The Kingdowm Under Fire series can’t get it quite right with me. I wanted to play Kingdom Under Fire because it looked good at I heard it was an action RPG. Then I played it at my friend’s house and found out it had Real Time Strategy elements I had to command people to do stuff. So that was fun for about two seconds and then I was done. I don’t like taking time out of my schedule of school fools on the battle field in order to tell other people what to do. Next there was Kingdom Under Fire 2. I dismissed this game out right for being a complete Real Time Strategy game. Next, Ninety Nine Nights. Now we’re talking! I don’t have to tell any one what to do. All I have to do is set up my forces. then let them automatically do their thing while I go in there and lay out a beating on everybody. This is totally fun for the first couple of stages then you realize that that’s all there is a couple of stages per character that you have to play over and over until you level up to max, find the good weapon, and take out the last boss. That got totally boring real fast, but at least it had a little story I could get behind. Finally comes Kingdom Under Fire: Circle Of Doom. Here we are! I’m all alone. I’m leveling up. There’s some awesome looking stages, bosses, the whole bit except for one thing. I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. There’s some sort of nonsensical light and dark story that suggests things for quests when I sleep, but that’s about it. If this game were about a story I would have forgotten it twenty minutes after I started, but it’s not about a story it’s totally about loot. Lott, loot, loot! I kill all the monsters and they drop tons of loot that I get and maximize my character with then I get to the selling idol, sell my junk and buy even better loot to maximize my character. Then, after I fought the first boss last night it dropped a sick armor and I was like oh that’s cool. Then all of a sudden it started raining loot!!! There was a time limit on how much loot I could loot! The whole equipment loot scheme smacks of Diablo and Record Of The Lodoss War, but I don’t care because i like those game and I like this game. If it keeps on going this way I’m going to be pleasantly surprised. So far Blue Side’s made a good, fun game to play. If they had beefed up the story some more it would have been a great game. Hopefully, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle Of Doom 2 will be a great game.

I finally finished Circle Of Doom and thank goodness that monkey’s off my back. What? That’s right. It ended up totally sucking towards the end. The one thing they were getting right, which was the constant acquisition of marvelous loot and equipment ended 3/4th’s of the way through the game and turned the game into a constant grind and that’s it. I’ve outlined my problem with Blueside games before. They fail in critical areas in every game they make and the failure of Circle Of Doom was that it had the thinnest most ridiculously stupid story I’ve ever heard. I played as Kendal and it was my job to preserve the Age Of Light from turning into the Age of Darkness while stopping myself from being consumed with madness. In theory that sounds kind of cool , but with absolutely no cut scenes of any sort it’s really hard to care about that. So I didn’t. Blueside expects you to read the manual and get all pumped up about what your doing. Sorry Blueside, nobody reads the manual that’s what in game movies are for. So I could care less weither Kendal lived or died or what I was doing or why I was doing it, but the one thing I did care about which was constantly gathering sweet loot stopped along the way and I stopped caring all together, but I didn’t want to waste my money so for 26 bucks I got 18 hours of play out of one character. That’s an alright exchange, but I’m not going back to play the other 5 characters. That would be completely counter productive. So, as of Circle Of Doom I’ve had it with Blueside. Even though they announced Ninety Ninety Nine Nights 2 I’m done with them and I’m not going to play it because it’s just going to be another thin story with disheartening backtracking and grinding that I don’t care about just like Ninety Nine Nights 1. Here’s a pro tip in case you, for some reason want to play Circle of Doom. Don’t waste your healing items while grinding through the map. You can die anywhere and respawn and all the enemies you killed will still be dead and all the enemies you harmed will stay injured. This lowers your chances of synthesizing good weapons and armor, but synthesizing was a stupid part of the game and totally useless when the game was giving you awesome weapons and armor in the first 3/4th’s of it. Another pro tip is don’t waste allocating any points you get from leveling up on HP use the points on SP and Luck. You can’t fight without SP anyway, and the weapons and armor give you tons of HP add ons. So there you go. If you want to play Circle Of Doom for whatever reason there’s some pro tips for you. I’m never playing it again and moving on to the media darling Odin Sphere. I hope it can wash the bad taste of Circle Of Doom out of my mouth.