Summer is drawing to a close for me, but hopefully I shan't neglect my gaming. That's my hope, but who is to really say such a thing until I find out how brutal my classes will be. For now, let's focus on the games, though!
Title: The Guided Fate Paradox
Released: 2013
Story: Renya is an unlucky high school student. He's never won anything in his life and is known for unfortunate things happening to him. This all changed one day when, thanks to a lottery, he won the ultimate prize: to be God. Kidnapped by the angel posing at the lottery attendant, Renya is whisked away to Celestia and given the task of regulating the Fate Revolution Circuit (FRC), a massive machine made by a previous angel to help God handle the numerous wishes and prayers sent to the heavens.
Wow. Just wow. Right off the bat, the main character is given an immense burden, despite how it may seem. We are introduced to the other angels besides the primary assistant, Lilliel; there is Galtion, Rakiel, Kuroiel, Cheriel, Lanael, and the recluse Neliel. Renya's job is to dive into the FRC into the Copy World, a data version of the real world (or Original World) surrounding the person he's granting the wish of. In this way, Renya can defeat enemies in a strategy rpg combat system (similar to a dungeon crawling game like Digimon World 3 or Chocobo's Dungeon) and alter the fate of the believer in the Original World.
Graphics: There's not much of a change between this and other Nippon Ichi games in terms fo character designs. Traditional anime-style characters act as the cast, and while every Copy World is unique, the amount of times you have to dive into one for the Lessons (the game is divided into these much like most of the other games are, like the different maps in Disgaea) can lessen the unique look each world has. The maps of each floor are randomly generated and put together, loaded with items, traps, and monsters and retain the imagery of the Original World's theme.
What I do like is that, in the cutscenes where conversations take place, the portraits of the characters talking gradually change to convey the body language when they're speaking their specific lines. This is something that I usually see with an entirely different image being placed up instead, but this game goes about actually having the character change their pose visually before starting their lines.
Music: While most of the game does have decent music, the one song that really starts to grate on my nerves would be the music you hear when handling the shopkeepers. As with most strategy games handled by NIS, you have the chance to change music, but this only alters what songs are playing while you are in the home base. The main theme, God and the Illusory Garden, which is shown in the beginning video was very nice to listen to, though, so I'll let the other bit slip.
Overall: As you can expect with Nippon Ichi, the game is very underrated by the majority of the American market due to low advertising. But this isn't necessarily something that NIS suffers under: instead, it makes itself known as a niche game developer over here and those who enjoy RPGs or have previously enjoyed other NIS games can be comforted with the fact that it combines mechanics of its previous games while making each stand out. I'm unfortunately only up to the sixth lesson, and it's starting to whip my butt. I was never that great at Chocobo's Dungeon for the Wii because of it resetting everything, so guess I'll see how well I can do when I venture back into it. I do like that the dungeons each have their own theme AND a thematic danger to them. The world of the first lesson is straightforward, and then when you get to the second, it takes on a different approach to the scenery and its mechanics. When you move to the third, the entire map gets a different layout, and this pattern repeats. This definitely makes each map memorable.
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