Mana Khemia: Student Alliance Introduction - PSP
0Mana Khemia: Student Alliance is an RPG touted as being the same exact game as Gust's older PS2 counterpart, "Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis", except with new synthesist items, multiplayer battles with rare items, a few modified battle scenarios, and the ability to "Jump Start" data to cut down on load times. This is not correct; if it were, I'd expect a minimal loss in other areas, but that is not what you get with this port. NIS isn't exactly known for publishing top-of-the-line early PSP titles or general ports, but when you take a game like this which should've been ported with relative ease and, depending on the circumstances, was instead made almost unplayable, I find it offensive, especially since I enjoyed the PS2 game. Being released pretty late in 2008 in Japan and early 2009 in the U.S. and Europe, to still see games like this on PSP which aren't remotely optimized for the hardware is a joke.
In general, there's a lot to like about Mana Khemia: it has a simple plot with great character interactions and hilarious scenes (should you choose to explore them), lots of items to find and items to synthesize, nice character customization, serviceable 2D graphics, a fine soundtrack, and it introduced what is perhaps the best overall battle system of any game in the Atelier/Mana series (which dates back to the mid-late 90s) which starts off relatively simple but just gets better and better, rewarding players for their diligence and good grades with off-the-wall special attacks and flashy combinations and battle tactics.
The story revolves around Vayne Aurelius, a young, enigmatic teenager with a strange black cat, who (originally) prefers solidarity to friends. He is invited to attend a prestigious school due to his "father" and past connections, none of which Vayne is initially familiar with. As he attends the school, he makes many friends, rivals, and enemies while learning about alchemy, his special gift, and his place in the world. You can build relations with the primary characters (many who have intersting quirks or surprising secrets) and gain access to various endings. While not particularly deep, Mana Khemia excels in character interactions and the game banks on its upbeat atmosphere and settings, which makes up for its generic main plot. All of this is fine and good, but the PSP version makes it incredibly difficult to enjoy anything the game has to offer.
First of all, loyal gamers who bought the initial UMD version and put money in the pub/devs pockets were shafted with a game plagued with absolutely horrendous load times. The game stutters so much, music and sounds play off-key, and the PSP struggles so hard to access data that you'd almost swear it was damaging your PSP just to play Student Alliance. Gust/NIS did try to remedy this with a feature known as "Jump Start", which allows you to store data that the system can access faster to reduce load times, which doesn't do much on PSP-1ks, but does help on PSP2k/3k models. Later on, a downloadable version improved load times significantly as it could load the game off a memory stick without accessing a CD. The problem is that the game was not made available in obvious places or was removed from places like U.S. PSN (you could get the English download from Hong Kong, Amazon, etc.) and didn't remedy other pressing issues with this port.
Other issues? The graphics aren't just a minor downgrade from the PS2 game, they are significantly degraded. Character sprites and enemy models look sharp and respectable, but everything else is a blurry mess; character portraits, anime loading screens, text- almost everything is a farcry from the the PS2 game and could've been properly formatted with proper care and attention (and a game like this should've been converted almost flawlessly, with a half-cut in the framerate and occassional slowdown at most... the original game didn't exactly push the PS2). Even worse, the framerate is a joke, constantly slowing down in places where nothing goes on, when characters jump, and especially in battles, where it frameskips and/or drops to single-digit frames with basic attacks. God help you with combo attacks and variable strikes / character swaps. A steady 30FPS? Great. 5-60FPS? Unacceptable. Everything else about the game is fine, but you need no other reason not to play this than the load times and poor framerate.
Let's just accept this for what it is: a bad port of a good game, and move on. Regardless of whether you get the UMD or download, this is one game I do not recommend. Buy and play the PS2 game wholeheartedly and don't worry about this half-assed port, as I don't want devs to think ports like this are okay. Spectral Souls: RotEE was also bad (loading-wise anyway), but it at least had an almost three-year age advantage and was one of the early PSP games.
Format Recorded: UMD
Media/Distribution: UMD/Download