Mana Khemia: Student Alliance for PSP Reviews by Gamers

This game might have been very enjoyable to play were it not for the horrendous load times. Normally I tend to disregard the occasional UMD access, even abnormal amounts, simply because I understand that a UMD system must access the UMD. It would be silly to expect otherwise.

This game is ridiculous in the amount of times it must stop and load data. Everything that you do in this game causes a UMD stutter. That is not an exaggeration. Everything short of walking across a room requires that the PSP read from the UMD, and even sometimes walking will cause the game to stutter as it tried to quickly read the UMD to refresh at the appropriate frame rate. There is no enjoying this game simply because of that.

If we don't take the constant UMD access in to account, probably my only gripe with the game is the constant and redundant dialog that serves absolutely no purpose but to provide banter. This is not solely exclusive to this game, though, and you could really say the same thing about every JRPG.

Avoid this game. Play the original. Play something else. Do ANYTHING but waste time playing this game... and when I say "playing this game" what I mean is "listening to the UMD drive spin". Ridiculous to think that the developers thought that anyone would find this acceptable.

Having played through the PS2-release of Mana Khemia, I had expected great things from a portable version of the game. Sure, one should expect some stunting when porting to a smaller capacity media-format, but this is a tad ridiculous.

First of all, if you've any vision problems, you may want to avoid this release. It seems the developers thought simply jamming the graphics onto the PSP's screen would be a good fit. Some text is nigh-unreadable (the day-to-day screen for example) and it's sad they didn't even try to optimize it.

A second, glaring problem is that the load-times are horrendous. When you defeat a monster, the game will actually freeze for three to five seconds on the characters prior to their victory poses. This is in addition to a loading pause before every special attack. This might be kosher for a slow-pace strategy RPG or the like, but it's irritating for a speedy battle system like Mana Khemia's.

A third noticeable problem, is a visual lag on Vayne every time a new area is loaded. Oddly enough, this can be remedied by pressing square. Still, one shouldn't be expected to hit a button every time you want lag to be relieved. This is just lazy programming.

The third problem is merely preference, as there is no option for the Japanese voice track. This was supposedly because of space restrictions on the UMD. Battles are also noticeable quieter due to the lack of voices for normal attacks, though they're still in for special attacks but only if you do the install.

Overall, this is a poor port of a great game. A saving grace is the extra items available to you throughout the game, but even that can't save this lackluster port.