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Echoes of Mana Review: Planting the Seed

2K View2022-05-14

Secret of Mana wasn’t the first Square Enix RPG I ever played, but given that it was released when I was just turning eight years old and when all of my gaming happened on a Super Nintendo that my dad had bought my siblings and me a year or two earlier, it must have been dang close. I still have fond memories of sitting, wide-eyed and cross-legged, eagerly tapping away at the controller through that iconic first section of the game, where the spiky-haired hero discovers the Mana Sword and is unfairly exiled from his village.

If this walk down memory lane strikes up any nostalgia for you as well, then you may be the precise target audience for Echoes of Mana, the latest spin-off of the series and the first mobile Mana game to get a North American release. This game pulls on heroes, enemies, and locations from the series’s past, blending it all together into a modern action-RPG with heavy gacha mechanics. But do gacha and Mana blend together into a seamless formula? Well, not exactly.

In Echoes of Mana’s opening cutscene, you’re introduced to the protagonist, who can be either male or female depending on your choice. This classically mute hero is thrown in medias res into a jailbreak scenario, which then unexpectedly turns into some sort of strange metaphysical showdown. Before long, the protagonist (and the player) are introduced to the Mana Tree, a powerful plant that will serve as a sort of hub.

See, the fruit that drops from the Mana Tree isn’t for eating. Instead, it allows the hero to access other worlds—or to pull characters from other worlds into this one. With that conceit introduced, I was off on an adventure to find the Mana Sword that would take me across numerous worlds from previous Mana games. And that, of course, means teaming up with numerous characters from Mana history.

It’s all a perfectly fine setup for a multiverse-spanning story, but there’s one major problem with making this the basis for a character-collecting title: For as much as I love the Mana games, I don’t feel like they’ve ever had particularly memorable characters. Even in the aforementioned Secret of Mana, which I have a deep fondness for, I didn’t remember the names of any of the three main party characters. And do you know why that is? It’s because those characters don’t even have given names in the game. The player names them. You have to dig through the manual to discover that the main character’s “official” name is Randi, and that his companions are Primm and Popoi.

To be clear, this is not remotely a criticism of Secret of Mana. Though I’m sure many would agree with me that story has never been the biggest selling point of the Mana series, I think the best entries in the series always have some interesting twists on a level beyond the character level. But the literal pull of a gacha game is in wanting to acquire new characters, in being excited to unlock and power up each addition to your roster. And for many of my pulls in Echoes of Mana, I just...wasn’t enthused at all.

Alright, time to knock a fruit down from the Mana Tree and see what exciting new character joins my party! Oh, it’s...Dark Lord...from Adventures of Mana. Cool?

If Echoes of Mana felt like mostly a miss from a character collection standpoint, it at least mostly delivers in terms of gameplay. Quests in the game play out similar to many other mobile RPG grinders, where you fight through waves of monsters on a small map. The fighting feels great, however—responsive, smooth, and fast-paced, even when using touch controls. Echoes of Mana features an “autoplay” option, but it’s one of the few games of this type where it genuinely felt like turning on auto put me at a distinct disadvantage. But even if it didn’t, I enjoyed the combat enough to want to maintain full control.

Though they’re rarer than I’d like, the best quests in Echoes of Mana add a little more complexity with a series of interconnected maps that include alternate paths with treasure. These areas aren’t on the same level of complexity as even the small levels of a 16-bit RPG, but they at least pay lip service to the exploration that was a key element that made those games so compelling.

For better or worse, Echoes of Mana also leans into the norm for the mobile gacha game style when it comes to character progression. That is to say: There’s a lot of it. A LOT. Not only does each character you pull into your party from the Mana Tree level up individually, they can also be ascended (which increases their rarity and thus their level cap), unleashed (which improves the power of their special abilities), and awakened (which further increases their rarity and level cap beyond what’s available by ascending). On top of all of that, each ally can also be equipped with up to six slots worth of gear, each individual piece of which can be further powered up through upgrade materials, and they can all be equipped with “memory gems,” one of the other items that can be acquired through gacha pulls, which are bits of artwork representing major moments in various Mana games that provide stat boosts and passive abilities. Oh, and the memory gems can also be leveled up and unleashed.

Phew. I didn’t even mention how each character has their own “mana board,” where you can spend elementally-themed resources to unlock further stat bonuses. You could absolutely devote months to painstakingly powering up each of your favorite characters in Echoes of Mana if you want.

These complex layers of systems upon systems run the risk of being too overwhelming, but to be honest, this is the kind of stuff that gacha gamers eat up like candy, and I count myself among that crowd. Echoes of Mana contains plenty of crunchy numbers and resource grinding to keep players tapping away at their phones for months (and probably years) to come.

The biggest issue I had with its systems is just how poorly presented the user interface is. It can take way too many taps to get into the specific sub-menu of the specific character you’re looking to boost, and the game has bothersome loading times at each step of the process. A noticeable load when you’re starting up a quest is one thing, but load times to get into and back out of the menus? What is this, a PlayStation 1 RPG?

If my complaints about Echoes of Mana come across as particularly harsh, it’s less that the game is bad and more that I can see so much great potential for more within it. The colorful 2D art manages to capture the spirit of the pixel art the series was founded on much better than recent console/PC 3D remakes of Trials of Mana and Secret of Mana pulled off. And although the story didn’t really grab my attention, the dialogue is at least sharply written and translated, and does a good job of getting across the core of the characters quickly.

Those small victories just don’t fully make up for Echoes of Mana’s many shortcomings, though. That’s not to say I’m totally giving up on the game already. I’m planning to keep it on my phone, to check in here and there, and to see how it progresses with updates. With some tweaks here and there—especially if they fix those pesky load times—I just might end up really getting pulled back in. But it’s still a long way from being able to take the spot of my go-to gacha of the moment.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Last Cloudia or other similar action-RPG gacha games. While Echoes of Mana doesn’t quite live up to the best this style of game has to offer, it may serve as a good break if you’re burnt out on the ones that have been around for years, or if you’re looking for a secondary gacha to play on the side.

• The Mana series. Again, Echoes of Mana doesn’t quite manage to deliver on what made games like Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana so special, but if you have any nostalgia for these classics, it will play on that.

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