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DRAGON OF NEGATIVITY

 

Visions of Mana - https://youtu.be/xmwUUfqZMuE

 

That's it! The series is finished!

 

As with Anise in Trials, the superboss for the second story is not exactly something we've been hearing about the whole game, but unlike Anise, we at least got hints, with the Thaumatorb! I'm kind of surprised they didn't at least include a cutscene segment of Morley shattering the thing. I don't think it's implied that they just left it there. That would probably be bad. I was surprised that the "monster" that made off with it was Passar―and that he even had offered to purchase it. Which means the Lunar Sandglass breaking was actually something that someone might have seen coming, and they simply hadn't seen fit to warn anyone. They probably thought Passar wouldn't simply steal it when they said it wasn't for sale.

 

And the superboss was actually hard! Well, so was Anise. I guess that was kind of a given, huh? My backup plans, had the second round not been a success, were things I had expressed throughout the rest of the playthrough: 1) use the serums that I kept buying but never actually used, or 2) use Julei instead of Val, or 3) both. Survivability was the major issue, and though the limit of only using 9 of a single type of item was present in both Trials and Visions, they only told you about it in Trials. To be fair, I rarely ran up against it in either game. But I did run out of revivals against Aeve Zalaha, and Julei's healing magic would basically resolve that issue. In the end, however, "dealing lots of damage" was good enough.

 

I kind of feel bad that I never used Careena once I had Palamena, and I never once used Julei. Julei was clearly meant to replace the healing that Hinna provided for free in the early parts of the game. If I had struggled against bosses, then Julei would have been great to use… but I simply didn't. I had 3 game overs in the whole game, and two were against an elite non-boss foe that turned the whole party to stone pretty much all at once. Adding a Petrify Immunity seed to one character was enough to win. (Careena was in pretty much the same boat, as Ramcoh made her something of the party's tank alongside Val's high HP.) Maybe if I do a NG+, I'll make it a priority to use those two.

 

The "of Mana" series generally consists of short RPGs. Visions was the longest by far and still under 60 hours even when I did basically everything. (Contrast with Xenoblade games taking hundreds of hours if you do everything…) It feels good to finish a series, especially considering all the other series I plan to stream this year. I've been looking forward to them for a while―not to say that I haven't enjoyed my time with this game!