Mana Khemia: Student Alliance

Reviewed by Kyle Stepp (April 04, 2009)

As Vayne arrives at the academy for the first time, the first thing you may notice is that the graphics are blurry, low-res 3D that look like someone popped a PS1 game in their PS2 and turned on texture smoothing. You may also notice just how long the game had to load said images. Nearly everything you do in Mana Khemia causes the game to stop and load something. Even simplistic tasks like jumping from one ledge to another will cause the PSP to halt everything for a moment to load the jumping animation. This has the unfortunate side-effect of disorienting your jump and often (at least in my case) leads to Vayne landing squarely on a monster's head. There's another battle that could have been avoided!