[PS2] Mana Khemia. ITT: Lace bending time/space to play more than 24 hours of game per day.

Proving that the PS2 will never die NIS just announced Mana Khemia will be coming to the US in March. I'm just going to quote RPGFan here (hoping this isn't another hoax):

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NIS America has announced that they will be releasing Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Revis for the PlayStation 2 in March of 2008. Developed by Gust, the title is a bit of a spiritual successor to the Atelier Iris titles, with a similar 2D graphical style. Players will take control of novice alchemist Vayne Aurelius, who has been invited to attend Al-Revis Academy to unravel the secrets of alchemy.The game will feature an in-depth item crafting system, similar to the system found in the Atelier Iris games. Players will also "craft" skills, instead of simply leveling up through combat, allowing unique skill sets. Additionally, random encounters have been removed from Mana Khemia, and players will need to actively engage enemies.
Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Revis will be available on March 18, 2008, and has not yet been rated by the ESRB.

Now all they need to do is announce Ar Tonelico 2 and I think I can happily put my PS2 to rest.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Generic Badass

It would be super if Gust could make a game that doesn't look exactly like every other game they've ever made ever.

That said, it seems that companies like NIS America and Atlus aren't really sure as to how they should make the jump into the current generation. They're sort of dragging their feet, it seems like. Probably because they haven't had to deal with real hardware competition in a long time, and can't be guaranteed that they're reaching the largest or best-suited audience for their chosen project.

Well NIS American and Atlus need something made first before they can publish it. The Japanese developers they normally deal with are just now jumping into a next gen project since most of them have just wrapped up their late PS2 projects.

But it looks like the small groups of Japanese developers have already chosen the PS3 as the next jRPG platform with NIS already on Disgaea 3, Atlus with Persona 4 and Steamboat Chronicles II with Irem, GUST with an announced PS3 project in the works, From Software with a few titles (mostly SRPGs we'll never see here), and Banpresto with some PS3 RPGs in the works as well. Plus I'm forgetting a whole lot from the even smaller developers that have PS3 RPG projects in the works.

It's really no different from the PS2 though. We didn't see any major projects from these companies on the PS2 until Final Fantasy X came out on it and established it as the go-to system for RPGs.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

OMG widescreen boxart.

Anyway yeah I was expecting just another GUST game which would have been find by me but this game has really surprised me with the amount of refinement and evolution they put into this one. They have also listened to the difficulty criticism for sure.

My only (non)complaint might be that the 'E' rating will probably prevent some of the crude humor I find oh-so-entertaining in NIS games. Well that and I wish NIS would starting giving us full OSTs rather than select song CDs since the CD just gets shelved in favor of the full OSTs I end up downloading.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Ah this is true, but they probably used up their entire quota on that line as I haven't seen much else, though I'm not far into the game at all.

Also, while the sprites are the same old style at least it doesn't look like they re-used many. And the field sprites are of the same quality of past GUST games but they did a really nice job layering backgrounds this time for a faux-3D effect in a lot of areas.

How ya doing, buddy?

This game is closer to Aterlier Iris 3 in that it borrows and refines a lot of the ideas setup for that game. I seem to pretty much be under the same opinion as you about AI3 but I'm enjoying this game far more because it takes a lot of the AI3 concepts in the right direction.

And I have not experienced any lock-ups yet and I'm using the surprisingly excellent English dialog. But I am getting some massive framerate issues in some areas on fields. I'm playing this on a PS3 though. Are people experiencing framerate issues on the PS2s?

I was speaking idiomatically.

I love the stat boosting system. Its like Chrono Cross were it's impossible to be over-leveled for an area thus making it boring. The item stat boosting in this pretty much keeps the game challenging and actually keeps mini-boss battles that were introduced in AI3 difficult as they should be and it obviously allowed GUST to make this a much better balanced game battlewise compared to their past games.

And Ar Tonelico II...won't stake my reputation on it or anything, but keep looking for updates sometime soon.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Xellos

I'll give it a shot then. AI3 may have been a lot worse then the previous AI games, but I still had fun playing it. It wasn't a total trainwreck.

You say it has many AI3 elements, which might those be? I hope it's not the limited time you can spent in each area, or the whole quest system that made you go back to the same areas constantly. That's 2 of the things I really didn't like from AI3.

Hah well it has both aspects, but not exactly like AI3. There is a passage of time in fields but it won't kick you out of the field. Rather day turns to night and during the night time the enemy blobs become really fast making it hard to sword them for battle advantage. Enemies also become much stronger and so far during night I've had to avoid the mini-boss blobs as I simply can't kill them during the night-time. So you still feel this need to rush to get things done before night but at least the game won't kick you out of the area after a specific amount of time. I found that annoying in AI3 as well but the day-night cycle system in this is a much better refinement to that idea.

You also do return to the same areas on a regular basis. The school serves as a hub like the town did in AI3. However there is A LOT more to do inside the school than there was in the town in AI3. The areas in this are also much bigger than they were in AI3 and each one is better divided into sub-areas so you usually get to explore some new looking areas for a lot of the tasks even if they send you to a repeat area.

The battle system is also pretty much a highly refined AI3 system. Stuff like the burst gauge, card based turns, stunning, charged attacks, etc are all there like they were in AI3 but some of the aspects work slightly different. For example its really hard to get the burst gauge to fill up now.

FELIPE NO

Woah back up. They announced Mana Khemia 2 for release outside of Japan? If so awesome but the 2nd game is supposed to be vastly superior to the first in every way and the first game was pretty damned good.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Oh I get it now, sorry I totally misread that.

Unfortunately I haven't heard of anything about the second game coming over. If they starting recording the voice overs for it I'd probably learn about it right away.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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So, just curious. Since the PS2 refuses to die, should we expect Mana Khemia 2 to make it over here as well?

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NISA: We haven't made any formal announcements, but yes please expect to see Mana Khemia 2. The game is definitely an improvement over the original, so please look forward to it.

Don't put your PS2s away after AT2 this January!

There's nowhere I can't reach.