The Fool

Phew, that was a long and joyfull journey that now has come to a partway end. But at this point in time I do not wish to keep repeating the same text six times more. So for now I will give it a rest and let´s just talk about and review the game instead.

Mysterious students enroll to Al-Revis

The once glorious alchemy school of Al-Revis is in a dire pinch. Zeppel the principle has driven the school to almost going out of comission. The power of mana has almost dissapeared and few are left in the human world.

Any quick and easy solution to this problem? One of the schools donators thinks so, open the school for the public and make it a more variety of classes. All she asks in return is that she will be the chairwoman. The three year studies are also turned into a one year crash course.

After a couple of years the school is finally earning a profit. But with this the chairwoman thinks of a new turn for the school, after this year the alchemy classes, the most expensive ones are to be discontinued.

Zeppel might be a wimp but this is something he won´t stand for. So in this last year he has to succeed at getting the alchemy classes to stay, so what does he do? He entrusts the future of the school to Flay Gunnar, a hero from the first game to get the alchemy classes to be continued and at the same time take care of the chairwoman…

All Flay asks in return is that he get´s almost free hands and that he is turned into the Vice Principal of the school.

And what is more, this year two special students enroll, one is a boy that is dragged with to the school by his Master to take the fight classes and the other is a girl who received a mana egg from a mysterious person 10 years ago and since it hasn´t hatched yet she wants to become a great alchemist, both to crack the egg and let the mana out and to be able to work as an alchemist after the classes are finished.

Mini-games are fun to play right?

After choosing a main character, either Razeluxe(Raze for short) or Ulrika you start your school life at Al-Revis Academy. Depending on what main character you choose the quests will be a bit different. Raze´s will focus more on fighting and Ulrika will be more alchemy based. Not saying this is the only type of assignments you will get for each characters as both are skills needed to become a great fighter or alchemist.

You get to choose your assignment, some are needed to attend, like the school marathon or saving people that are stuck on a mountain freezing. But for each class you get a short description about the assignment, what it is about and so.

When you have taken this assignment you go to class and after hearing the lecture the assignment begins. The first is to grab ingredients for a simple alchemy based creation: A Heal Jar. Going to the area where the ingredients are you are faced with monsters on screen, when you touch one of these monster one of the four buttons from the controller pop up and if you press the right one you get a bonus start from the enemies and may be able to finish them of. If you are stronger than the area´s enemies most enemies are blue and when you press the correct button they dissapear and leave items for you without having to battle them.

When you want to grab some vegetables from the ground another mini-game starts, a roulete with different things that can be found appears, getting a variation of three or four of the same kind gives you a extra bonus item. If you want to fish then you have to press the button at the right time to damage the fish, each fish has different speed and HP. For mining you have to remember a certain input command and press those buttons before the cauge reaches your position.

When you want to synthesize an item there is a roulete wheel with the different mana areas. Earth, wind, fire, water, darkness. Getting the right element to the right ingredient makes the ether level rise, the wrong will decrease the ether level.

Alchemy rules

Everything revolves around alchemy in Mana Khemia 2. If you didn´t like scavanging the areas for alchemy recepies or finding ingredients then this game might not be for you. The growth book of the first game is here again and this time you don´t have to follow a set course to learn abilities, instead there are cards that you can move freely between and choose exactly what skills you want to learn.

For synthesing weapons, armours, accessories, items and ingredients you get the item booked in your growth book. The items changes depending on the character. To get this growth book to 100% it isn´t as easy as to synthesize everything. You have to get an ether level of 100 to access the third slot of each item.

Without doing that you can get to about 75-80% of the growth book.

Why do you want to get as much procentage as possible? For certain numbers you aquire titles that give you specific bonuses, everything from reducing the SP cost of skills to getting a big or small boost in the Unity cauge. Or a small increasement in stats. I do not know what the 100% title will give you since I haven´t reached that far with any of my characters.

Some people do not like this system. To me it didn´t matter, it was fun to create items and to run trough the areas looking for recipies and ingredients.

Battles are fun fun fun

The battles in Mana Khemia 2 are fun to play. There is a sphere based system that shows you what will happen. Unless on some bosses that like to change the sphere grind into blank spheres so you never know what is going to happen.

Certain abilities create a sphere that is placed on the sphere ring. When this icon comes up it will heal you(healing echo) or do damage to the opponent(Falling Leaves) which can make the battle pretty fun to watch your six time sphere bash on the enemy and utterly destroy them.

Skills consume SP, but this doesn´t matter in the later game when you have more than three characters as you can place up to three characters in support row, where they will automatically restore SP. Making it a nice feature since you can heal and so between the fights, let the character rest in the fight and thus restore the SP, rince and repeat.

The attack/support system from Mana Khemia returns, all characters when they are called in either after an attack or as a defensive option have skill. Raze will slash with his sword at the enemies when he comes in for attack support while on defence he will raise the unity cauge and guard all allies so that they take less damage.

Enemies appears at first without any status, so you have to use either Raze´s Analyze or Chloe´s World of Books skill to get some stats like HP, what they are strong or weak against and such things. This makes the battles easier as you can dash out damage and increase the unity gauge so fast if you attack the enemies weak spot.

All in all it is a great battle system.

Schoollife has never been more fun

Since this is partly like a school game, for every assignment you go trough you get graded on it. A is the grade you want to have since it will give you a lot of units. Every week has a set amount of classes. Get an A on as many of them as you can and you might increase your freetime. It is during this time that you can make some money on the side by taking job, which consists of either creating an item/fetching a certain item or battle a strong enemy that terrorizes the area.

Battling the stronger enemies is my favorite as they can give you new alchemy recepies so that you can get stronger instead of just giving you the money reward.

If you don´t succeed to get the required units then free time is canceled and you will have to take make-up classes, I never received any of these so I can´t talk about it.

The fun part about free time is that you can take a more personal and closer look at your friends troubles or how they are in person. Helping out Chloe will get you having to deal with her incantations or with Lily she tries different plans to snare Raze into either confessing his love for her or getting them to spend some quality time. This will also help in creating a special ending where you as either one of the main characters get a special image of the one you choose and succeeded in getting the furthest with.

As a little bonus for playing trough the game with both main characters you get a extra scenario where your team is combined so you have ten characters on your team, but your active battle party can never be larger than six people so you have to leave four behind. Which is a bummer but understandable. The extra chapter is a nice finish though for the game.

Fuck you backtracking

In all this glorius fun gaming experience the games does have it´s bad moments. Having to go trough the same area over and over again to fetch some special item or defeat a specific enemy or boss is not fun. At the most it´s fun when you are taking jobs in your free time and the bosses are in the same area.

After going trough the areas for so many times in a row you get a new one with either a assignment or it opens up according to the story. This can turn people of and I do understand why. Since Atelier Iris 3 and Mana Khemia 1 I´ve grown used to it so I am not bothered by it that much. In this game where I have to replay the areas but with a second character it get´s to long and boring. There are some exclusive areas but they come in late of the game and are very much the best areas in the game.

If you wanted a 3d game then don´t come close to Mana Khemia 2. This is great 2d at it´s best, at least for in game character portraits and such. When on screen it´s a bit low design. You can see what is going on and so but it could have been better.

The amount of time that you have to spend on creating items is also a large part of the game. This is not for everyone and if you do know that you have a hard time wading trough menus to create items to create items to create items to create the final item that you intentionally wanted, this is not the game for you.

Finally, a grade for this game…

9/10 - If you enjoy exploring every area to the very tiniest part and spend lots of time to create items and in exchange for this become so powerful that you can defeat just about any opponent with ease. Then this is the game for you. If you find yourself not wanting to do the above, don´t even bother with this game.