Rise of Mana[b] is a Japanese action role-playing video game developed by Goshow for iOS, Android and PlayStation Vita.

The story focuses on two characters, an angel and a demon, who are cast down to the mortal world in the midst of a battle and are forced to share a body in order to survive.

The art director was series newcomer Hiroyuki Suzuki, while the character, monster and others designs were done by Taiki, Ryota Murayama and Haccan respectively.

The music was composed by a team led by Tsuyoshi Sekito, while the theme song was written and performed by singer-songwriter Kokia.

Each quest consumes a part of the player characters' "mental energy", a stamina meter that refills as real-world time passes.

[1][4] The story takes place in a variation of the Mana high fantasy setting, and is divided between the human and the spirit realms.

[c][6] The two are forced to confront agents sent from the spirit realm by each side to retrieve them: the archangel knight Vibra and the warrior demon Toryu.

After their final confrontation, Foron willingly disperses after she and Mana explain why they summoned the Champions: to bring them together through circumstance and pave the way for peace between the Rasta and Daruka.

After the initial release of Rise of Mana, Yagi was responsible for the main scenario alongside Oyamada and post-launch content producer Naofumi Takuma.

The development team initially thought of creating custom middleware, but the rebuild needed would have taken a whole year, threatening the project's existence.

In search of suitable middleware, the team contacted Fixer, who offered them the use of multiple options including Photon Server.

Trying out Photon Server, all the problems faced by the developers were resolved within a two-month period, and the middleware's inbuilt security structure and specification match with the game persuaded the project's engineers to greenlight its use.

[4] During the early development stage, the team thought it would be fun to re-create the multiplayer elements in Secret of Mana.

Due to the use of Photon Server, additional player characters could be fully rendered rather than appearing as ghost-like transparent helpers.

When the project was proposed to Sony, the Unity technology built into the Vita was fairly new and did not make full use of the platform's processing power.

The team needed cooperation from both Sony and Unity Technologies to optimize the engine so the game could run on the new platform.

[23] Yamanaka acted as sound director, while poro@lier created the piano arrangements for both "Rising Sun" and the game's theme song.

[24] Seiken Densetsu: Rise of Mana Original Soundtrack was released on April 24, 2014 through Square Enix's music label.

[23] Andrew Barker of RPGFan was cautiously positive about the album: he described "Believe in the Spirit" as being "hit-or-miss" for different listeners while evoking memories of earlier Mana games.

[26] Chris Greening of Video Game Music Online gave the album a 2.5-star rating out of five: he was most positive about the tracks from the guest composers like Ito and Shimomura.

While he praised Sekito for moving away from his traditional musical style, he felt that the result was fairly mixed, with some tracks lacking the proper emotional drive and others "falling flat".

"Believe in the Spirit" was praised for avoiding J-pop elements and sticking with its Celtic style, being favorably compared to the theme songs of Xenogears.

Overall, Green felt that, while it had good production value and was substantially better than other mobile game soundtracks, but lacked the emotional impact of previous Mana titles in the majority of its tracks.

Famitsu generally praised several aspects, but found the item management and weapon structures confusing, saying that it did not live up to the legacy of the Mana series.

[1] Reviewing the Vita port, Famitsu praised the game's general ease of play and use of the Mana series, but the button layout was criticized.

The writer noted that the game should be played on more advanced mobiles despite recommendations, as the graphics and performance suffered on older smartphone models.

Christopher Allison, writing for tech website Tech in Asia, was highly positive about the game, saying his last experience of this kind was when playing the 1998 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: he greatly enjoyed the battle system despite the touch controls sometimes working against the player, and referred to the environments as "wonderfully drawn".

[29] Shaun Musgrave of Touch Arcade, in a preview of the game, echoed other reviewers' opinions on the graphics and gameplay, and hoped that Square Enix would both handle it wisely and bring it overseas.

[2] Kerry Brunskill, in an article for Nintendo Life, referred to the story as "engaging", and again held similar sentiments as other reviewers about the graphics and gameplay.