Congratulations! You have been randomly chosen to become God. As the newly appointed ruler over all creation, you shall be whisked away to the heavens above to fulfill your holy duties--which may include battling mermaids and flirting with angels.

Such is the fate of Renya Kagurazaka, an everyday, mild-mannered, dime-a-dozen, completely generic high school student. That's right: The Guided Fate Paradox presents a truly nightmarish scenario where God is, in fact, one of us. It's a goofy premise, since a lot of this fate guiding involves helping a weak-willed zombie find his courage or a knightly couple fall in love.

Sadly, the game chooses not to embrace this silliness, and instead gets bogged down in a workaday, good-versus-evil plot culminating in a workaday, good-versus-evil showdown. The fact that you're playing as God is of no real consequence; it's just a flimsy rationale supporting the game's singular purpose: level grinding.

The Guided Fate Paradox is a turn-based role-playing game played on a grid. Combat and exploration are not separate modes, so every step your take, or attack you make, counts as a turn. After you act, your partner acts, and then all the enemies act in unison. As you fight, you collect equipment for Renya--aka God--and friends to use, which confers new attacks, spells, or other special abilities. It's a play style reminiscent of the roguelike genre, but with a Japanese RPG twist in character advancement and death.

Paradox's woes start with leveling up, which is divided across many systems. By juggling these different systems, Paradox makes you feel as if you're getting stronger, but the complexity of this system also makes it difficult to understand exactly how strong you've become.

After you finish the game--a feat that could easily set you back more than 40 hours--something interesting happens. A survival dungeon is unlocked. This dungeon negates all of your base stat advancement, and lets you use only the items recovered in that dungeon. You can improve your characters and their items, just as you would in the rest of the game, but that progression is lost once you leave the dungeon. This goes a long way toward providing a consistent, satisfying challenge. Both Renya and his enemies start at the same level and advance along a similar curve. Play smart, and you can make life easier for yourself by getting ahead of that curve. Alternatively, if you rush through the dungeon the enemies will quickly outpace you.

With its intricate leveling system and randomized dungeons, The Guided Fate Paradox succeeds in creating a game that can easily gobble up biblical amounts of time. It's simply too bad all that time spent ends up feeling like a waste when there's no great payoff for all that hard work.