Rise of the Kasai is a bad, bad game. Also, it is dumb. Its narrators blather endlessly about noble warriors and evil cults and oracle trees whose branches hang with the Fruit of Knowledge, but you will have no trouble completing the game if you ignore all this and instead concentrate on mashing the attack button. It is a festival of moronic fantasy clichés wrapped around an underwhelming collection of beat-um-up video game conventions. You will not like it.

You may find moments that impress you, however. The back of the box boasts that Rise of the Kasai is a collaboration between Hollywood animation talent and the best the game industry has to offer. This is clearly not 100% true, as the game stinks, but the animation sequences in the opening titles and in the cinematic cut-scenes really are glorious and beautiful.

The first scenes are wispy and only half-rendered. They look a bit like National Film Board shorts from the late '60s and early '70s. You can see every stroke of the animator's pen. Edges are soft and vague, and they shimmer and wander and come to life themselves. Sometimes it is more interesting to watch the lines that make up a sword, dancing and scribbling and flickering, than it is to pay attention to the sword itself, which is usually just headed for some poor sot's neck. Every frame of these animations is a complex and chaotic and sophisticated thing. There is real art here.

It is some time in the past, in a fantasy world that looks more Asian than most video game fantasy worlds. Many people are born with something called the Mark of Kri, which is a birthmark that is also a sort of recipe for an evil spell. There is a whole class of warriors whose job is to defend the people who bear the mark, presumably to stop the evil spells from falling into the wrong hands. As you have already guessed, there are wrong hands all over the place, most notably attached to the arms of the Kasai, an evil cult committed to destruction and world domination.

As video game back stories go, it's not bad. Unfortunately for us, it is spooned out in incomprehensible little bursts of booming, portentous narration without any regard for either plot or character. We learn a little bit about something that happened 20 years ago, then we see a dabble from the present, then we're back in the past again, and we like the cartoons, really we do, but we have no idea what's going on.

It doesn't matter. The Kasai may well be evil and the Mark of Kri may well be powerful, but wherever we find ourselves we can always count on the attack button to get us out of a jam. We take the role of a fierce warrior and wander into battle. Bad guys cluster around us, waving sticks and swords. To fight, we tilt the right-hand joystick, which causes a ray of glowing orange smoke to project out of us, accompanied by a rumbly farting sound. Rotating the joystick left or right moves the ray, as if it were the second hand of a clock. When it sweeps over a bad guy, a little icon appears over his head, telling us which button we must use to attack him. We press the designated button repeatedly, the bad guy collapses in a heap of his own entrails, and we move on to the next bad guy.

Rise of the Kasai does not know itself very well. It rewards the most idiotic kind of pounding on the controller, but it repeatedly interrupts the action to tell us how important it is to learn to execute elaborate combinations of button-taps. It suggests that we sneak up on guards and cut their throats before they can sound the alarm, but even if the horns do go off, all we have to do is mash the attack button until all the reinforcements are dead. It is fun for a while, this feeling of unstoppable power, but then it gets silly and then it gets boring.

We find ourselves wishing we could fast-forward through the game play to get to the next animation sequence. Usually it works the other way.