I promised Dan that if he put me on Gaming Journals I would write about JRPGs until he banned me, or at least deeply regretted it. Well, he did anyway, and now I’m going to write about a JRPG. Since I’m playing Mana Khemia I’ll go ahead and talk about that.
Mana Khemia is about a guy and his cat. The guy is studying alchemy because he can’t think of anything better to do, and the cat might be his dad. I haven’t been paying much attention to the story because, really, who cares about story?

Here are things I like:

  1. It’s turn-based. RPGs should be turn-based. Turning them into low-grade action games is stupid; there are already plenty of real action games that do it much better (Final Fantasy 12 gets a pass because the Gambit system lets you strategize almost as much as a turn-based system would.) Mana Khemia also makes use of all the modern features a turn-based RPG should have: You can see whose turn is coming up, you can see monsters before you encounter them, and you can call in your reserve characters at (almost) any time.
  2. Fairly streamlined stuff-getting. Although you have to spend a lot of time gathering ingredients for your various alchemical endeavors, there are no asinine minigames, nor do you have to breed any goddamn Chocobos. You simply find them lying around while you’re out killing monsters, or you cut down grass with a simple half-second animation, or you harvest them in various ways with other simple half-second animations.
  3. Prevents overleveling. Your characters’ levels are determined by what items you’ve synthesized, and what items you have available to synthesize are largely determined by where you are in the story. This means you can’t ruin the game for yourself by accidentally overleveling, something that has happened to me in other games without even trying.

Here are things I don’t like:

  1. Fetch quests that are dumb even by fetch quest standards. So far the game has yet to rise above “go to a place, kill a thing, get another thing.” Most of the time it doesn’t even bother with the things and just has you go to a place and watch a scene.
  2. Unbalanced day/night system. Time passes while you’re out killing stuff/gathering stuff, and at night monsters get more powerful. This is reasonable enough, except they get much too powerful; defense increases by something like a third and attack power nearly doubles. Combine this with their drastically increased overworld speed and going out at night becomes flirtation with death. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the sheer size of the maps means that being out at night is impossible to avoid, forcing you to either wait it out in a safe spot or slog on through very dangerous enemies.
  3. Running away is goddamned useless. I swear it fails 9 times out of 10, or at any rate often enough that I don’t even bother trying. This is especially annoying coupled with #2 above.

On a scale of 1 to pi Mana Khemia gets one thumb up at a 72° angle.