Mana Khemia

Mana Khemia is a spin off series from the Atelier games by Koei Tecmo. 

It focuses on a group of students studying to be alchemists and their journey to success in alchemy school. 

The story itself is interesting on paper and it was nice to see another jrpg have their take on the school life setting outside of blue reflection caligula effect or persona. 

Fail a term your free time is taken up with detention In between, the player is generally required to complete two or three courses, earning a grade depending on how well the course was completed. This is then followed by two or three days of free time. If the player should fail to make a decent cumulative grade by the end of courses, they will need to spend one day of free time in detention, doing required tasks. Once in free time, the player is free to take odd jobs, talk with characters, and perform side quests related to the other members of the party. 

Its something of a slow burner too. 

The game like in the Atelier series is focused around assignments and creating stuff from the various ingridents and parts you  find throughout the game. 

Just like in Atelier, it can be quite a grindfest to go through. 

The graphics and art are pretty good. 

The games map is kind of clunky to use at least for me since theres often back tracking and not really a clear direction where to go or what to do next. 

Unlike typical role-playing games, there are no experience points or characters levels. Instead, through combat, characters earn "action points" which are used in the character-specific "grow book" to unlock new skills, and character bonuses such as additional health or mana points. However, these bonuses are tied to completing the recipes for specific items in that book. The grow book is presented as a graph of synthesizable items. The bonuses for an item cannot be acquired using action points until an adjacent item on the graph, and the item itself, has been made 

The game had alot of techinical hiccups like low res visuals and frequent loading times and frequent slowdowns too. 

The music was decent too. 

Overall it was an alright port. 

It gets 3 out of 5 stars.