Visions of Mana is exactly what it should be: mid-budget RPG comfort food

Visions of Mana.

It took an entire hour for Visions of Mana to click with me.

I’ve poured a lot of time into Square Enix action RPGs lately. Between Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and even 2020’s Trials of Mana, I expected Visions of Mana to play similarly when I demoed it this month. Yet what I saw was the opposite: Combat is slow-paced, even though enemies can bombard you with rapid attacks marked by AoEs. There’s no combo system, despite the fact that Trials of Mana, a 3D remake of a 1995 Super Famicom game, had one. I struggled as I initially tried to button mash my way to victory, which only slowly whittled away at the HP bars of basic enemies at best.