Fun story with likable characters, but the battles are too long and too frequent. And...where are the cinematics?
All that being said, I really did enjoy this game a lot. The story itself is somewhat typical, a bunch of kids form camaraderie as they go through alchemy school together. We follow the story of Vayne, a mysterious boy who doesn't remember his past but seems to have a talent for alchemy. He joins the workshop of Flay, a delinquent who is one year older, along with two other students his own age, Jess and Nikki (the obligatory spunky cat-girl). The interactions between the characters as I watched them grow had me smiling quite a few times, and it felt like I was playing through an interactive anime (great for me, because I love the stuff).
The alchemy portion of this game is expansive, with a huge list of items to be crafted. I would go fight for a while and gather supplies, and then spend ridiculous amounts of time standing in the workshop just making whatever items I could. The only annoyance is the fact that healing/status/attack items are made in the workshop, but weapons/armor/accessories have to be made downstairs in the Athanor room…so you could find yourself running back and forth a lot trying to get all the ingredients together for one thing or another. Every new item made fits into each character's "Grow Book," Mana Khemia's level-up system. Fighting gains you AP, which you then use to purchase new abilities and stat increases for each character. The system is very reminiscent of FFX's battle grid, and I think it works out pretty well.
Battles are not random; instead, every area has red slime-looking blobs running around, which represent monsters. If you use Vayne's sword slash to attack one, you can get the drop on them when the battle starts, but sometimes they run into you on their own. I found battling to be somewhat repetitive…the monsters frequently seemed like they had outrageously high HP compared to their strength, so battles take forever, no matter how strong your characters are. The more time you spend battling, the less time you can spend gathering before it gets dark and all the enemies get even stronger, so I tried to avoid them when possible unless I was AP-hunting. Once you get a fourth character they introduce the ability to switch characters in and out of battle on the fly, which made fighting more fun and added some strategy elements to the whole thing.
Overall, I had a great time playing this game. At first the story was pretty slow, but they provided little tidbits between chapters to hint toward the fact that there was a deeper underlying plot waiting to be uncovered. The characters are each quirky in their own way, but I didn't find them to be very unique as far as Japanese games are concerned. I recommend it if you like JRPG-style storytelling. Just don't expect anything to knock your socks off as far as the graphics go.