Square Enix has posted a new interview with Visions of Mana director Ryosuke Yoshida, discussing the title’s combat system.
Throughout the interview, Yoshida emphasizes the difficulty the team had implementing the right degree of combat balancing, ensuring that battles were neither too short nor lengthy.
Measures were taken so skilled action players could achieve victory at lower levels while those not versed in action games could progress by paying close attention to stats and equipment.
Classes are tied to the elemental vessels in this entry because, during development, these facets felt disconnected from each other. Eventually, this critique led to a clearer combat focus, with it being the elemental vessels. Further, the team always intended to utilize a class system.
Interestingly, Yoshida reveals that the beastmaster class was cut due to balancing issues. This mechanic was shifted to summoning magic.
Yoshida’s personal favorite avenue of classes is the Light ones due to their synergies with other elemental vessels providing potent effects.
Yoshida shared the following comments regarding the weapon types and playstyles for each party member:
Val is the first character in the party, so we gave him a small sword to start with, as it’s the weapon that’s easiest to get to grips with. After that we added great swords (which are more cumbersome, but also more powerful) and lances (which are focused on offense) as weapons that are fairly distinct from small swords.
Careena’s combat style centers around her teaming up with her partner Ramcoh. We thought about what kind of weapons would fit best with the two of them dancing around each other and pulling off lots of tricky maneuvers, and it felt like spears, gloves and fans worked best for that.
As a member of the beastfolk tribe, Morley has a very strong aesthetic, and we wanted him to be a nimbler character. We gave him katanas, knives, and canes, as these seemed like things that would be suited to actions that are focused on speed.
Being a queen, Palamena has a regal air about her, so we chose to give her flails, boots, and sickles. But she doesn’t wear just plain old boots – Palamena’s boots are endowed with magical properties, so they can change shape and perform mysterious feats. Palamena’s backstory is that she is a specialist in magic, so we were very conscious of making sure we conveyed that, even when she’s performing regular actions.
Finally, being a sproutling, Julei is a bit of a special character, so our main goal was to give him weapons that played with motifs of flowers and grass, but also left the player thinking, “What the heck is this?” In-game, Julei’s weapons have names like “wand,” “hammer,” and “umbrella,” but in reality, the starting point for choosing his weapons was just that we wanted him to fight using flowers, mushrooms, seeds, and the like.
You can view the full interview for additional comments.
Check out our review and the official countdown illustrations.
Visions of Mana is the first new installment of the mainline Mana series on consoles in over 15 years. It is also the franchise’s first launch on Xbox and will be released on PC and PlayStation 5. The franchise began as Final Fantasy Adventure and has since grown to include classic titles such as Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana. In recent years, remakes and compilations of Mana titles have been released, potentially testing fan interest in the series for the developers.
This revival boasts aerial combat, and the series familiar Elementals will return to assist the player and allow for flexible fighting styles. The game’s soundtrack was also mentioned to feature an adaptive music system that seamlessly transitions the game in and out of combat while still keeping the Mana flair and having a tracklist of 100 songs. A new creature is the Pikul, a companion that assists with traversal.
