Visions of Mana running in 6DoF VR lets us live out the fantasy of a hybrid future

I’m a big old dreamer, me. I see a thing that I love, like VR, and I like to imagine the best outcomes for it. You know, like Sony actually bringing a new Astrobot to the PS VR2, or say, smaller, lighter, cheaper headsets for all. Obviously I’m disappointed every time – newer headsets seem to be getting impossibly expensive and, well, of course Sony’s gone done a Sony with the PS VR2.

One of my biggest dreams though, is that one day, in the future, every game released would come with a hybrid VR mode. A simple toggle at the start, like Capcom put in Resident Evil 7, that gives players the choice to either experience the game in VR, or enjoy it in flat screen on whatever TV or monitor they choose.

While this dream seems like a distant improbability, we do at least get to enjoy a taster of this fantasy thanks to Praydog’s magical UEVR mod, which lets you convert any UE4 or UE5 game into VR at the click of a button. Sure, not every game runs perfectly and there’s plenty of fiddling that can be done in the mod’s menus to iron out the creases but still, for this week’s VR Corner I was able to play a demo of a game that’s not even fully released yet in both third person and first person VR.

That’s right, this week’s VR Corner subject is the demo for Visions of Mana, the next instalment in the Mana series that is due out at the end of this month. In the video above, you’ll be able to watch me explore the cute and colourful world that Ouka Studios has created and, while this game is best played from a third-person perspective, I discovered a couple of quiet areas that were magnificent to wander around in using first-person VR!

The majority of the many Mana games available have always been played from a top-down or 2.5D perspective, and while Visions of Mana does give you a lovely three-dimensional world to explore, up until now, players have never been able to view the lands of Mana from the eyes of the series protagonists. With the UEVR mod however, I was able to postion the in-game camera so that I could see the world just as this game’s hero, Val sees it. I could inspect everything in close up detail, from his friend’s lovely eyes, and someone else’s gnarly toenails through to a whole host of adorable barnyard and domesticated animals and much, much more. Hell, I even got to experience what it would be like to gallop across some impossibly lush fields on the back of a dog-like Pikul. Torrent, eat your heart out!

The Mana series actually started its life on the Gameboy as a side story to the Final Fantasy franchise but with UEVR there’s nothing final about this VR fantasy. Praydog’s mod allows us to get a peek at what a hybrid future might one day look like and that’s a dream that, I think at least, is well worth dreaming!