Last time (all two months ago) I talked about Mana Khemia, so naturally this time I’ll talk about Mana Khemia 2. It’s a pretty typical JRPG sequel: Largely identical graphics and gameplay, a few gratuitous recurring characters, very little to do with the original game. This doesn’t bother me much because that story didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway (frankly, by the end I was getting a little sick of it.) This time around the Al-Revis academy from the first game has both metaphorically and quite literally fallen back to earth, and oh fuck it who cares. On to the gameplay:

Stuff that’s better:

  • It’s still turn-based. I wasn’t expecting them to change that, but I’m still glad they didn’t.
  • Item creation has been streamlined a bit. Now if you try to synthesize a item but have run out of one of the ingredients, it’ll automatically take you to that item’s synthesis screen instead of forcing you to do it manually. This was a major problem towards the end of the first game because the endgame equipment required lots of powerful ingredients that, in turn, also required lots of powerful ingredients. You might end up having to synthesize 9 or 10 items just to make one weapon. This was made even worse by having two separate synthesis locations, another thing the sequel has fixed.
  • New “Camp” option makes the day-night cycle much less of a pain in the ass. Now if you find a save point out in the field you can opt to rest until morning, noon, or night. This means you no longer have to stand around waiting for the time of day to change if you want to get a particular fruit from a tree, or if you want to not get slaughtered by considerably more powerful night enemies.

Stuff that is dumb and bad:

  • Goddammit they added fucking minigames. I praised the first game for not having asinine minigames be an important part of item-gathering, so naturally they fixed that for the new gaming. It’s nothing too heinous, but goddammit I do not want to play the fucking slots for my items stop it
  • Nested locations make map navigation a little bit more annoying. This is a minor thing, but you spend a lot of the game here so even minor things can grate after a while. Most of the important locations in the academy are now on submenus rather than the top menu, meaning you have to click twice to reach them rather than once. This bugs me more than I thought it would.

I admit I was reaching a bit on that last one, so there is a pretty significant net gain here. Nice job by Gust of incremental improvement.