Mana Khemia 2: Ochita Gakuen to Renkinjutsushitachi (2008)
2025-01-13
i'm a real Atelier boomer, so while i can see why Mana Khemia 2's combat is view as the high water mark for the series and i do appreciate it, i also prefer more item-based combat like with Arland or even Salburg (unhinged person talking). MK2's combat is definitely much better than the other post-Iris games in terms of prizing item usage, but it's still a very character skill-based affair. the character skills are definitely fun to use, though, especially with Ulrika's team where you have multiple ways to buff, debuff, and manipulate time card skills to your benefit. the game is easy, but it's easy in a fun way, because it's always fun to break the game over your knee. that really only holds true for Ulrika's team, though--Roze's team is almost total crap, which makes playing his route feel more irritating because you don't even have a fraction of the tools that Ulrika's route gives you. and for what! Lilia is useless because half the enemies in the game resist ice elemental attacks and that's all she has. no one on the team can tank. there's no way to mitigate damage. this game's balancing just leaves me scratching my head.
i will also note that the alchemy synthesis, despite being very baby mode easy Atelier, is actually really fun in a way that everything from Iris 1 to Mana Khemia 1 failed to capture. i think a lot of this is due to how the game rewards you for getting 100 Ether Level on every item which, while not being difficult, is enjoyable to do while zoning out for a few hours. there's some minmax-y stuff you can do, but none of that is necessary for any of the content in the game. we can't all be Arland, though, so i'll happily take Mana Khemia 2's alchemy for what it is.
Mana Khemia 2's writing, at its best, feels like the writers sat down and tasked themselves with making the player feel like they're having a stroke. this is at its most evident in, well, the entirety of Ulrika's route--the characters are all horrible people, they all hate each other, they're constantly verbally and physically abusing each other, and almost nothing serious happens until the very very end. it's extremely entertaining to watch all of these people be at each others' throats constantly; you would think it'd wear out its welcome, but it really doesn't. the character quests are truly baffling: Peperon and Gotou, as a giant muscled man and a stuffed animal, are slathered in oil and wrestling for about twelve hours; Chloe is trying to summon a demon, succeeds only to have it possess her body, and nobody in the atelier believes her because her normal personality is indistinguishable from that of a demon's; Ena gets kidnapped by Gunnar--one of his professors!--and has a chip implanted in his head to brainwash him. Ulrika's main story only has a final boss because she smacks her baby mana and makes him throw a tantrum. the entire rest of the route is just people arguing and wasting time. it's all absurd, and it's this absurdity that makes Mana Khemia 2 shine.
unfortunately this writing is also extremely inconsistent; Roze's route is, in comparison, really hard to sit through. this is because it tries to take itself entirely too seriously, kind of, but also this attempt at seriousness is half-hearted at best, which ends up making it the worst of both worlds. the serious moments feel extremely out of place, and the comedic moments are held back by the route's attempts to be serious. Roze's cast is also much weaker, mostly in the sense that there is a serious lack of whimsy in that atelier. Et is the shining star because she's completely unhinged; Yun has his moments in addition to just being an enjoyable character in general; Puniyo is i guess passable even though her presence slows down every scene because they decided to have at least one other character speak for her and thereby make things take longer; but for the most part... almost every scene in Roze's route is just dragged down by Lilia's all-consuming presence. she sucks. she's so, so heterosexual and irritating. Satou Rina's voice only helps so much. why does she fawn over Roze so much when it's clear he isn't insterested? who even likes her? she's exhausting, and that feeling of exhaustion ends up coloring the entire route.
it is easy to see that Roze's route is the team's attempt to capture that wider "normie" RPG audience that the entire Iris trilogy and Mana Khemia 1 were so slavishly devoted to courting, which i will forever maintain was a gigantic mistake for Atelier's identity. Mana Khemia 2, in its attempt to have it both ways--normie RPG with Roze and traditional Atelier with Ulrika--feels like it's trying way too hard to stretch itself in two opposing directions. while that does piss me off, i also feel like, at this point in the series (speaking about when MK2 was released), at least there was SOME attempt to capture that real Atelier feeling again. up to MK2's release, the only attempt at 'serious' storytelling in Atelier that really, truly, 100% worked for me because of its seriousness was Hermina and Culus, and i'm one of only five people in the world who played that game. and it's also clear that H&C was not the blueprint for anything that came after it in terms of measured, emotional storytelling. so Mana Khemia 2 is better than nothing, is what i'm saying. if it's a choice between slop like Iris 2 and half-slop like MK2, i'll take the latter any day.
i can view this game fondly in retrospect because i know that Atelier as a series managed to fully course correct with Arland, which lets me place Mana Khemia 2 as a kind of uneven step in the right direction. and it's got Chloe, who is easily one of my absolute favorite characters in the series. not only is she completely unhinged, but she also has an incredible ASMR voice courtesy of Gotou Yuuko. she frequently manages to swing from sounding sweet to sounding like she's about to beat you with a rock in the span of a single text box, and it's awesome. Chloe alone is enough to catapult this game into good standing, as far as i'm concerned.