Over these last few days, I’ve had the chance to play Echoes of Mana on my phone. I have a fair amount of experience with mobile gacha RPGs, and I’ve played a couple of Mana games, so I felt pretty excited to try Echoes. While it can be a bit slow, the combat and visuals are quite appealing, and the gacha elements seem pretty average for this sort of game.
You’re probably not coming to a mobile gacha game for the story, but I’ll still give you a basic overview. You play as your own avatar, canonically named Quilto it seems, who must help the Goddess of the Mana Tree to restore the various realms, which have been reduced to “echoes.” You basically go to the worlds of various Mana games and meet the protagonists in the search for the Mana Sword. All the while, Quilto is pursued by a mysterious Ebon Knight, who seems hellbent on his destruction.
It’s a fine story that gives you enough reason to visit your favorite Mana worlds. The dialogue is a bit long-winded, but there’s a neat feature that lets you read all the dialogue on one page, and then skip the cutscene if you find it too slow.
The gameplay is quite fun, as it’s more of a beat-em-up with RPG elements than anything else. You use your left thumb to move your character across the screen, and your right thumb to select actions like attacking, dodging, and special techniques. You face a number of enemies, including the iconic Rabites, who you slash away at until they go down. Once you beat all the enemies in a stage, you clear it, sometimes after fighting a boss. Levels feel like they’re just the right length, as they’re perfectly digestible when you’re doing other things, like a good mobile game should be.
By pulling with a gacha system, you can get new playable characters to use from across the Mana series. You get a redoable pull at the beginning, with which you can try to nab a favorite character. I repulled a few times and got Duran, who was one of my favorites from Trials of Mana, and a few other neat additions. I started with enough gems to pull a full party, so I got through the early levels of Echoes without much struggle.
How you level up your characters isn’t super clear though, as you have to go to the character you want to level themselves and go to a tab on their stats. Not a huge issue, but it’s weird that leveling is somewhat hidden away. Mechanics like equipment and stat boost boards take a fair amount of time to get to, which makes the beginning feel pretty long. Once things get rolling though, there’s some interesting depth to strengthening your character.
Echoes of Mana is a pretty fun, if somewhat standard mobile gacha game, with fun gameplay in digestible sections and a decent amount of depth. If you’re already a fan of the Mana series, it can’t hurt to give Echoes of Mana a go when it launches on April 30th. It’s free-to-play, and a fun distraction from your bus ride or in between tasks. You can pre-register as of now, with specific bonuses being granted to players once certain pre-registration numbers are hit.
