he problems are clear from the outset. Before you are even mindlessly hacking away at mobs of lemming-like enemies, your character is introduced to you via a short, confusing, and poorly scripted cinematic – “short” being the closest thing to a compliment I can give them. Honestly, the story is all but nonexistent. You practically have to hunt it down. At various points in the game you come upon shrines where you can go to sleep and enter a strange astral-like plane. This is where you interact with the one or two other characters who make up the entirety of the game’s cast, but you may as well just sleep through these segments yourself they are so boring.

Circle of Doom’s combat might have you curling up for a nap too, since the game’s featureless move list requires that you carelessly jam on the A and X buttons like it was still 1985. Not that I have a problem with keeping things simple, but this style of combat gets tedious fast. The action/RPG genre has made great strides to evolve combat systems in recent years, and Circle of Doom does everything in its power to buck this trend.

Learning new abilities is a rather annoying process. First you have to talk with your mentor about which ones you want to learn. You can only learn two at a time, but for each ability, you must first kill a certain number of enemies. Where you can find these foes – or even which ones you will face in the next area – are never clear, which makes it all the more annoying that you lose any progress you’ve made if you switch out abilities mid-process. Once you meet these requirements, you still have to travel back to the dream plane and talk with your teacher before you can even use your new skill. The whole ordeal is annoying and time consuming. But, perhaps this process was implemented to discourage players from learning abilities, because most of them actually seem quite useless.

After you play it for a while the game starts to grow on you – like a parasite. You get used to dealing with its annoyances, but you know you’re not having fun. Case in point: the game’s synthesis system, which allows you to combine items and weapons to make new ones with different enhancements. The system is confusing and never really explained well, plus I always found plenty of stuff at the store that was just as good – if not better – than what I made. In fact, you’ll have to buy some things from the store, since the loot gained from enemies is usually pretty junky, and sometimes can’t even be used by your character.

I may sound like a whiney little child who’s complaining that his snack just fell on the floor, but all these tiny little issues add up to destroy the experience. And the saddest part is that Circle of Doom’s problems all seem so frustratingly obvious the first time you see them that it makes you wonder why they were never changed. I know the development goal for Circle of Doom was to make a game that was pure fun and silliness, and it looks like the final product came close, because it’s laughable.