So what kinds of unique challenges await you in the Roguelike Pit? Honestly because I haven’t made it too far past the early floors, most of it is about resource management. This makes the Roguelike Pit your grinding area, earning you coins faster to spend on permanent upgrades that can then help you finish the Classic Pit. However, the Roguelike Pit is also a lot more generous with coins, giving you half of what you earned when you die and everything you earned when you live – even if during the run you spent that money on unlocking bonuses or in shops. Because you can’t build your character in the metagame for the Roguelike Pit, you are a lot more dependent on lucky draws in terms of the resources you get access to in order to be able to progress. ![]() In addition to at least one battle, each floor also presents challenges to take on in order to gain access to items or badges that help you along in your run. You always start with 10 HP, 5 FP, no badges, and no partners. In this pit the upgrades you’ve accumulated don’t matter. This is particularly relevant in the Roguelike Pit, the second type of run available in the game. While the combat mechanics, badges, and items function much as they do in Paper Mario 64, the ways you upgrade and level up have been modified in this game to make it function more like a roguelike, building your character up over time by doing repeated runs of the same procedurally-generated content. In addition to the coins you earn, you can also collect star points by completing metagame challenges like getting a certain number of coins collected or buying a certain number of items. I can bring these with me into subsequent runs, making those runs easier increasing my chances of completing the pit on subsequent visits. In my playthrough for example, I found Goombario in the first chest along with a badge for the hammer supercharge. The upgrades you earn in the Classic Pit carry over into future runs of that same pit. If you die again before reaching them, they disappear. If you lose, your drop all your money on the floor where you failed and must make it back to that floor to reclaim your coins. After each 10th floor there is a notable difficulty spike. As you battle you earn coins that you can take back with you to spend on permanent upgrades for your character like a boost to your hammer or jump abilities, the purchase of badges, or upgrading the partner characters you meet as you descend deeper into the Pit. You navigate 9 floors of battles and then on every 10th floor receive a reward for your troubles, as well as an opportunity to duck out and regroup before starting the pit over again. The Classic Pit most closely resembles the Pit of 100 Trials in Thousand-Year Door. My first impressions here are based on two attempts each at both of the games pits: the Classic Pit and the Roguelike Pit. Black Pit is a romhack of Paper Mario 64, so the music, visuals, and gameplay are all built on that system. If you’re not familiar with Paper Mario lore, the Pit of 100 Trials is a location in The Thousand-Year Door as well as Super Paper Mario. ![]() The premise of The Black Pit is simple: Mario falls into the Pit of 100 Trials and must complete the trials in order to escape back to the surface. What follows are my first impressions of the game. The game has a full-length trailer you can check out on YouTube, and I was intrigued enough by the premise that I navigated the intentionally-vague world of ROM-patching in order to try the game out for myself. After a brief bit of poking around the first one I found that looked pretty legit was a game called Paper Mario: The Black Pit. I follow a couple that are currently in development on Twitter but I imagined that there must be some completed ones out there that I could try and check out. Recently in a moment of boredom I decided that I wanted to do some research into fan games for another favorite series of mine: Paper Mario. Later on I would learn about the kaizo Mario fan games often played by speed runners, and last year I dipped my toe into the world of fan games by fiddling around with FE Builder as well as playing a significant portion of Fire Emblem: Vision Quest. ![]() These fan games varied from patches that added quality of life features and new difficulty levels to whole new storylines created by fans. I first saw them on YouTube for the Pokemon fandom – I followed a lot of Poketubers circa 2014-2016 and in addition to competitive battle videos, many would do Nuzlocke challenges or play romhacks of Pokemon games. The world of fan games is one I have long been aware of but rarely engaged with.
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