Farentia

Once upon a time there was a mystical land, which was threatened by a two-dimensional villain with a silly name, until a two-dimensional hero with an even sillier name came along and saved the day.

Not that anyone cared, particularly, since they'd seen this sort of thing a thousand times before.

But to absolutely nobody's surprise the evil came back to rub his oily hands together and gloat over the fate of the mystical land. But there wasn't another hero so they had to draft in a pasty-faced kid from another dimension in the form of a badly drawn anime character instead.

For no better reason than it suited the story, this badly drawn anime character had power over all four elements instead of the usual one.

This meant that if he had the appropriate elemental shards he could summon elementals and cast elemental spells like fire bolt in order to do battle with the minions of the evil villain. These, oddly, looked like the ghosts from Pac-Man and felt about as threatening as a badly set jelly dessert.

The first task of our whey-faced hero was to defeat some of these globular minions who were gathered, for no apparent reason at all, in four elemental dungeons. He stood in the corner and summoned some elementals who would march forth and do battle on his behalf.

To his surprise, the mighty saviour found these creatures were even more badly drawn than the jelly-mould monsters and looked like badly stuffed children's plushies.

He was also shocked to find they had different area attacks, because nothing in the tediously confusing tutorial had actually explained that, and actually managed to kill his own minions several times as a result.

Once he got the hang of what was going on, there was a brief period when he started to believe that the different attack patterns were the key to some interesting strategy.

But then he realised that the monsters milled about almost at random, so he couldn't really plan any tactics, and that most levels could be won just by summoning elementals until his shards ran out, then summoning more shards and repeating the process.

But he wanted to be sure, just in case he was missing something. So he waded through this dull and repetitive process through all four elemental dungeons.

Each time he laboured to conquer one he was rewarded with a new skill, which didn't seem to be significantly different from any of the previous skills.

Oh, sometimes one might trap a monster on a square, and some seemed to do extra damage for some obscure and unexplained reason, but mostly they just reduced the life meter of some malformed dessert or other by a random value and offered a new and wholly uninteresting animation or sound effect.

So, as our hero trudged through his Herculean task, some numbers associated with him went up, and he presumed this signified something important, but what really captured his attention was the looming tedium of yet another level, very much like the last level, that he had to overcome.

He had at least turned off the music, which seemed to be on an endless loop of about three seconds, and that was a mercy.

Perhaps that was the real purpose of his mission: to save an unfortunate mystical land from endless tyranny of an irritating melody.

Sadly not, it seemed that just shutting off the sound wasn't enough. And when he discovered that a significant amount of the content offered by this mystical land was actually the same level played over and over on marginally increased difficulty settings, he decided he'd had enough.

And he left, and was never heard from again.