Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy Review - IGN (2024)

Creating anything is a good thing, as it will often unlock an entry in each of your party members' Grow Books, a sort of encyclopedia of semi-related weapons, armor, restoratives and random materials. By spending Action Points earned in battles, you can upgrade specific abilities that are locked inside every item -- things like boosting attack power, defense, or even learning entirely new skills in battle. It's a heady combination of constantly-discovered new items, their ingredient requirements and stocking the necessary AP to keep upgrading your characters, and it creates a near-constant treadmill of gathering, creation and upgrades that gives you an appreciable boost to each of your party members' skills.

Actually sussing out the particulars of the battle system and its bevy of meters and gauges actually takes quite a while -- more than a dozen hours, in fact -- but that's because things are spoon fed, allowing you to learn a new wrinkle in an otherwise simple system before tackling the next. What starts out as a simple lesson in turn order quickly begins to incorporate more strategy. A Unity Gauge fills as you dole out hits and when it completely fills, all your party's attacks hit harder, their turns come up more quickly and, if you can master the system of bringing in any extra party members waiting in the wings, you can do a combo chain for extra damage (or defense, as they can sub in to take a hit, dealing damage or even nullifying attacks later in the game) and unleash an epic finishing move on enemies.

The whole system for swapping out party members is, again, one of multiple layers. While waiting for their portrait to fill so they can return to or enter the fray, they'll slowly regain SP (the game's version of MP) -- though not health. Chaining big hits together can dizzy an opponent, leaving them open to a guaranteed critical hit, but also causing them to lose a turn.

Careful manipulation of the turn order, then, via dizzying, attacks that knock them back in the queue and concentrating attacks on upcoming enemies, can result in very quick, one-sided battles -- which is good, as you'll get a bonus for finishing without taking a hit. The character that deals the final blow gets a little bonus too, and at seemingly random times, your party members will gain HP and SP max increases, so fighting is quite important beyond just grinding for AP to upgrade the party.

That party will come in one of two flavors depending on how you choose to start the game, either as man of action Raze or alchemist in training Ulrika. Given that it's a game about making stuff, I opted for Ulrika. Don't make the same mistake. Throughout the considerable story, I was subjected to a cast of the most apathetic, borderline offensive and consistently negative characters I've seen in a JRPG in quite a while. They constantly berate each other, whine about how none of them want to do anything and deride each other. The only character I actually found entertaining, Goto, is a sentient ball that runs around in a cuddly little cat-like suit and regularly entrances girls with his eyes. He actually has some of the best lines in the game.

I'll get to the choices in voice work and personalities in a bit, but suffice it to say Raze is probably a better choice for a first run through the game; since you can get fairly different sides of the story (Raze's past plays a role in his; the origins of Mana in Ulrika's), it's worth going through twice if you dig it the first time around, but Ulrika's cast will make that an uphill struggle.

The act of gathering things from the ground becomes a slot machine-style mini-game where you tap X to stop one tumbler at a time, or hit Circle to stop all at the same time, with bonus rare items for matching up multiples or combos of the same ingredient. Fishing involves a circular contracting gauge with a timed button press to decrease a catch's HP. A Time limit lets you capture multiple fish, but you'll have to be quick as a line that slips completely by forces you to fight your catch. Mining is perhaps the most challenging, requiring a quick look at a button press sequence which then disappears and has to be repeated blind to harvest the max amount of ore and raw materials.

Regardless of how you actually gather the myriad bits and pieces that make up a synth recipe, you'll eventually have to head back to your workshop to start throwing 'em all into a pot. Here, again, the game reveals multiple layers of depth. You can pick and choose multiple ingredients for a recipe most of the time (your character will even get flashes of inspiration that allow for the swapping out of rare items to create more powerful variants of the original recipe), but for the most part the ingredients are kept pretty straightforward, and often resources are tight anyway, so there's not a whole lot of mixing and matching. With the necessary ingredients present, you simply select them and then an alchemy partner from your party.

Each member has their own particular elemental affinity or passive skills and once per recipe, they can be tapped to influence the materials or mechanics of making something. See, once you've picked your parts and partner, a colored wheel begins spinning. Stop it on an ingredient's element and you'll tack on its Ether Point value. This is important, because every item you make has an associated Ether Level, and by working the individual ingredients' ether points, you can increase or decrease the level, which yields different properties for that final item. Max out an item, for instance, and it'll usually be imbued with specific beneficial properties and unlocks a final third slot on the Grow Board to give your party member an extra bit o' oomph.

Dropping the level all the way to zero by using inferior ingredients and selecting the opposite element on the wheel can also yield unique properties. Though you'll doubtlessly be making the same things over and over again (a process which can be shortened by just mass producing items once you've done it once the long way provided you have all the ingredients), the materials and your skill in making them can yield very different results. The better the items, the better the final product, which means even after you've made something, there's always reason to go back and try to make it better to help pad the Grow Book with more unlockables and, in some cases, unlock better titles for your party members which gives them unique ability boosts in combat.

Though Mana Khemia 2 is a sequel, the general flow of things is largely unchanged. The story goes like this: over the years, the teaching talent at Al-Revis Academy started to drop and eventually encrollment in the magic floating school was so low that there wasn't enough Mana to keep it aloft. It eventually plummeted to the ground, re-opened, and thanks to a new Chairwoman with striking business acumen, started accepting new students. The curriculum was shortened to just one year and alchemy, formerly the school's only discipline, is in danger of being dropped at the end of the year.

Also up for grabs in Free Time is the ability to sell your extra items in the Student Store, which can cause more rare things to show up in the other shops, cutting down on the amount of grinding needed to get better materials, though it's not guaranteed. You can pick up to 10 items, a person to sell 'em and view a list of customers that will be coming by with various personalities and affinities for items. By tapping the X button at the right time, you can either sell the item for normal price, over-charge (which usually drops the store's reputation meter), give them a price break (good for raising the public perception) and even get a prize. The indicator for how you'll charge the customer fluctuates pretty quickly, so there's a bit of luck and reaction time in place.

The time of day changes from the first game are back, and while they'll still make monsters stronger at night, they can also alter the layout of a particular level. Down by the waterfront, for instance, night brings high tide, which raises the water level and creates bridges out of the floating walkways that weren't there during the day. Granted, it means a bit more grinding and time burn when you're in locations like this, but it's a nice touch and you can always camp at a save point to instantly jump to a particular time of day. It should also be mentioned that while there's a lot of back and forth and re-treading familiar areas, most of the major location changes are all menu-based, which speeds things up a little.

If there's one area of the game that I was a little disappointed in, though, it's the audio. The music, which was phenomenal in the Ar Tonelico series, just doesn't seem to have any hooks this time around. It's cheery and it's plucky and upbeat, but it's not really memorable in the same way as some of Gust's other games.

The choices in localization were also a bit suspect, though I give NIS America props for at least attempting to buck the usual set of cookie cutter voices. The big, burly guy is fascinated by "cute" things, talks with an effete lisp (because he thinks that's how fairies talk, which I'll leave up to you to determine whether that's a bit offensive), the female lead speaks with a southern drawl that actually grew on me by the end of the game and her best friend apparently watched a lot of "Daria" while studying occult incantations. Different, yes, but when coupled with all the negativity and general malaise about everything, Ulrika's side of things comes off as annoying more than unique. Raze's side is a bit more standard, and I honestly didn't have much in the way of gripes -- it's not like you couldn't just flick over to the Japanese language track if you wanted to.

Visually, the game's come about as far as Gust's engine can take it at this point. Transparency on the edges of sprites in the foreground have been cleaned up, it all runs at a smooth enough pace and some of the huge summons during Unity Mode in battles are a joy to watch in a ridiculous, over-the-top way (especially if you do a finisher as the final move with a full Unity Meter, which introduces a unique, utterly insane move for overwhelming amounts of damage). The larger, seemingly more hi-res sprites are fairly well animated, the character portraits sport a bit more detail and better depth of color than in previous games... it's essentially the most visually well-put-together game based on this core engine, if not quite as imaginative as, say, the Ar Tonelico games.