Combat with Class: Building Visions of Mana’s brilliant battles
Visions of Mana is an incredibly vibrant game. From the rich characters and gripping story to the stunning visuals, the game is bursting with imagination.
That quality extends to the combat, which is fast, exciting, and enjoyably tactical. The satisfying flow of battles is enhanced by an incredibly flexible class and customization systems, which give you an impressive amount of control over your character builds and playstyle.
We wanted to learn more about how the team created this multi-faceted combat system, so we put some questions to the game’s Director, Ryosuke Yoshida.
His responses reveal the level of thought and consideration that went into the class system, the satisfying flow of battle and much more.
It’s a fascinating discussion and we hope you enjoy it!
When you were building the battles in Visions of Mana, what was the first thing you had to think about?
Ryosuke Yoshida (Director, Visions of Mana): The first step was to consider what makes up the core of the Mana series. I felt that the Elementals were really indispensable to the series, and so we put a lot of effort into giving them a tangible influence over the game’s combat.
This took the form of the elemental vessels in the final game, which allow you to call on their power both in battle and exploration.
How did you incorporate these elemental vessel abilities with the rest of the combat suite?
When I was thinking about making the elemental vessels a key part of the combat, I wanted to make sure that the other action elements – things like special moves and abilities, and basic attacks – didn’t feel like they had just been tacked on afterwards.
Careful consideration was given to how the different elements relate to and interact with one another in the combat design.
For example, hitting enemies with a regular attack reduces the cooldown timer for the elemental vessels, meaning they can be used more quickly. Similarly, using elemental vessels to inflict further damage on enemies causes them to drop mana (white orbs), which in turn restores MP and therefore allows you to use your special attacks more frequently.
If you keep the interplay between all of these different elements in mind, you’ll be able to defeat enemies with slightly higher levels than yourself, and that’s pretty satisfying.
How difficult was it to find the right balance of these elements working together?
It took a lot of iteration. The elements that make up the core battle gameplay were completed fairly early on, but we continued to make adjustments to the controls and to more nuanced aspects of combat right up to the eleventh hour.
That was perhaps one of the biggest challenges. Visions of Mana is an action RPG, with a lot of different elements that make up the combat system. But these elements also influence things that happen outside of combat, such as character growth and exploration.
It was pretty tricky for us to convey these complicated systems to the player in a way that made them easy to understand, but I think that framing all of these different mechanics by tying them to the elemental vessels allowed us to present them in a pretty straightforward manner.
I think ‘balanced’ is a good way to describe the combat of the game. It feels like battles fly by at a great pace – not to short, not too long. How difficult was it to achieve this?
Visions of Mana is an RPG, so first and foremost, we wanted to balance the game so that even players who aren’t well versed in action games could make it to the end of the game just by levelling up and using the elemental plot.
By the same token, players with low-level characters can still beat slightly stronger enemies if they’re skilled enough, though it will take some time.
In this way, the length of battles can change according to the difference in level between the player characters and their enemies. We wanted to give players the option of how difficult they want the battles to be, and that was one of the motivating factors for us getting the balance to as fine a point as it is.
The elemental vessels all act very differently. How did you come up with their actions?
The abilities associated with each class type were inspired by how these elements behave in real life. For instance, wind could keep enemies blowing in mid-air, the moon’s gravity could slow enemies down, and so on.
Once these traits were established, we considered how the different weapon types and elemental vessels in the player’s possession might complement one another, and we tweaked the classes until we had a line-up that seemed like it would work best.
Speaking of classes, they’re a big part of the combat system too. Why did you add this aspect of the game?
We knew that the class system had been received well by players in previous games in the Mana series, and that it was a staple of the franchise, so we decided to include it in Visions of Mana, too.
By equipping an elemental vessel to each character, you change their class, giving them different weapons, abilities, spells, and playstyles depending on the vessel.
One thing unique to this game is that the classes are tied to the elemental vessels. What was the reason for this?
When we were developing the battle system, there were periods of time when the elemental vessels, classes and class abilities were all very disconnected. That led to feedback that although there was a wide variety of combat mechanics, they were so disparate that it wasn’t clear where players should focus their attention, or how they should play their role. Even members of the development team were saying this!
Since we wanted the elemental vessels to be the most fundamental part of combat, we ended up tying all the systems that we wanted players to be most aware of, such as class, class abilities, outfits, and weapon actions, to those vessels.
Were any other options considered before you found that right approach?
It was always our intention to use a class system.
At one point, we considered having specific abilities that were tied to different classes (for example changing the basic and special attacks), but for a variety of different reasons, we eventually dropped the idea.
The characters all feel very distinct – both in appearance and playstyle. How did you achieve this?
When we approached our character designer HACCAN, we didn’t just tell him what sort of a role the characters would play in the story; we also told him what sort of controls we wanted them to have in order to make them feel unique, and the types of actions that we thought would suit them.
After that, HACCAN would send a beautiful character illustration back to us, and then we would come up with more unique traits for the character, taking inspiration from that illustration.
Every character can equip any elemental vessel – that must have created some challenges.
There were some concerns that having every character be able to equip the vessels would mean that some players would want to equip different characters with vessels that all had the same effect.
It would be possible to implement a system like this, of course, but it would have also undermined all the hard work that we did in preparing eight different vessels. That’s why, in the end, we gave them all unique characteristics along different lines, so that there wouldn’t just be one vessel that became the popular choice.
Each character can use three very different weapon types depending on the class you equip. They all feel quite different – how did you settle on what to add??
Val is the first character in the party, so we gave him a small sword to start with, as it’s the weapon that’s easiest to get to grips with. After that we added great swords (which are more cumbersome, but also more powerful) and lances (which are focused on offense) as weapons that are fairly distinct from small swords.
Careena’s combat style centers around her teaming up with her partner Ramcoh. We thought about what kind of weapons would fit best with the two of them dancing around each other and pulling off lots of tricky maneuvers, and it felt like spears, gloves and fans worked best for that.
As a member of the beastfolk tribe, Morley has a very strong aesthetic, and we wanted him to be a nimbler character. We gave him katanas, knives, and canes, as these seemed like things that would be suited to actions that are focused on speed.
Being a queen, Palamena has a regal air about her, so we chose to give her flails, boots, and sickles. But she doesn’t wear just plain old boots – Palamena’s boots are endowed with magical properties, so they can change shape and perform mysterious feats. Palamena’s backstory is that she is a specialist in magic, so we were very conscious of making sure we conveyed that, even when she’s performing regular actions.
Finally, being a sproutling, Julei is a bit of a special character, so our main goal was to give him weapons that played with motifs of flowers and grass, but also left the player thinking, “What the heck is this?” In-game, Julei’s weapons have names like “wand,” “hammer,” and “umbrella,” but in reality, the starting point for choosing his weapons was just that we wanted him to fight using flowers, mushrooms, seeds, and the like.
How did you ensure the different classes worked well together?
First of all, we assigned classes based on what we thought would suit the characters. Then we checked the overall balancing and came up with new classes that could make up for anything that we thought was still lacking.
Were there any considered that didn’t make the cut?
We actually did consider a few other classes, including a beastmaster class.
The Mana series features a host of cute and lovable monsters, chief among them being the rabites, so we thought that it would be nice to be able to fight alongside them, rather than just defeat them all the time.
But once we considered the balancing of the other classes, we decided to implement this idea in the form of summoning magic instead.
The first time you change class by equipping a vessel, there’s a flashy and fun transformation scene. Why did you add these to the game?
The class system is a hugely important element of Visions of Mana, and since each class has its own fun and unique outfit to go with it, we decided to add the transformation scenes to make the process feel more exciting.
I’m really pleased that this feature has been so well received.
With so many classes for each character, it must have been challenging to create so many of these animations…
I knew that we couldn’t just have one scene to cover all the transformations. If we were actually going to go ahead and make them, then we would need to make scenes for all five characters with eight different outfits each. That’s 40 transformations in total, so the workload for that was quite intense!
I want to express my gratitude to the members of our team who were more closely involved in creating these scenes than I was.
The outfits assigned to each class are pretty amazing! How did you come up with them?
The character designers contributed a huge number of ideas for the different outfits, but they were also very mindful of classes from previous games in the series, as well as each character’s cultural background, and made sure to incorporate those elements into their designs as well.
For example, Val’s paladin armour drew inspiration from Duran’s outfit in Trials of Mana, and since Julei is a member of the sproutling race, his outfits incorporate plants into their design.
Do you have a favorite class from the game?
I like the element of Light classes best. The reasoning behind this is that I like the light-class outfits for each character, their abilities are really useful, and when they are combined with other elemental vessels, their effects become even more powerful.
For example, if a group of enemies is bound by light, and just one of the enemies gets slowed down by the moon vessel, all the other enemies will be affected by the slowdown as well!
There are other techniques like this that can be used in Visions of Mana, so I hope that everybody will check them out.
Finally, how do you feel now that the game is out, and people are experiencing the combat for themselves?
I’m proud that even though we came up with a lot of different actions and mechanics, we were able to establish the elemental vessels as the core of all the new gameplay elements.
I’m also proud of the fact that we were able to come up with a combat system that felt authentic to the Mana series!
Many thanks to Yoshida-san for his insight into the game. The combat of Visions of Mana is fast-paced, flashy and fun – you can experience it all for yourself in the full game, available now for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Windows and Steam.
A free demo is also available. It lets you play through a few areas from the early game, try out a few of the different classes and smack rabites around to your heart’s content. It’s a great way to sample the combat, play with the elemental vessels and get a taste of the impressive character customization at the heart of the game (please note that progress doesn’t carry over to the full game).
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