Visions of Mana looks cute and casual on the surface, but underneath lies some surprisingly deep team building. Each of the five characters can eventually equip one of eight classes, each with their own Elemental Plot invested in with Elemental Points. Unfortunately, even though spells learned by one class can carry over to another, you absolutely won’t have enough Elemental Points to learn everything at once. Not a big deal, as long as the game gives you a way to respec your Elemental Plots, right?
Visions of Mana does have a way to respec your characters, but you shouldn’t count on this when building your characters. The consumable item Goddess Scales allows you to reset a character’s Elemental Plot progression, but this does not show up in bulk until Chapter Seven. For context, Chapter Seven is the start of the game’s final act, so you’ll have already seen most of the main story content by this point. Additionally, this is only a one-use item, so you can’t use these willy-nilly to test new builds. You’ll want to plan exactly how you want to respec a character before you use one of these.
That said, I strongly recommend holding off on using Goddess Scales until you clear the main story in Visions of Mana. If you want to know why, let’s get into the nitty gritty of how Visions of Mana progresses in its post-game.
Where to find Goddess Scales in Visions of Mana
As mentioned above, Goddess Scales won’t appear in Visions of Mana until the late game. You’ll likely first encounter this item by opening treasure chests, which are thankfully marked right on your map screen. By the time you’ve obtained all eight elementals, you should be able to collect every treasure chest you see (save maybe chests hidden in ruins, though even those should be feasible by this point). By my count, I was able to obtain five Goddess Scales this way.
The other source of Goddess Scales comes from the Grizzly Exchange. You know, the shop run by the Dudbear that goes “Badu badudu bub.” Starting in Chapter Seven, you can purchase five Goddess Scales for 20 Grizzly Syrups each. Then, once you enter the post-game content after Chapter Nine, you can purchase an additional five Goddess Scales.
By the post-game, I had found fifteen Goddess Scales in total. That’s three respecs per character, or five respecs for your main team if you don’t use anyone else. As far as I can tell, there are no ways to grind for Goddess Scales outside of replaying the game all over via New Game Plus. While this should offer enough chances for you to customize your team exactly how you want, you still want to be careful before using these.
Why you should wait until the postgame until you use Goddess Scales
Throughout most of the main story of Visions of Mana, you’ll have access to the first two tiers of each character’s Elemental Plot. If you explore the world and gather Elementite as they become available, you should have plenty of Elemental Points to experiment with different classes and obtain most of the spells that each character can natively learn. Only in Chapter Seven will you start obtaining each character’s third tier of the Elemental Plot, and by this point you should feel generally decided on which classes each character can learn. Maybe your build isn’t as optimized as you like, but you should fare well if you only focus on maxing out the classes your party currently mains.
The big thing here is that Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine consist of the game’s final dungeon and final boss respectively. There isn’t a ton of game left once you start finding Goddess Scales.
After you beat the final boss, you’ll unlock the post-game of Visions of Mana. Visit the Dudbear’s Grizzly Exchange again, and not only can you purchase additional Goddess Scales, you can buy the Tonics to unlock each character’s final tier of their Elemental Plots for a total of 100 Grizzly Syrups. Max out the class of any character’s Elemental Plot, and, surprise, it turns out your base class can equip any of the skills of any class you’ve maxed out.
That’s right, you functionally have cross-classing now, and you’ll need to respec every character to get the most out of this system. Instead of grabbing helpful skills from any line of the Elemental Plot, you’ll want to reinvest all your points into two or three classes to make builds that can take on the post-game superbosses.
If you already respecced everyone in Chapter Seven, you should still have two more chances to respec your party in your pocket. But this leaves you short on chances to adjust your builds, especially if you want to rethink your party after finding out a superboss resists every element in the game.
To be fair, Visions of Mana doesn’t sport a terribly robust post-game. If you want to use a Goddess Scale before this point, it’s not the end of the world. But when faced with the hardest content in the entire game, you’ll feel happy to have that extra security in case you need to rethink your team. Make an extra save file after the postgame to be safe!
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