Lost Dimension character breakdown: Mana Kawai and Nagi Shishiouka

After my previous Lost Dimension character breakdown of Himeno and Toya, this week it’s the turn of Mana Kawai and Nagi Shishiouka.  As with Himeno and Toya, these two are fairly opposed in terms of the skills they bring to battle.  Mana is an eccentric close-up powerhouse, while Nagi is a highly mobile and evasive character with some longer-range attacks.  Let’s look at the pros and cons of each.

Mana is one of my favourite characters in the game, because of her direct approach to combat; get in there and beat them senseless!

That’s my own default approach to most games, so she’s a more natural fit for me than some of the others.  Here are my favourite of her skills:

·Barrage: This is available quite early on Mana’s skill tree and is certainly one of the most powerful skills that feature in the early part of the game.

It inflicts plenty of damage for a reasonable outlay of GP, so you’ll be relying on this a lot when starting out.

·Mounting Rage: Since Mana is best utilised in CQB (due to her short range, high strength and good resistance to melee attacks) Mounting Rage helps take advantage of the high likelihood of her getting hit by enemies.

Every time she’s hit she’ll do higher damage in the next turn.  This can stack up well and make life tricky for tougher enemies.

·Earth Crash: Mana’s finest area attack, although it’s not going to get unlocked until midway through the game at best

It’s a hard hitter and has good range, although it only ever centres around her.  Also, she punches the ground, which always looks epic.

·Runner’s High: Mana’s low movement makes her a natural candidate for other characters to defer their turns to.  Each time you defer to her she gets bonus strength, more hit resistance and becomes harder to hit.

It's well worth utilising this skill, but you may have to plan wisely to unlock it on your first couple of runs.

Now let’s look at Nagi.  She’s a very fast mover which makes her perfect for performing tasks like seeking out items, flipping switches to open doors, or going out to find those pesky hidden Tips files.

More so than most characters, I’d recommend unlocking as many skills as you can rather than levelling them up.  This will allow you to unlock her passive skills, Zero Gravity and G-Force which boost her best stats even higher.  Here are my favourite of Nagi’s skills:

·Assassin’s Blade: This makes an already long-range character even deadlier at a distance.  It has EXCEPTIONAL reach and hits hard.

·Dive: This is my go-to skill for Nagi.  It’s available early, has 10 levels, is cheap and – best of all – can’t be countered by the enemy.  This makes it great to initiate a flurry of assist attacks against powerful enemies with zero comeback.

I often find myself using Nagi to rush enemies with assists in this way.

·Thousand Knives: This is my favourite of Nagi’s area attacks.  While Dragon Dive hits hard and wide, it must be centred on a particular enemy, which often means you won’t be able to hit all enemies in a large group.

Thousand Knives avoids that problem, so that’s what I use most.

·Neutron Wall: If you find Nagi at a loose end – say, when she’s heading back towards the action after whizzing off to collect a distant item – then this is a good skill to use, as it makes her even harder to hit than she already is.

It’s always nice to make the most of those ‘wasted’ turns! ^^

So, there you have it: Mana and Nagi covered. They’re two very opposite but useful characters who I use an awful lot.  In particular, Nagi’s high movement is a great asset and both characters' ‘survivablility’ up close makes them great for rushing enemies when assists are available.

Next time I’ll be looking at two characters who are some of the most interesting to use in the whole game: Sojiro and Zenji.  See you then!

(Blog written by Ghostlight Ltd. All screenshots are taken from the PS3 version of Lost Dimension.)