Echoes of Mana pre-release hands-on: A buggy hodgepodge of RPG nostalgia

This one deserves to be banished from Potos

Square Enix has been celebrating the 30th anniversary of its Mana action RPG series over the last year, and so the company has launched a couple of classic Mana titles on the Play Store, Trials of Mana and Legends of Mana. These classics were welcome releases, but seeing that this series is 30 years old, it's about time a new game popped up, and popped up it has. This game is known as Echoes of Mana, and it's a free-to-play gacha game that just entered into pre-registration last week, with the official launch nearing.

Thankfully, Square has been kind enough to supply a testing build, and so I've gone hands-on with Echoes of Mana while recording a 40-minute gameplay video, all so you'll have a better idea of what to expect from the game when it launches in the near future.

The above 40-minute gameplay video was recorded by yours truly, offering a first look at a preview build for Echoes of Mana (unedited to provide a clear view of how the game performs). Since this is a preview, that means the game isn't finished yet, so some of the bugs and issues I've run into may be fixed by the time the game is released. Still, the issues I've run into are many, souring my opinion of the game. So let's get into why that is.

Square has apparently gone all-in on a story-driven game. Echoes of Mana offers a tale that spans several past releases in the series, with classic characters included to hit the ol' nostalgia button. Sadly the story is incredibly dull, filled with too much pointless text for how boring it is. Yes, we'll once again have to save the Mana Tree, and for some reason, this journey feels as though it's been written around collecting old and new characters in the Mana universe more so than existing to tell an exciting story, a problem with many F2P gacha games.

Moving beyond the incredibly contrived and boring story, there's a forced tutorial that overstays its welcome. It somehow manages to be filled with text but rarely thoroughly explains the game's mechanics. You'd think if the developer is going to force you to waste your time with a tutorial you can't skip, it could at least explain the game's mechanics better, especially when that game's UI design is a confusing mess. Then again, a casino's floor is designed to be a maze, much like how a F2P gacha game is designed to be a confusing tangle of menus and upgrade systems backed by multiple currencies and a stamina system. Turns out it's incredibly easy for people to lose track of what they are spending if they are forced into a constant state of confusion.

And things only get worse from here. I enter into a tutorial boss fight at the 6-minute mark in my gameplay video. At the 7:28 mark, the game literally stops in the middle of this boss fight to download the entirety of the game's data files. It's my suspicion this is done on purpose to ensure player retention when faced with a large data download, as players will want to see how the boss battle concludes. It takes over five minutes to download this data (and I've left this in the gameplay video, unedited, just so you can see how annoying this is). Straight up, that's horrible game design; there's no excuse for it.

Then there's the game's performance, where load times are long, for some reason, with odd black-screen gaps between every scene, which are very jarring, especially for how frequently this happens. This is odd for a game that offers incredibly stiff vector art and animations, as performance should be the last issue for a game offering such simplistic 2D graphics, and yet my phone was constantly hot to the touch, a literal furnace in my hands, for a game that can't go beyond 60FPS. Sure, you have a choice of Low, Standard, and High graphics, though I find these settings hardly affect the framerate or the device's heat.

As for the gameplay, it's the same shallow junk we've seen thousands of times over, where you collect star-rated characters to build out a team for your team-based RPG battles. These battles are at least real-time, so you control all of your characters, switching them on the fly, dependent on what skills you need to finish off the latest round of bad guys. This switching system is similar to the one within Trials of Mana, so there is some strategy to be found as you build your team and level up, but even that is fairly shallow. There's also an auto-battle option, because of course there is. For all intents and purposes, the gameplay loop follows that of any gacha game, but this time with a Mana skin slapped on top.

Of course, Echoes of Mana will launch as a free-to-play release, and even though the Play Store doesn't yet list what the game's in-app purchases consist of, the preview build sure does, and IAPs range up to $79.99 per item. These are primarily for purchasing the in-game currency known as Gems, but you can also purchase 4-star Harvest Tickets (the means for summing new characters). No matter how you slice it, you're provided several avenues to directly pay for your character pulls, which means the game is pay-to-win, by definition. Luckily there's no PvP component, only co-op, so at the very least, the players that do pay to win won't ruin your experience.

In the end, my gameplay video finishes with the title locking up during a movement tutorial, forcing me to quit to end the recording. This perfectly encapsulates my experience with Echoes of Mana. As is, the preview build is incredibly buggy, with performance woes abound, which is worrying as we are nearing release. I would hope Square has plans to polish further before the game launches, but the uninteresting story, stiff 2D graphics, and a gacha gameplay loop that was already stale several years ago don't leave all that much to get excited about. Sure, it was nice to revisit the Mana universe, but sadly the gameplay and graphics barely hold a candle to the classics in the series.