Echos of Mana impressions

Another day, another smartphone game based on an established RPG series that is likely to be doomed to a short life. I suppose the important thing is that they didn’t number it.

But will Echoes of Mana thrive like Fire Emblem Heroes or fade away to nothing like Star Ocean anamnesis? Don’t ask me; the game just came out 5 minutes ago.

While this is SquareEnix’s property, the game was developed by Wright Flyer Studios. The studio is most famous for one of their previous smartphone games, the Masato Kato (who wrote every game in the Chrono Trigger series) 2D RPG Another Eden (coming soon to the Switch). Seeing as the studio has experience working with Square staff and that Eden reviews praised it for barely qualifying as a F2P game due to few time-based restrictions and paid content not being all that necessary, I have high hopes for Echos.

…I also am wondering why the hell haven’t I played Another Eden yet. That is one heck of a sales pitch.

Echos, like many smartphone games based on a game series, is something of a compilation/theme park of a game. There’s an overarching story populated by a brand new character who is tasked by the one, true Mana Tree to jaunt between representations of past games to find a specific Mana Sword to prevent these words from fading away beyond even memory.

The game oscillates between story sections where you watch and read along as the point of view character goes to classic locations and meets other characters, then teams up with them to fight mooks in Mana’s traditional real-time idiom.

The game starts you off slow (and boring) in combat sections with simple square rooms sprinkled with foes. But before long, these areas develop more sophisticated shapes, branching paths, non-combat obstacles and hidden treasures. While I understand the need to get the basics handled first, I think a lot of people would be turned off by the simple presentation in the first chapter, thinking the game was just bouncing between talking-head cutscenes and random pit arenas that felt more like a beat-em-up instead of an action RPG.

The combat itself isn’t deep, but it keeps you active with how it rewards thoughtful movement and positioning. Attacks by you and the enemy can be dodged — either with a dodge button or by walking out of the hitbox before the attack lands. And as your rewards from any given combat are partially based on how fast you clear it, you’re encouraged to risk taking hits in order to attract all the enemies attention so they can be grouped up and finished off with everyone’s magic and special attacks. In higher-level content, elemental affinity and weapon types are supposed to be more prominent, but early-game enemies just don’t have the HP (and early-game allies just don’t have the stats) for it to be worth worrying about as you’re starting out.

There’s a lot of flair and attention to detail in Echos that draws from the original games. In the sections where you are in Secret of Mana, for example, defeated enemies leave behind crumbling skeletons, just as they did on the Super Nintendo. Any eagle-eyed connoisseur will find similar details throughout the experience. While the game very clearly has a unifying art style, the environments are unmistakably from their particular games. …and yes, the merchants dance.

I’m not mad, just disappointed at the music. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Final Fantasy Record Keeper’s fabulous remixes, but the soundtrack here just isn’t doing it for me. It’s as though every single track has one very poorly chosen instrument, and it tugs at my mind.

The monetisation of the game is limited, but rather prominent. Outside of special deals, the in-game currency of crystals runs between 0.8 cents to 1 cent a piece, with a gatcha 10-pack summon costing 2700 of them. Most of the other direct money purchases are simply a regularly-priced (but large) pack of crystals plus items that are used to strengthen your party members. I haven’t found any places to spend crystals outside of gatcha summons, but that doesn’t mean they’ren’t any.

And, as one might expect for a game of this type, there are 30 zillion different ways to improve your heroes, all involving grinding (or buying) 30 zillion different resources through special daily training quests, random enemy drops and duplicate heroes from the gatcha summons.

Echos of Mana doesn’t feel like anything special, but this is its first day. It could always grow into something more as the developers get feedback and implement new ideas. For now, it isn’t much more than what it purports to be: a Mana-themed smartphone game with gacha monetization. Though there’s only so many games to pull characters from; it may run out of whale fodder too quickly for even swimsuits and wedding dresses to keep the money flowing.

All in all, it is good for killing time, but hardly gripping.