In the Amazing American Circus, there are fifteen different types of circus performer you can have, and you can bring three of them to any given circus performance, which is a card-battling RPG where the enemies are audience members you have to impress and who boo you on their turn. The mechanics are kind of thinly attached to the theme, but it’s a unique theme and the mechanics are still good, so I like it.
When I say the mechanics are good, though, there is a major hole in them, just one that’s luckily easy to ignore: There’s fifteen classes and basically no reason to care about more than three of them. You start with a juggler, an aerialist, and a clown, and you can recruit new performers at each town you visit. There’s three of the same class, so when you find a class you don’t have, you can pick out one whose starting hand of five cards is closer to the build you’re going for. Performers gain XP from shows, but leveling up gives you extra cards or upgraded cards without changing your limit of 5 cards per performer, and you don’t get any extra HP or anything, so a level 1 performer is completely usable even in the endgame.
However, you don’t get to pick out specific cards when you level up. You get a random selection of three. Since leveling up does take quite a long time, it’s very hard to assemble a build without pulling up the Wiki to see what cards are available and shoot for those…oh, except the Wiki sucks because it’s not a super popular game, so actually when you level up you have to look at the cards in front of you and decide if you want to use a reroll to draw three new ones completely blind. You have limited rerolls per level up (you can unlock more by buying an upgrade, which is theoretically useful, if you know what card you want), so you don’t know if you’re throwing away your best option or fishing for it until you’ve played with that class through multiple level ups.
And since there’s no point where retiring characters is required or even useful, there’s not really any reason to change things up except boredom. There’s more than enough depth to this game to carry it through three or four playthroughs, but once I found my team of Face Changer, Juggler, and Fire Swallower was an effective heavy-attack party, I was reluctant to switch out even after I started maxing the level on some of them. I did eventually switch out Juggler for Snake Charmer because that gave my party a more unified aesthetic (the Juggler looks like just some girl with a dream, which I love, but the Face Changer and Fire Swallower are both really extravagently costumed and the Snake Charmer was more consistent with that, whereas the Juggler looked less like we were an underdog circus with a limited budget and more like we really didn’t like our Juggler and refused to get her a costume). I’m glad to be figuring out a new class instead of just steamrolling through everything with a maxed out party, especially since I can always swap the Juggler back in if I’m ever confronted with a particularly difficult performance, but I would appreciate some more guidance on what these classes actually do and, for that matter, where to find the ones I’m missing. The Wiki doesn’t have complete card lists, but it does have a complete class list, and there’s a One-Man Band? Where?!
What this game is really crying out for is side quests that revolve around and require a specific performer. The game has tons of side quests and they’re great, highlighting cryptids, urban legends, and prominent historical figures of the vaguely 1880 to 1910 time period the game is set in, and they’re the best part of the game. Instead of having performers recruited randomly from towns you visit along the way, the game could’ve used the side quests as an opportunity to recruit specific, named performers with specific classes. A handful of the side quests work this way, or nearly work this way, which makes me think this might’ve been the plan at one point? Having a side quest that required you to use a specific performer for a couple of shows would’ve incentivized the player to get a feel for that class and then make a decision about whether or not to add them to the permanent line-up.
And then, instead of randomly selecting cards on level-up, the performer should be able to get any card they want each level up, including copies of or upgrades to existing cards. Put all the cards in front of the player and let them work out what build they want to go for, and get there within just a few levels. It’s fine if there’s some cards that you can only have a maximum of one of, like the Face Changer’s Dragon Circle, a heavy nuke whose primary downside is that after you play it you have to flip it over to Face of Failure, a terrible card that you play only to get it flipped back around to Dragon Circle (but ideally you’ll play a card like Defensive Change that lets you flip another card in your hand without playing it). This does mean that a performer will probably only spend two or three levels getting new cards (or new copies of existing cards) and then the rest upgrading them, but a lower level cap would be fine and also it would be fine if a performer is expected to have all five cards they add to the deck be upgraded when they hit max level (which is eight in the game as it is).
The Great American Circus is still a pretty great game overall. If you want to explore more classes you can always decide for yourself to swap them out more. In order to see all the classes, you will have to commit to using five in each of the three regions (technically four, but you can’t do the South and the Midwest in the same game, which is annoying), and I didn’t realize I might want to do that until way later in the game, and some better design could’ve fixed that. But it’s not like the game prevents you from fully exploring its mechanical depth. You can just decide to do that.
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