Game Impressions: Disaster Report IV, Trials of Mana, War of the Visions

Disaster Report IV

Well, there’s a disaster, but there’s not much to report.

The recently launched demo for the PlayStation 4 takes you through a protracted character creation process for the low amount of customization available. It then launches into the game proper…. What little of it it can bother you with.

Here’s the whole demo experience: Make 9 forced conversation choices, make three optional conversation choices, find three items on the ground you don’t use, take damage if you don’t cower from the aftershocks, die instantly if you don’t go straight from conversation 7 to conversation 8, and get confused by the abrupt ending. If you button mash through the conversations, you can 100% the demo in under 5 minutes.

Here’s my early April Fool’s joke: I have no impressions to give! This threadbare demo wasn’t enough of the game to really get a feel for anything but the conversation trees.

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Trials of Mana

So, the Secret of Mana remake was rather disappointing. From the scattershot effort at remixing the music to unintended consequences of making a 8-dirction game fully analog to hoping the extra story was about restoring the cut plot and dungeons from the unfinished CD version only to just get party chat. And also the updated art style didn’t even try to go for the box art.

While Secret of Mana was a remake of opportunity following the similar upgrade to Sword of Mana, Trials of Mana was intended to be something more. Not just a polygonal face-lift, but a full-on 3-Dification of Seiken Densetsu 3.

You will by no means confuse the texturing for that of a AAA game and the color palettes continue in the same cartoonish vein as the previous remakes. But the music is coherent and the controls fit the new, 3-D world.

While the locations are instantly recognizable and navigable to veterans of the game from ROM translations or the Switch’s Collection of Mana, they exist in a world designed for 3D exploration. There’s meaningful verticality, an adjustable camera, and the spaces make use of being stackable, jumpable and climbable. The combat system is updated to fit the 3-D space, and the story scenes have camera angles and movements, as well as expressive and gesticulating characters.

And, unlike Disaster Report IV, Trials of Mana gives you more than enough game to decide if you like it. You can play through the introductions of each of the game’s six characters, easily putting in more than an hour of gameplay for each.

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War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

Launching just this past week was a new gatcha smartphone game spun off from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius that leans VERY hard into Final Fantasy Tactics.

Sold already, eh? Just be warned it leans just as hard into the gatcha part, too.

On the Tactics side, you get a job system redesigned to make each unit unique (each one only gets access to three of the many classes in a predetermined order.) You get a grand epic tale of noble families and the church struggling for dominance while the little folk suffer. And you get the tactical combat you knew and loved more than 20 years ago (but on smaller battlefields to make the time spent in each battle more on-the-go friendly).

On the gatcha side, you get eleventy billion time-gated currencies, the need to level up absolutely everything (character levels, job levels, skill levels, equipment levels, equipment proficiency levels, accessory levels, summon levels) then get other stuff to unlock a higher max level and do it all again.

The game’s pay-to-win currency, Visiore, is given away fairly generously to newcomers through event rewards and special first-timer missions. BUT the game differentiates between Visiore that it gave you and Visiore that you paid for. And take a wild guess which of those two types you need to use to pay for the Good Stuff™? And there’s no shortage of items available that the game has chosen to classify as Good Stuff™.

It’s not as fun to grind as Tactics because the grind takes longer, and too many of the benefits of the grind are locked behind currency that you just can’t get fast enough to keep up with everything you can spend it on. Nobody is levwling Ramza up to Ninja before the second story battle here.

The story has got me hooked, at least. But I expect to eventually give up as the game looks like it’s going to ask me to spend a lot of money to avoid too much grind to keep progressing. So perhaps I’ll just replay Final Fantasy Tactics and then check out the cutscenes from this one on YouTube.