Here’s a shocker for you: NIS America’s latest release is another anime themed RPG developed by Gust for a Sony system, and it makes heavy use of the concept of alchemy. I’d be more upset about this concept recycling, except Mana Khemia 2 is a pretty good game. It gets off to a rocky start but in due time brings you into a bright, fantastical world that is quite silly, but manages to tell a pretty interesting tale once it gets some momentum. A genuinely competent RPG system will keep you entertained as you play through this story, too.
Mana Khemia 2 centers around the Al-Revis Academy, a high-class, for-profit school where students enroll to learn a variety of things. One of its most interesting classes are its lessons on alchemy, and they provide the background for most of the game’s events. Rather than dumping your chosen characters into a huge open world, you’re placed on a school schedule and navigating the campus and surrounding areas is done by menus which in turn drop you onto small areas consisting of just a few ’rooms’. In other words, pick a nearby forest from the menu and you’ll be dropped into normal RPG exploration from there, but only for the few rooms that make up that forest.
While exploration and combat are done in traditional RPG style, the school schedule system means the plot moves at a very different pace than you might expect. Your characters are regularly given lessons and tasks to fulfill, which serve as both a major way to move the plot along and as direct challenges to the player. Note that you (or your characters, in any case) are graded on your performance; do well and your main character will earn Free Time, which can be used to start character-specific story angles and really get you into the core of this game’s plot. Along with the fairly in-depth alchemy system you use for creating new items, weapons, armor, and accessories for your characters to use, it’s fair to say that you are simultaneously kept on a fairly narrow track and yet given chances to mess around and experiment.
Competent RPG rules, an interesting alchemy system, and a school schedule to keep you on task and moving the game along would be meaningless if the story was bad, however. Fortunately, Mana Khemia 2 doesn’t have that problem for the most part. It starts off very badly with a nearly hour-long intro and a barrage of tutorials one after another, but once you get past them you will find both a good game and a decent plot underneath. The story’s major tone is one of absurd comedy; many of your characters bicker with one another, behave in very exaggerated ways, and solve their problems through truly outlandish schemes. Even violence is usually played for laughs here, resulting in a story tone that is sometimes very serious and interesting... but usually aims for being very silly in the same vein as anime shows like "The Slayers" or "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya."
