On paper, Visions of Mana seems tailor-made for on-the-go play. The combat doesn’t require complex strings of button mashing, the clearly marked story objectives help orient you even on a small screen, and the many side quests are perfect fodder for pick-up-and-play sessions. The remakes of the first three Mana games are all on mobile devices (even if some ports aren’t preferable to play), so the series has a history of portable-friendly play too. Everything’s in place! So how does Visions of Mana fare on the Steam Deck?
In short, Visions of Mana runs…adequately on Steam Deck. It looks good enough after you fiddle with the settings, and it can hover above 30 frames per second. But you can tell this game wasn’t made for the Deck’s low resolution screen, since the text doesn’t scale well and looks kind of ugly (albeit readable). Still, it’s a passable experience, and I personally enjoyed killing time while I laid in my bed doing side questing on the Deck. I wouldn’t recommend making it your primary platform for playing the game, though, especially if you have access to any other system that can run it.
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To really enjoy Visions of Mana on Steam Deck, check out these tips below to optimize your experience.
How to fix Visions of Mana not opening on Steam Deck
This might sound obvious, but one of the most important prerequisites for enjoying Visions of Mana on Steam Deck is being able to open it at all. If the game refuses to load when you start it, give these troubleshooting steps a try.
1: Before you hit the “Play” button, press the cog icon on the right side of the screen. Select Properties, and then select Compatibility. Check the box that says “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool,” and then select GE-Proton7-5.3. This is the option that worked for me, but you can give the other iterations of Proton a shot if that doesn’t work (or if a newer option becomes available after we publish this guide).
2: If the compatibility modes don’t work, or you see an error message saying “DX12 is not supported on your system,” you may need to reinstall the game. To do this, select that cog icon again, choose Manage, and select Uninstall. You should see the green Play button replaced by the big blue Install button. Try running the game using the compatibility tools again and it should hopefully work.
The best Steam Deck settings for playing Visions of Mana in handheld mode
Now that you’ve got Visions of Mana running on your system, you’ll notice that it offers limited graphical settings in the options menu. Your resolution is unfortunately locked to 1280x720, which doesn’t quite fit the 1280X800 resolution of your screen. This means you’ll have to deal with black bars as you play (pictured above), and there’s nothing we can do about that.
Only two options here really impact the game’s performance. Since the game’s already running at a low resolution, I found setting AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 to Quality and Graphics settings to High produced the best results. Some areas in Visions of Mana can cause dips to the frame rate, so you may prefer to adjust that first option from Quality down to Balanced to gain some extra frames. These settings should still preserve the game’s visual splendor on the Steam Deck’s small screen, even if it doesn’t compete with its console counterparts.
You could consider limiting the Frame Rate to 30 in the interest of saving battery life, but I’d personally recommend a shorter and smoother play session, unless you don’t intend to actually fight anything.
The best Steam Deck settings for playing Visions of Mana in docked mode
I’ll be real with you: I don’t recommend playing Visions of Mana with the Steam Deck docked and connected to a TV.
At 1080p, Visions of Mana seriously chugs on the Steam Deck. Frames drop so dramatically that the 20 FPS of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 will seem smooth by comparison. This can be fixed by setting the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 to Performance and the Graphics settings to Low (pictured above), but this leaves the game looking horrid. Sure, you get normal looking text, but is that worth completely eliminating the game’s aesthetic?
You’re better off sticking to the 1280x720 resolution option and reusing the handheld mode graphical settings. However, when this image is blown up on a big TV, Visions of Mana winds up looking predictably blurry. It works, but you’re probably better off just trying to stream the game from a dedicated PC if you have one.
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