The Guided Fate Paradox - This game is a sequel to Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger VS Darkdeath Evilman that copies most of it, and adds a few bad ideas of its own.
ZHP is a roguelike where you play as a super sentai hero on a mission to defeat Darkdeath Evilman. The writing is by NIS, which means bad humor and nonsensical dialogues that go on for way too long. I don't enjoy their style so I skipped it after the first third of the game. ZHP had two interesting mechanics:
- You could see where enemies had vision.
Tiles where enemies could see are colored in white, until you step inside them,
at which point they turn red and the monster starts chasing you. If another monster stepped inside the red zone, it would also become alert of your presence. This allowed for some basic stealth where you avoid enemies by going around or between their vision zones.
- Each weapon and armor has a special attack or attribute. Most would give a special attack that hit certain tiles with an elemental attack. Other would change positions for you or the enemy. Some allowed you to eat equipment or avoid traps. You have five slots, so you have to pick and choose.
Sadly those two mechanics were undermined by:
- Poor dungeon design. You don't need to sneak around when the entire level has no walls. You can't sneak around when rooms are super tiny and corridors are one tile wide.
- Stats were far more important than special attacks. It wasn't a situation where grinding was optional to overcome challenges, you pretty much had to grind monsters with levels lower than you and then you so you could rush the boss. This was mainly because leveling had a drastic impact on the HP, so if you didn't do it everything would one shot you.
The Guided Fate Paradox is the same game with a new coat of paint. Whatever changes made are only for the worse:
- Reused dungeon designs. Stealth is still mostly useless.
- There's barely any items drops within the dungeon. Without items you lose, so to compensate for it the developers made it easier to bring equipment from outside the dungeon in the form of temporary item sets. This means you don't get random item combinations, with random special attacks, which were vital to creating cool unique situations in ZHP. ZHP had the classic roguelike situation where you find yourself in a hard fight with a couple of items, and have to stop and think how to use them to get out of it. The Guided Fate Paradox removed it by removing randomness.
In addition, those sets you created can be grinded and improved. They could be lost on death, so you had to save scum. To quote a
review:
Reviewer said:
This can be incredibly frustrating when the game gives you the ability to level up equipment after continued use through the blacksmith, and hours of progress can be lost in a single swoop. This can obviously be avoided by following the golden rule in roguelikes: save often, as I was reloading the game a lot.
Reviewer said:
the golden rule in roguelikes: save often
Vile scum.
The game gives you a way to deal with it later on, but save scumming is still the proper way to play the game for various reasons.
- Even more story than the first game. The first game had maybe a 1/5 ratio of game and story. This one is closer to 1/2. I thought it was bad in the first game. This one is way way worse.
I liked ZHP. It had good ideas, even if the execution wasn't good enough. The Guided Fate Paradox is the same game, only worse. There's no reason to play it.
