Look, if you're a Mana Fan and you played Seiken Densetsu 3, when it was called that, and have also played the Trials of Mana remake: you're gonna like this game. If you like real time combat JRPGs at all and just want a comfy game to sit down with for ~60 hours, you're gonna like this game. If you're a nitpicker who is bothered by lack of polish in certain areas or games that are "good but flawed", you *might* like this game. I loved my time with Visions of Mana and had pretty much non-stop fun, but even I understand where its flaws lie.

Gameplay:
This is not an open-world game: it's a mostly linear JRPG with some large areas that feel like little open worlds. You can branch out and do certain things in these open areas in any order, and get bogged down by side-quests at your leisure, but the game is ultimately a straight shot from plot-point to mandatory place.
The core combat of the game is genuinely pretty fantastic. It's real time with AI party members but you can quickswap to them as expected of a Mana game. There's no co-op or multiplayer of any kind sadly, but that doesn't diminish the core fun. It's limited initially, and the game is very careful to add new systems one at a time. Eventually you have to make judgment calls on when to spend multiple sorts of "limit breaks" tied to 2 meters and how specifically to build in regards to each of those: with some interesting strategic trade-offs. For example, you may want to equip the Vessel of Water onto a party member for the class they gain access to, but then you fight a boss that's immune to water and it makes the Vessel's combat utility completely nullified: now you could switch to a different class but that might come with other downsides that outweigh the upsides for you, lots of give-and-take systems with opportunity cost like that. The accessorizing and general character building is also satisfying: and it opens up significantly in a cool way in the post-game. It's not all good though: the camera is atrocious at many points and you can't freely rotate the camera if you use lock-on... leading to some annoyance. There's also some slight balance issues with the really strong stuff, and you'd need to self-impose limits to keep the game challenging. Lastly there's definitely too many side-quests overall and most (but not all) of them are pretty repetitive and boring, but not so much that I didn't complete them all.

Graphics:
This is easily the best-looking game in the series and it has some jaw-dropping particle effects and attack animations in combat. Field and environment graphics are mostly good, especially at a distance, but there are examples of pretty ugly and low-res textures on lots of things if you look hard enough. All of the cutscenes are in-engine so they show your equipment and costumes, as well as the super-detailed character models, but this can contrast glaringly against the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ blurry brick texture on the castle wall behind you: Overall good but showing a distinct and distracting lack of polish, Faces look great but facial animation has some weird misses, like certain bones (especially eyebrows) just aren't animated to move at all... making the character faces fail to convey the intended emotion at pivotal moments. The disconnect between the faces and the voice acting can be jarring.

Music:
The soundtrack is outstanding, absolutely the best part of the game. This game does justice to its predecessors with no fewer than 14 boss themes and tons of fun callbacks to prior Mana games. The 3 composers are Hiroki Kikuta (THE Mana guy), Tsuyoshi Sekito, and Ryo Yamazaki. The important thing to mention right away is that EVERY environment theme which can have enemies in it, has 2 versions of its background music. There's a combat theme that changes some instrumentation and adds new drum tracks, sortof like a "Yoshi theme" from Sunshine. Most of the environment themes are good, and most of the boss themes are great, but the real standouts in this game are the town themes. Each town has such a distinct musical flair and the tracks are very long and masterfully done: Etaern's theme has been stuck in my head for weeks.

Story:
Some people play RPGs for story, and while that's never necessarily been the strongpoint of the Mana games (gameplay first), there's quite a lot going on here in terms of dialogue and cutscene action. The writing is mostly fine, and the plot points are interesting if predictable. The story inevitably treads some series staples like Mana Sword this, Goddess Tree that (it's right there in the thumbnail and title screen) but some of the locations in-between are new and pretty cool. Some parts of this game are EXTREMELY SAD so maybe be warned if you don't necessarily like games that try to make you cry. As is quite common these days, the English dub is not up to snuff relative to the Japanese voices. Most of the main cast performances are fine, with absolute standout work by Morley and Aesh, but then there's Careena who is inexplicably a Texan kind o' guuuurl and whose performance has been memed on considerably. The option to switch to Japanese is there for anyone who wants it (but I liked Careena and her VA grew on me).

Conclusion:
C'mon, real Mana fans already understand that most of us pre-ordered this game. Every single person I know personally, who owns this game, pre-ordered it. We were the target audience and we bought it. If you're reading this review it might be because you are considering getting the game and aren't sure if you want it. I got ~70 hours of very fun gameplay out of Visions of Mana on my quest to 100% achievements, and I did a lot of recording vids and just idling listening to the music as well. I didn't need any convincing to get this game, so I'm not sure how to convince anyone else to get it... well except to ask "do you like having fun?"

I should have written a review long ago. After all, I've played this game for 1,000+ hours and idle'd in its level editor for a few hundred more.

Dustforce DX is the deepest and most technically demanding 2D platformer ever made. It has a momentum based engine where all actions have real weight and consequence, attacks have start-up frames, things are jump and dash-cancellable, and there are tricks measured in how many frames they save. Every level has leaderboards both for score and for raw time, and the community is fiercly competitive and still very active. More importantly, every run on the leaderboards also has a replay embedded. Being able to watch your run (or anyone else's) is not just fun, it's a fantastic learning tool. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, then keep reading.

Dustforce DX will never hold the player's hand. Several people ragequit the third TUTORIAL, and a wide number of the advanced mechanics and workings of the game are never explained in-game. To really master this game and understand everything in it, you need to know other people who play it and/or engage on the subreddit and IRC channel. Even if you do that and arm yourself with knowledge: this game is HARD. When you think you've finally gotten good and beaten the game, you have only just begun because you unlocked "The Difficults". Honestly even getting that far is going to take you a hundred hours at least, because the only way to unlock new levels is to complete easier levels perfectly. I'll explain...

Dustforce DX has 4 main hub areas of one large world (The Nexus). Each hub has 4 baby levels, 4 easy levels, 4 medium levels, and 4 exceedingly hard levels. Each tier of level above the first is locked by a key, and you earn progress toward keys by playing the levels in the tier below. But the only way to get a full key from 1 single level is to get an SS rank. One S is completion: for cleaning all the dust and defeating all the enemies. The other S is Finesse: for never losing your combo from dying, getting hit, or letting it time out. The game doesn't just reward perfection, it demands it if you even want to see all the stock levels.

Now why did I say stock levels you may ask? That's because the true magic of this game is its INTENSELY POWERFUL level editor. Custom Dustforce Maps (it calls them maps instead of levels) are what keep me playing. This is one of several games where the editor gives you every tool the dev had, letting you make stuff on par with, and often exceeding, the quality of the stock game. You have 20 layers to work with, tons of cool props, almost complete RGB color control and control over the %blend of the color PER LAYER, a ♥♥♥♥ ton of props and emitters to place, several things with transparency for awesome effects, and total control over the music and sound effects at every point. The last sentence is very important since this game has a truly amazing soundtrack. Free control over the music in the editor doubles as a sound test, even if you don't enjoy making maps. The nice thing about the leaderboards and replays is that you can watch everyone playing your map once you publish it. That adds another level of enjoyment to the process, a feature missing from several other games with level editors.

There are almost no restrictions on what you can place anywhere, allowing the free mixing of themes from the 4 hubs if you have the skill to make it work. The game is easily moddable and the community has several killer spritemods available, one even turns a character into Kirby! There are several different classes of mods both for art and for performance, and they are all easy enough to find on the subreddit. Sadly they aren't integrated into Steam like with many other games. The community also has several third party tools available for more detailed stat-tracking, new kinds of competition, and even a cool TAS community.

In conclusion, Dustforce DX is a great game and one of my all time favorites. It's not easy to get into: indeed you will struggle if you go it alone and it's still very difficult even with friends beside you. You'll get what you put into it. We still learn things about this game every week; the engine is just that deep. A lot of the quirks in this game are things you just won't find anywhere else. When I say that there's no 2D platformer with the complexity of Dustforce... I mean it.