Visions of Mana

The first new Mana in eighteen years, and a franchise finally moving on from Trials

Visions of Mana is the first entirely new mainline entry the Mana series has had since Dawn of Mana and the original Trials of Mana closed out the SNES-and-early-2000s era of the franchise. Square Enix spent the years leading up to it re-releasing and remastering the back catalogue — the excellent 2020 Trials of Mana remake most prominently — so this was always going to be judged as much against that recent remake as against the series' classic reputation. The verdict from just over 2,100 Steam reviews is "Mostly Positive" at 77%, a real step down from the remake's own reception, and reading through the detailed negative reviews makes clear it isn't one single flaw driving that gap — it's a series of smaller simplifications that, added together, leave the game feeling thinner than what came before it.

Combat that earns its praise, wrapped around a world that doesn't

The single most consistent point of agreement across both positive and critical reviews is that the combat works. Val, the player's controlled protagonist, leads a three-character party built around swapping "vessels" — elemental classes tied to spirits the party gathers across the story — mid-fight, and multiple longtime fans specifically call it an improvement over the Trials of Mana remake's own combat system. It's fast, it's readable, and the vessel-swap mechanic gives fights a rhythm that holds up across the reviews that otherwise have plenty to complain about elsewhere.

The world those fights happen in is where the complaints concentrate. Previous Mana games built their appeal partly on exploration that rewarded curiosity — finding a treasure chest tucked somewhere the map didn't already tell you about, or discovering a shortcut that changed how you thought about a zone. Visions of Mana's map marks every chest and point of interest from the start, which more than one detailed review calls out specifically as removing that sense of discovery rather than assisting it. A second, related complaint concerns class progression itself: the series has traditionally used a class-advancement system where characters commit to and grow into a class over time, and Visions of Mana replaces that with vessels the player can freely swap at will. It's a legitimate design choice with its own logic — more flexibility, less commitment friction — but reviewers who grew up with the older systems consistently describe it as a loss of depth rather than a modernisation, and it's hard to read that many independent, detailed accounts saying the same thing as pure nostalgia.

A story several longtime fans call the series' weakest, and the signs of why

Where Visions of Mana loses the most ground with its own core audience is the story. Multiple long, detailed reviews — several with 60-plus hours logged, ruling out early bounce-off as the explanation — independently call it the weakest narrative the series has produced, with specific frustration directed at underdeveloped characters and a back half that feels compressed relative to the game's opening hours. That complaint has a concrete, checkable example behind it rather than just vibes: at least one late-game dungeon is built around a switch that raises the area's water level exactly once, is never used again, and is never referenced by anything else in the dungeon — precisely the kind of loose thread that shows up when content gets cut rather than redesigned. Documented technical issues compound the impression of a rushed finish: crashes, enemies clipping through the floor, and a specific, reproducible bug where players emerge from battle able to dash and jump but not walk, fixable only by reloading the game.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Days after the game launched, reports confirmed that NetEase — the Chinese conglomerate that owns Ouka Studios, the Tokyo developer built specifically to produce games like this one, staffed with veterans hired from Capcom and Bandai Namco — had cut nearly the entire Ouka team, with the studio's closure widely expected to follow as part of a broader NetEase pullback from Japanese game development investment. Square Enix published the game and Ouka built it; the layoffs are NetEase's decision, not Square Enix's, and there's no confirmed reporting that says the game's development was cut short by the same turmoil that led to the studio's closure days later. But the timing is close enough, and the game's own back half thin enough, that it's easy to see why several players have connected the two — and worth reporting plainly rather than pretending the coincidence doesn't exist.

What still lands

It would be a disservice to all of the above to undersell what the game gets right. Art direction and environment design draw close to unanimous praise, including from reviewers who are otherwise sharply critical of the story and progression systems — it's a genuinely beautiful game to walk through, zone to zone. The soundtrack gets the same treatment: named as a highlight in nearly every detailed review this piece drew from, whatever else that review had to say. And Square Enix built in an unusually thorough accessibility suite for the genre — camera comfort options, adjustable difficulty, a keyboard-only control scheme — the kind of feature set more RPGs this size should ship with as standard rather than exception.

Verdict

Visions of Mana plays like a game whose combat team and art team delivered exactly what a new mainline Mana entry needed, while everything built around that core — exploration, class depth, and especially the story's back half — came in noticeably thinner than the series' own recent remake led fans to expect. The real, separately documented collapse of its developer days after launch doesn't excuse the specific, checkable signs of cut content reviewers point to, but it does explain why so many of them are willing to be generous about it rather than simply calling the game bad. Existing fans with tempered expectations, especially anyone who enjoyed the Trials of Mana remake's combat and wants more of it, will likely have a good time. Anyone hoping for the series' traditional depth of exploration and class-building, or a story that closes as strongly as it opens, should read the detailed negative reviews before buying at full price.