New details on three Elemental Vessels, plus a video that explores them further – PlayStation.Blog
Visions of Mana, an upcoming action RPG from Square Enix, will be released on August 29 on PS5 and PS4. The game features a thrilling action combat system where you fight hordes of monsters with weapons, magic, and a variety of awesome abilities. The game is fast-paced and will test both your reflexes and strategy.
At the core of the experience are Elemental Vessels. These tools, imbued with elemental power, allow you to perform incredible feats in combat – from freezing time to dealing damage with style. What’s more, equipping them on one of the five playable characters changes their class, opening up all sorts of new options in the heat of battle. See some of them in action here.
During that presentation, we revealed three of these Elemental Vessels, representing Earth, Light, and Darkness. For this accompanying blog, we asked Visions of Mana producer Masaru Oyamada and director Ryosuke Yoshida to reveal a little more about each one – and the entire combat system!
Capture the spirit (elements) of the Mana series
While Visions of Mana was intended to be a fresh start for the series, without prior experience, the team still wanted to capture the series’ very own identity through combat. But what defines the combat of a Mana game?
Masaru Oyamada (producer)
Since the beginning of the series, Mana games have featured a wide variety of weapons and spells for players to use – as well as interesting RPG character progression systems. So it’s important that people feel those elements strongly in Visions of Mana too!
Ryosuke Yoshida (director)
One of the most important elements of the Mana game is the feeling that you are interacting with the elementals (spirits that control elements like wind, fire, or darkness).
That’s core to the design of Visions of Mana and something that was really important to me. It’s a huge part of the Mana series’ distinct identity, and if the combat doesn’t capture that, then the game doesn’t make any sense!
In Visions of Mana, we focus the flow of battle around the use of Elemental Vessels – powerful weapons infused with elemental magic. These artifacts use the power of the Elementals to manifest mysterious primal forces, such as trapping enemies in bubbles of water or pinning them in midair with gusts of wind.
The effects they create can also be altered in various ways through player actions, making it interesting as you feel like you’re interacting with the Elements as you fight.
Go to the core of the war
Combat in Visions of Mana is fast and fluid. You’ll have to consider a lot of things, from positioning to what abilities you throw at them, but you’ll soon be taking down enemies in spectacular fashion.
There are a lot of great powers to use in combat, especially once you start using Elemental Vessel, but before they can dive into that, the developers have to make sure the basics of combat are really solid.
Yoshida Ryosuke
When we think about how to design the combat system, we don’t just look at combat in isolation. Instead, we try to make it something that ties into the overall concept that has been decided for the game.
Core mechanics like switching between three party members during battle, using the circular menu, and hotkey bindings are inspired by elements from previous Mana games. However, I have a strong desire to focus more on switching between different characters during combat.
One way we do this, for example, is through Elemental Vessels and the gameplay options they offer. You have a party of three characters and can equip each character with a different Elemental Vessel that exhibits different effects. It is possible to continue after you use one of these effects by switching and using another elemental power to create an even more powerful compound ability.
In this way, we create motivation and benefits for players when switching between different characters in battle.
That said, we were careful not to make switching so important that it was mandatory. To that end, we avoided creating enemies that couldn’t be defeated unless you jumped between characters.
Elemental containers
As mentioned, Elemental Vessels play a central role in both combat and movement in the game. These artifacts, bestowed upon the player by the eight elements throughout the course of the game, give you new ways to move around the world and special powers to use in battle.
This is the core focus of the game and lies at the heart of the experience. Naturally, that means the team has taken great care to make it as satisfying and enjoyable to use as possible.
Yoshida Ryosuke
I felt it was important to create a consistent feel throughout the game, with the design tying both combat and exploration to the core concept of interacting with elementals as sentient beings.
The tools that help us realize this concept in practice are the Elements.
Masaru Oyamada
The Mana line has always had eight distinct elements, each representing one of the core forces shaping the world. Naturally, there would be eight objects that would hold the power of each element. We came up with a lot of interesting ideas for different objects to use, but ultimately aimed to create designs that best captured the interesting aspects of each element.
Earth Ship: Shovel Gnome
In the video, we present three Elemental Vessels: Earth, Light, and Darkness. Producer Oyamada and director Yoshida provide some insight into the process of creating these ships – and the abilities involved.
Oyamada
The concept of Vessel of Earth is ‘defense’. When used, it surrounds the player with a solid stone shield that protects against attacks.
Yoshida
However, it took a bit of trial and error to get it right! Initially, it created a giant earth wall to protect the player from attacks. Unfortunately, we found that summoning a large barrier into the combat area would block the player’s vision. Plus, enemies attack from multiple angles, so it didn’t really protect them. So we switched to the current idea, where the ship creates a dome-like shield out of semi-transparent rocks!
Ship of Light: Lumina Lantern
Oyamada
The idea behind this game is ‘reflection’. Using the Lumina Lantern, players can link enemies together with rays of light, reflecting damage from one enemy to another!
Dark Ship: Dark Vision
Oyamada
The idea behind this ship is ‘gravity’. When the element is released, it creates a black hole, sucking in enemies.
Yoshida
Our combat director naively pointed out that he was curious about what would happen if there was a lake or river nearby and suggested that the water be sucked up along with the enemy. However, not many combat areas are adjacent to lakes in the first place, and if we were to do this, it would create a whole host of problems, such as when the water would return!
So it’s understandable that we soon abandoned that particular idea (laugh).
Equipping an Elemental Vessel on a character will change their class, giving them new abilities, weapons, and even outfits. Each ship can be equipped on any character, allowing for a lot of variety in how you customize your party.
Yoshida
We have given the specs for different weapons and classes along with the specs of the Elemental Vessel.
We did this because we knew from the beginning that future balancing would be needed to ensure that no ship-related weapons and actions could break the system.
This means that by the time we reach the prototyping stage, all the base effects of the ship have been decided and we can focus on the final balance between the classes. Not only that, but we can also compensate for any areas where a class is less distinct by adding unique abilities and changing their parameters.
Oyamada
After deciding that there would be eight different elements, we designed the concept for each character class based on the combination of Elemental Vessel effects and different weapon types.
Of course, these things still went through changes during development. For example, we originally went with a succubus style for Careena’s dark-based class, but our character designer Haccan suggested a great idea that got us thinking in a different direction. I think this turned out great and also captured her fun personality!
Visions of Mana launches on August 29 on PS5 and PS4. The game is available for pre-order now on the PlayStation Store.
