Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis
is a role-playing video game developed by Gust Co. Ltd. in 2007 for the PlayStation 2. The game is the ninth entry to Gust's Atelier series, and incorporates elements of standard turn-based combat and alchemy. A PlayStation Portable version was released which included additional features. Gameplay Mana Khemia shares many common elements with its predecessors, the Atelier Iris trilogy. At the core of the game is alchemy through which the player can create weapons, armor, usable items, and complex ingredients for these recipes. The player is required to gather core materials through field exploration, spoils of combat, or by purchasing them in the shops. Each item carries fundamental properties that include elemental and special abilities, and character stat improvements, that can be infused into equipment. Through the creation of new items, these properties can transfer over into the new item. A new "alchemy wheel" allows the player to adjust the quality of each ingredient as it is added to the mix, for better or worse, in order to alter the final item's properties as well. Recipes for items are learned over the course of the game by finding or buying recipe books, conversing with characters, or can be extrapolated from existing recipes by altering the ingredients list. When in the field, the player can opt to avoid encounters with monsters by running and jumping over them, but also may attempt to strike first to go into battle. Mana Khemia uses a turn-based system similar to previous Atelier Iris games. Once the player has more than three characters in the party, he or she can then have up to three characters in reserve; these characters can switch in during a normal turn, or be called in at the end of one character's attack to provide an additional blow, or be called in to replace a character about to be attacked. The swapped out characters require a number of turns to recover before being called in again. As the player becomes able to inflict more damage, they can activate "Burst Mode" that temporarily increases the damage from each attack; this mode rewards the player with a large number of hits. Additionally, about mid-game, Burst Mode can lead to a "Finishing Burst" that requires the player to meet a certain condition while Burst Mode is activated, such as striking with each team member, or healing a certain amount of damage; this allows for a special powerful finishing move to be unleashed by one of the characters. Both alchemy and combat are necessary to grow the characters. 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