LogFAQs > #951443008

5.) Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis (PS2, 2007)



I love this game to bits - when everyone else was ranting and raving about the persona series, I personally got completely drawn into this entirely different game about school life with social link style bonding events with your teammates and moody backstories for most of the characters. I did not know at the time that this game was a successor to Atelier Iris and the Alchemy series. In fact when I had first seen it I mainly was interested because I thought with the word "mana" it might be related to the mana series.

It is still a lot more light than persona, which is probably the reason I liked it so much. You play this game as Vayne, a young boy who doesn't remember too terribly much about his past, just that he is a budding alchemist who has a talking cat as a familiar. He is approached by the principal of Al-Revis academy and told to enroll in the school and, having no reason not, he does. While there he is sorted into a class with some memorable characters - Nikki who is a boy-crazed catwoman who wants to be in a rock band, and Jessica, a sickly girl who is most consumed with her alchemy studies (in a normal alchemy game she would have been the protagonist). As you go along you recruit a ghost woman, a man who fancies himself a hero of justice, a young very-intense sword woman, a guy who may as well be the rival from any card game anime and of course a space alien who somehow ends up involved with your class. You can build up your relationship with each and as you do you find out more about each of them - Catpeople have pretty short lifespans so Nikki's boy-crazy ways are biologically driven and make her quite unhappy and she still wants to be a star so she tries dragging you into that, Annas illness has rendered her physically weak and she seeks a cure, Vayne and Anna wrap you up in their psychosis and of course the ghost wants to unravel what happened to her.

The thing I appreciate most is how not every relationship ends up romantic - and in fact is even lampshaded somewhat in Anna's ending, where Vayne attempts to romance her and she's too much concerned with her sword studies to even really want Vayne around as anything but a friend and training partner. You end up forming a super hero duo with Vayne and i'm stll not sure what to make of the alien ending. Of course if you do just want traditional romance, well you have Nikki and Jessica. The cast is just so vibrant and zany and is probably my favorite part of the game


Probably my favorite mechanic in the game is the grow-book. It's similar to the sphere grid system in some ways. You go into the book and spend points to learn new recipes and as you make the items involved, you grow the characters stats. This gives you a good reason to make the most of your time in the laboratory so you can develop as much as possible. There are other reasons to do this as well, as fine-tuning your equipment and your expendable weapons is a major source of making your own life easier in this game. The intense customization is matched and surpassed by later alchemy games but I enjoy the way the whole puzzle fits together here the most.

The battle system is in the same general style as FFX with a couple exceptions. Your support character can swap in when you die automatically and each character has some pretty intense areas of specialization. The card guy can manipulate the turn order cards directly, the sword girl is SO FAST she can just give herself extra turns, The ghost girl doesn't stay dead, she just self-revives after a turn or two. And the special abilities are all generally visually pleasing such as this:


And then there is the music which is the guitar heavy gust, not the weird instrument heavy gust and gave me the song I pushed for years in VGMC, Nefertiti:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guiRH2FsSk

The game has a sequel, which I still enjoy and would have ranked somewhere in the 40s but it goes just a little TOO hard at the zany, not achieving the perfect balance of this entry.

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Board 8's Voice of Reason
https://imgur.com/AWY4xHy