Review: Mimana Iyar Chronicles

For a long while, PSP owners had a drought where RPGs were concerned. Crisis Core is a great game and Half Minute Hero is probably the most innovative RPG on any console, but compared to the massive catalog of RPGs over there on the DS, PSP owners have been poorly served. Because of this inattention, many might find Mimana Iyar Chronicles a welcome addition to the catalog. They might be blinded to its faults out of sheer need for something in the role-playing realm. They might tell people it’s a good game simply because there is so little to compare it to.

Do not be fooled, because this is not the RPG you’re looking for.

I won’t say that Mimana is a terrible game. It has its moments. However, the word mediocre feels appropriate for most of it. I had the feeling at several points that I was playing some senior student developer’s end of the term project. It hit all the major points well enough, but lacked any real spirit or catch to set it apart from anything else. It did get better as I travelled along with my nearly all female group, but the rocky start never launched into the heart-warming JRPG that it tried to be.

The story of Mimana is typical swords and sorcery business. The main character is a young mercenary named Crais with an shadowy past and a bad disposition. He doesn’t like kids, a phrase he will repeat endlessly throughout the first half of the game. Unfortunately for him, he is hired by a teenage girl named Sophie to protect her while she searches for seven mysterious gems. She will not tell him anything about this quest, nor does he particularly care about the details as long as he gets paid. Oh, and he doesn’t like kids. The story is neither good nor bad. It just is. Everything is fairly predictable. The hero will have a change of heart at some point, the girl will reveal something mysterious directly involving him, etc., etc. These points are advertised as though playing to a five-year old, and indeed maybe that’s the audience this market is looking for. At least it would be if there weren’t some blatantly perverted segments and even a touch of nudity. Yes, it’s all over the map.

The voice acting that attempts to move this story along balances between hilariously bad and just bad. Anyone who has played an anime JRPG would probably recognize a few of the voice actors. It’s a game that would have and should have benefitted from allowing players to choose the Japanese voice tracks. There was one character named Melrose in the game who always made me laugh, both from her pervy dialogue and the voice that went with it, but aside from her oddly charming personality, I could have done without anyone else opening their mouths.

The game is visually unimpressive as well. On a system like the PSP, there is simply is no reason not to render anything anime-related into beautiful, Tales of Vesperia-like quality. Instead, combat looks like a flash-based browser game, and walking around in a dungeon or town is like jumping straight back into the isometric days of the original PlayStation. Some might find this nostalgically charming. I did not. Spell effects are boring. The only three sword animations ever seen are repetitious, and even the few anime cut scenes are extremely choppy and oddly directed. The one point of visual charm lies in the dialogue portraits, which are crisp and pretty in the anime style.

Combat takes a page from the Tales series of games, giving players freedom of movement and an action feel. Players are always in control of Crais, with the other characters controlled by the AI with a bit of preset direction that can be changed up in the menu. The AI isn’t terrible, but the combat is also not challenging enough that anything complicated is ever required. Sophie heals, Crais swings his sword, Melrose casts spells, etc. The only fight I ever had an issue with was the very first boss. Beyond that, the game was a complete cake walk, and nothing but the default AI presets were necessary because I could just run around with Crais killing everything. Crais and his harem have access to magic, but the magic is completely ineffective and requires a character to line up the shot, so to speak. If a monster moves while this is happening, chances are good the spell will completely miss it. The combat isn’t a complete disaster because at the very least it isn’t turned based, and swinging with the correct timing will yield a damage boost when Crais flashes yellow. It’s just so bleeding easy. I’m actually convinced I could have walked through the whole game without ever equipping anything but the starter gear.

To really slam home the combat portion of this review, battles are random. Yes, random battles still exist in gaming. I don’t know why or how, but they do. And in this game they happen about every five steps. I once made it down an entire hallway without getting attacked and thought my game had glitched. Adding to this annoyance is the lack of a map, either mini or menu based, to guide players along the dungeons. This requires diligent players to either have a great memory or to draw their own maps on paper (who has paper anymore?). Again, nostalgic people might love drawing their own maps to games, but I do not. Unfortunately not drawing a map results in completely forgetting the dungeon layout simply because the battles happen so frequently. Half the dungeons are basically a straight line, and the other half are complicated enough to be completely annoying. The only saving grace to this “exploration” is that the game allows players to save it at any time, so when they finally just can’t take it anymore they can quit (not that this feature is even necessary given the ability to put the PSP into sleep mode at any time, but I honestly appreciate games that don’t require “save crystals”). This feature is also nice given that some boss fights aren’t announced. Crais and company are thrown into them as though they’re just another random battle. Oddly, this isn’t a consistent feature as some boss fights are forecast in an obvious manner.

The boss fights themselves can be somewhat challenging, especially that first one which is abnormally hard, but for the most part they’re just hack fests that require very little strategy. The first two bosses are crabs. Another boss fight doesn’t even require players to do anything because the boss self-destructs, and the way fights work in Mimana, the players can all die and if the boss dies as well, the game doesn’t end and instead the fight exits with all players at 1 hp. So in essence, the ten minutes spent on that fight are pointless.

Another vast source of annoyance for me was the way in which the overworld map works. It’s a connect-the-dots scenario, where players move from one zone to the next like pieces on a chess board; however, it’s also sequential. This means that to move to one area, players must go through the preceding area. This makes travel a completely cumbersome journey that forces a revisit into beginner areas with annoying fights that only take a second to win. Would it have been so difficult to allow us to skip over previously visited areas? And for another paradox, inside dungeons the game allows this, as after each fight there is a warp point accessible that lets the party warp to the entrance.

The game has few saving graces. The character interactions are about the only mildly interesting thing available. Melrose is hilarious, but then again that could be akin to saying that water tastes great when you’re dying of thirst. Sophie is kind of sweet, and though Crais is a complete a-hole and unlikable even when he “changes,” seeing them all together is the only reason to see the story through. Tinon is comic relief, and Feidh is the typical robotic “will she ever feel human emotions?” character. Patty character is the matronly stereotype. There are even spots where Crais has the chance to speak one-on-one with his party members, something almost similar to Dragon Age’s favor system. Unfortunately there was no extrinsic reason for doing so other than seeing different scenes or endings.

I don’t particularly know how to redeem Mimana. I laughed when I saw it priced at 40 dollars. It is not worth that in any way, shape, or form. It’s not even long, clocking in at around a dozen hours. I might pay 10 for it if I were seriously in need of PSP games to play or just bored beyond measure. But it is not a good game. It is barely an adequate game. In ways, it has potential, and it does a few things right, but its diamonds are completely covered by its rough, and so I must declaim it. Do not play Mimama Iyar Chronicles unless you crave mediocrity.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - Cute characters. - Keeps to a standard RPG formula. - Hilariously bad dialogue.	Doin’ It RONG: - No mini map or dungeon map. - Random battles that happen with annoying frequency. - Possibly the easiest RPG I’ve ever played through. - Nothing to set it apart in any way.
FINAL SCORE: 5 / 10