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Visions of Mana, an upcoming action-RPG from Square Enix releases August 29 on PS5 and PS4. It features a thrilling action combat system, where you take on hordes of monsters with weapons, spells and a host of awesome abilities. It’s fast-paced and tests both your reflexes and strategy.
At the heart of the experience are the Elemental Vessels. These tools, imbued with elemental power, allow you to perform incredible actions in combat – from freezing time to dishing out damage with style. What’s more, equipping them to one of the five playable characters will change the character’s class, opening up all new options in the heat of battle. See some of them in action here.
In that presentation, we revealed three of these Elemental Vessels, representing Earth, Light and Darkness. For this accompanying blog, we asked Visions of Mana’s producer Masaru Oyamada and director Ryosuke Yoshida to reveal a little more about each – and the combat system as a whole!
Capturing the (elemental) spirit of the Mana series
While Visions of Mana is intended to be a fresh start for the series, with no prior experience needed, the team still wanted to capture the series’ very distinct identity through the combat. But what defines the combat of a Mana game?
Masaru Oyamada (producer)
From the start of the series, the Mana games have featured multiple weapons and magic spells for the player to wield – as well as enjoyable RPG character growth systems. So, it was important that people feel those elements strongly in Visions of Mana too!
Ryosuke Yoshida (director)
One of the most important elements of Mana games is that feeling that you’re interacting with the elementals (spirits that control elements like wind, fire or darkness).
That’s at the core of the design of Visions of Mana and something that was really important to me. It’s such a vital part of that distinctive Mana series identity, and if the battles didn’t capture it, there would be no point to the game at all!
In Visions of Mana, we focus the flow of battle around the use of the Elemental Vessels – potent weapons infused with elemental magic. These artifacts use the Elemental’s powers to manifest mysterious primal forces, such as trapping the foe in water bubbles or pinning them in the air with wind blasts.
The effects they create can also be changed in various ways through the player’s actions, which creates a fun dynamic where it feels like you are interacting with the Elementals as you fight.
Getting to the core of combat
The combat in Visions of Mana is very fast and fluid. You’ll have consider lots of different aspects, from positioning to the abilities you unleash, but you’ll soon be able to take down foes in spectacular style.
There’s a lot of amazing powers to use in combat, especially when you start using Elemental Vessels, but before they could get into that, the developers had to make sure the basics of battle were rock solid.
Ryosuke Yoshida
When we were thinking about how to design the battle system, we didn’t just look at the combat in isolation. Instead we tried to make it something that tied closely into the overall concept that was decided for the game.
Central mechanics like switching between three party members in battle, using ring menu and shortcut bindings are inspired by elements from past Mana games. However, I had a strong desire to put more weight on switching between different characters during combat.
One way we did this, for example, was through the Elemental Vessels and the gameplay options they offer. You have a party of three characters and can equip each one with a different Elemental Vessel that manifests different effects. It’s possible to follow up after you use one of these effects by switching and using a different elemental power to create an even more potent compound ability.
In this way we create motivation and benefits for the player to switch between different characters in battle.
That said, we took care not to make it so important that switching became compulsory. To that end, we avoided creating enemies that can’t be defeated unless you jump between characters.
Elemental Vessels
As mentioned, the Elemental Vessels are central to both combat and traversal in the game. These artifacts, bestowed on the player by the eight elementals over the course of the game, offer you new ways to get around the world, and special powers to use during battles.
This was a core focus for the game and sits at the heart of the experience. Naturally, that meant it was something the team were very careful to make as satisfying and exciting to use as possible.
Ryosuke Yoshida
I felt it was very important to have a consistent feel across the whole game, with a design that tied both the battles and the exploration to the core concept of interacting with the elementals as sentient beings.
The tools that let us realise this concept practically are the Elemental Vessels.
Masaru Oyamada
The Mana series has always featured eight distinct elementals with each embodying one of the core forces that shape the world. Naturally then, there would be eight vessels that house each of their powers. We came up with lots of interesting ideas for different objects to use, but ultimately aimed to create designs that would best capture the interesting aspects of each elemental.
Vessel of Earth: Gnome Shovel
In the video, we show three Elemental Vessels: Earth, Light and Darkness. Producer Oyamada and director Yoshida offered some insight into the creation of these vessels – and the associated abilities.
Oyamada
The concept for the Vessel of Earth was ‘defense’. When used, it surrounds the player in a solid, rocky shield that protects against attacks.
Yoshida
It took a little trial and error to get right though! Originally, it created a gigantic wall of earth which would protect the player from attacks. Unfortunately, we found that summoning a huge barrier into the battle area obstructed the player’s vision. Plus, enemies attack from multiple angles anyway, so it didn’t really protect them at all. So, we switched the current idea, where the vessel creates a dome-like shield out of semi-transparent rocks!
Vessel of Light: Lumina Lantern
Oyamada
The concept behind this one was ‘reflection’. Using the Lumina Lantern, the player can link enemies together with rays of light, reflecting the damage from one enemy to another!
Vessel of Darkness: Shade Sight
Oyamada
The idea behind this vessel was ‘gravitation’. When the elemental is unleashed, it creates a black hole, which draws in enemies.
Yoshida
Our battle director innocently brought up that he was curious about what would happen if there was a lake or river close by and suggested the water should be sucked up along with the enemies. However, there aren’t many battle areas which are next to lakes in the first place, and if we were going to do this, it would have created a heap of problems, such as when would the water come back!
So, understandably, we soon abandoned that particular idea (laughs).
Equipping an Elemental Vessel to a character changes their class, giving them new abilities, weapons, and even costumes. Every vessel can be equipped to every character, which makes for a lot of variety regarding how you customize your party.
Yoshida
We came up with the specifications for the different weapons and classes alongside those of the Elemental Vessels.
We did so because we knew from the start that future balancing would be needed to ensure that none of weapons and actions paired with the vessels would break the system.
This meant that by the time we reached the prototyping stage, all the vessel’s basic effects were already decided and we could focus on the final balancing between the classes. Not only that, but we could also make up for any areas where a class was less distinct by adding unique abilities and altering their parameters.
Oyamada
Once we decided that there would be eight different elements, we designed ideas for each character’s classes based on combinations of the different Elemental Vessel effects and weapon types.
Of course, these still went through changes over development. For example, we originally went with more of a succubus-style appearance for Careena’s darkness-based class, but our character designer Haccan proposed a great idea which swayed us in a different direction. I think this turned out great and captures her cheery personality too!
Visions of Mana releases August 29 on PS5 and PS4. The game is available to pre-order now at the PlayStation Store.