Mana Khemia: Student Alliance Review

I love NIS America, I really do. That they try so damned hard to fill a niche that a very select few other publishers even dare tackle is admirable -- commendable, even -- but while a cursory glance would make it seem like Atlus finally has a friend in the import business, the chasm in quality of releases between the two publishers is becoming ever greater with each successive release NISA pumps out. Oh, their own internally-developed titles like the recent Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? or the Disgaea series get fantastic localizations (the PSP port of the first Disgaea was, at the very least, dead even with the PS2 original and some might say, thanks to the new content, even better), but it seems like the other stuff -- in particular Gust's RPGs -- are getting second-hand treatment at best.

NISA's PSP efforts have been even more spotty. A string of Idea Factory-developed ports were, at turns, absolute abominations, slightly improved and almost passable, but with the port of Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis (re-christened with the subtitle Student Alliance), things have taken a massive step backward. Let me be crystal clear here: this is a festering abomination of a port, rendering what was a decent little RPG with a seriously heavy crafting/item creation bent little more than a series of near-constant, hitching, stuttering load screens. Whatever fun the crafting process, the absolute crux of Mana Khemia's storyline, character progression and core gameplay, may have had is utterly lost as half the time you're staring at the same static, weirdly blurry images.

It's such an anime game.

I'm not going to get into the particulars of the core gameplay; with the exception of some new characters and new items to craft, the game is essentially the same content-wise as it was on the PS2, so if the idea of item creation from recipes sounds interesting, by all means, check out Jeff's review of the original. It's certainly not one of Gust's best efforts, but puts their crafting/alchemy bits found in most of their other games at the fore, and can make for some interesting -- if protracted -- bits of item hunting and experimental mixing and matching.

Unfortunately, it's also requires quite a bit of back and forth, jumping from off-campus hunting/gathering grounds to come up with basic ingredients, and then taking them to an alchemy pot or forge on campus to start whipping things up. Because the game doesn't really give you an easy at-a-glance peek at the materials needed for everything (at least not on a screen that also tells you what you have in your possession beyond the actual alchemy screens themselves), there's quite a bit of trial and error and moving between locations -- something that's made absolutely mind-numbing in the PSP version thanks to all the loading.

How much loading, exactly? If it's not on the screen at the exact moment you're playing the game, chances are the game will pause to pull from the disc. Opening a menu? Wait a few seconds. Switching tabs/characters in that menu? Wait a few more. Starting a battle? Expect to wait upwards of five-plus seconds to see that kick off at times. Just getting the visual prompt that says you can pull in one of your reserve characters to take or deliver an extra hit in battle? Yep, chugga-chugga. Getting the battle results screen? Looooooooad. Transitioning between screens? Tick-tock. Just pressing the jump button at times will cause the game to hitch. In fact, just about any time there is a transition of some sort from a cutscene to when you can actually move your character will almost lock up the game -- and twice during the 15 or so hours I spent with the game before I couldn't take anymore, it did lock up completely. To make matters worse, the game itself runs like absolute crap on the PSP, frequently dipping dangerously close to single-digit framerate territory where the PS2 version zipped along at a silky clip. It's not bad, it's deplorable, and it quite literally leeches any potential fun out of the experience.

This looks delightfully odd.

There was apparently some attempt made to mitigate these pauses with something called Jump Start, which essentially duplicates (albeit more slowly) a feature on the newer 2000 and 3000 models of the PSP wherein cached info is loaded from memory (in this case around 250 megs or so of installed data on your Memory Stick) to help supplement the stuff on the disc. It's not quite the same as the newer PSPs' internal cache that sucks stuff off the UMD ahead of time, but the idea is essentially the same: cut down on random seeks and loading to help smooth things out.

As you can probably tell by that little tirade I went on two paragraphs ago, though, Jump Start is woefully ineffectual -- if it even does anything beyond occupying a sizeable chunk of your storage. I could almost swear whoever burned the game onto a UMD tried to randomize the data, leading the PSP's UMD drive to constantly howl under the strain of seeking out new chunks of data to, say, pull up the status screen for a character. Lesson number one in porting a game to another platform: don't take arguably the worst, slowest part of the hardware and then ask it to pull overtime; it's only going to end badly.

source: http://psp.ign.com/articles/962/962430p1.html