For every good and fair game of gacha, there’s always a ghastly one that’s essentially designed to force you to spend excessive money to achieve in-game goals or get the shiny, desirable character/item. At its core, all gacha is primarily for making money; every player should understand this. Like a huge mana fan, I want nothing more than to sit here and write that Echoes of Mana is a good and honest gacha game with a lot of nostalgia in it. Now that the game has been downloaded more than four million times worldwide, that would be a sign of its quality, right? That couldn’t be further from the truth of the game, unfortunately, with its horrendous business model approach and poor gameplay decisions.
Before we dive into the swamp of negatives about Echoes of Mana, let’s look at the good points of the game first. Auditively and visually, the game is very beautiful. The graphics for a mobile game are colorful and match the mana style exceptionally well. Animations are fluid and the special attacks are very faithful to their original counterparts. There is a lot of great music in the game with small variations of some classic songs. I personally like all the classics mana tracks, including their version of “Pain the Universe” from Legend of Mana and “Danger” from Secret of Mana. I’m a sucker for awesome boss themes. What can I say? It has that Wright Flyer Studio polish in these areas that made Another Eden super fun to play. The story is decent too and while it’s nothing to write home about, it’s entertaining (so far) with some funny scenes and cute characters. This is all the praise I can give Echoes of Mana.
Now let’s get to the worst aspect of this game: the gacha system. Some games run gacha where you feel at least some hope of getting the prize on the banner, or you end up getting it with regret points after a certain number of draws. Echoes of Mana has four problems with its gacha which makes it feel very unfair and almost predatory. First, there are zero free daily draws in the game. For all the gacha games I’ve played, this is pretty much unheard of. There was even a free daily trek at the start of Final Fantasy: Record Keeper, my first gacha game, and that came out seven years ago! You have to use your hard-earned gems if you want to scratch that itch to even gamble a little. It’s a minor problem, but still a little annoying, as the next problem makes this little one hard to swallow.
The second gacha problem – and the most egregious – is that the percentage of getting a four-star rating on these banners is pretty atrocious. You are not guaranteed a four-star character or a memory gem on a pull of ten, only a three-star. This is not unheard of in other gachas, but the problem is compounded in this game as you are expected to get a lot of double versions of the three and four star characters to make them stronger and more versatile. You’ll need six copies of a character to fully charge them through the game’s unleash mechanic. This means you’ll need six with no guarantee you’ll even get one, an unrealistic expectation for free-to-play players. It wouldn’t be so bad if the pity was reasonable. Most gachas take pity on ten full pulls to give you the character or item on the banner. Echoes of Mana expect to do 20 full pulls to get one of the characters or items on the banner. With multiple characters and gear on the banner, it’s nearly impossible to get what you want if you’re unlucky.
I experienced this firsthand with the Black Pearl and Hawkeye banner that has just been released. I’ve saved a whopping 85% of the gems from the start of the game because Black Pearl and Hawkeye are two of my favorites mana characters, and thus began my folly. I did 15 full pulls and used all the free gems the game currently offers as I cleared all content and got zero of the four star characters and items. I didn’t even get an off-banner four stars. I just don’t have one. To make the sting worse, I would have to pull five more times with 2700 gems per attempt to get even one, which probably won’t happen by the time this banner ends unless I pay real money. And even then I’d only have one of the six copies needed to make the character better, and I’d have to choose between Hawkeye and Black Pearl. It pretty much killed my desire to continue with the game knowing that it will likely happen again in the future. If you want player bases to stick around, they should feel like they have a chance to get characters or items without spending any money.
There is a silver lining to the pity points you acquire. If you can never use your points, you can apply them to a global compassion system called the Rabite Shop. However, this is the third problem with the Echoes of Mana gacha system. The global pity system expects you to have 500 Rabite points for one character choice. So 50 full pulls before you even get one. That’s a lot of pulling for just one copy of a character, and aside from the 500 points for one character, the Rabite Shop has added a ton of junk that is easily available in-game through play. If you’re lucky and don’t need the pity, the rest of the store is practically a waste. It’s a waste of a good cause and another ridiculous slog for something you might want.
None of this would be so bad if the amount of gems you get from the game would let you enjoy them. That is simply not the case and leads to the last problem with Echoes of Manathe gacha system. Outside of the gems honeymoon stage, there is a little trickle of gems that you get every day. That’s about it. It’s enough to get maybe about 4500 gems a month and do about two full pulls, which isn’t nearly enough to get a compassionate character on a banner. With the Rabite Shop you can then expect up to ten months to get one compassionate character. It’s the icing on the cake of this hideous gacha system. And while the game has received updates to its gacha mechanics since its release, the general issues remain.
The gacha is not the only thing wrong with Echoes of Mana. It has a host of other issues such as numerous and long loading times for switching to every menu and map, an acceleration system designed to waste time getting the stats you want, and an action game operating system that is flat – terrible . You can accidentally launch regular attacks unless you hit the small skill buttons on the screen exactly or accidentally dodge the wrong direction. It’s almost infuriating when you have to avoid attacks. It also has a split stamina system that requires you to waste serious amounts of the precious blue stamina on the absurd requirements of each training phase. In addition, there’s gameplay with bosses that perform unavoidable attacks that will kill you directly if you don’t already have the resources to survive. This will likely be abused as paywalls in future content to force you to spend money.
If you’re considering playing with others, there’s forced and disconnected co-op for certain events and stages, and rampant cheating in ranking events. Finally, a serious lack of content in the game can be seen as a blessing and a curse depending on how much you like wasting your time with one game. For me that’s not really a negative point as I only play when I have free time, but it sure can be for many players who want to get the most out of the game.
All in all, this is just a disappointing game, and the mana series doesn’t deserve to be taken down like that because there are so many hit-or-miss games out there already. Wright Flier Studios needs to rethink and re-equip these and quickly before the player base is gone and not coming back. They just need to look at other Square Enix gacha games to see how they can get it right, like Romancing SaGa Re;universe, or even their own Another Eden. I can’t recommend it Echoes of Mana in its current form, but hopefully it can be fixed before it joins the graveyard of other dead gacha games.
0 Comments