almost immediately when you realize that it will involve a lot of pointless work for you. You're constantly asked to go back and forth from school gathering items, which never feels especially important or epic. Worse yet, it doesn't take long before these repetitive quests start to feel more like busywork. For one thing, the game requires you to go out on these ill-conceived missions that aren't always real clear or detailed. For whatever reason, I felt like the game was fighting me every step of the way. As I played through the early moments of this game I really felt like there were a lot of good ideas here and I couldn't wait to explore them further.īut the game didn't want me to do that. The whole game revolves around finding, winning and buying different ingredients and then combining them to create bigger and better weapons. Where the game sets itself apart is when you are allowed to mix and match complex ingredients to create all sorts of spells and items. With very few exceptions, if you've played a classic Final Fantasy game, then you will feel right at home with Mana Khemia. Was this a puzzle game? Would it be a role-playing strategy game? What would it be? Unfortunately I quickly discovered that this was, like most Japanese adventure games that make it to these shores, a traditional turn-based role-playing game.
Having not played the original game (2008's Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis), I wasn't sure what I was getting myself in for. Thanks to the game's ambiguous box art and lengthy introduction, it took me the better part of an hour to even figure out what kind of game this was.
After meeting with his new friends and the quirky faculty, our hero is off to collect items, combine recipes and, most importantly of all, settle in to his brand new surroundings. Mana Khemia starts out strong enough it involves a Harry Potter-style plot where you, an incredibly old sounding teenager, transfer to a new school that will hopefully teach you to harness your inner magical abilities.
Outside of a few interesting ideas, Mana Khemia proves to be nothing more than just another mediocre PSP role-playing game. This is a shoddily thrown together port of a so-so adventure game with annoying characters, ugly graphics and a serious amount of technical problems. Unfortunately, Mana Khemia: Student Alliance is definitely not worth getting excited about.
Hot on the heels of Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? (one of the most exciting 2D platformers in years), NIS America is back with their next exciting portable adventure game.