5/5 ★ – PlasmaLink's review of Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis.

One of the best item crafting systems, one of the best character progression systems, and one of the best turn based combat systems? What a package! While it's unintuitive at first, once you get a grasp on the trait system in the crafting, it is an absolute joy to experiment with. Traits like Atk+ do not stack with each other, encouraging you to diversify the traits you're adding onto equipment, and make actually well rounded character builds rather than just maximizing your attack and speed and calling it a day. The way you unlock skills by crafting each item for the first time! My god, what a treat! I was already planning on doing this for the sheer joy of turning a ??? into an item name, but the game gives you an extrinsic reward on top of this! Brilliant! And the combat, oh my! The turn tracker is so well done, and gives the designers more space for moves that would otherwise be too low-tempo to be useful, but if it only takes half the time of a regular attack, now has a useful niche. And lets them gives you some stupid powerful moves to end combat with (or simply make the most out of a buff about to expire) if you don't mind the long cooldown it puts you on. And the way various abilities interact with the tracker itself... Roxis, my beloved. The game also shines aesthetically. Very good music, very flashy combat animations. The story is serviceable, just some standard anime-ish character based storytelling, but even if they were a bit shallow, I grew fond of them by the end. Unlike the second game, which I stopped playing because of how much I just didn't care for the characters in the slightest (Maybe the boy route was better? Girl route was just so depressing)