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On paper (hah), this sounds like a terrific romhack. Going through a roguelike of the pit of 100 trials would be terrific! BUT, there are a number of huge issues.

1. The amount of grinding necessary to get permanent buffs is way too high. You'll need to grind the roguelike pipe for a very long time just to upgrade your boots or hammer ONCE for the main pipe.

2. The roguelike pipe will throw unbeatable challenges at you very often. Because you always have 10HP and 5FP, even with perfect command inputs on blocking attacks, you will still be forced into losing way too often. I understand that this can happen from time to time in roguelikes in terms of having powerups you can't get at the start, but having interactions where you can't win starting at the 21st floor onward is ridiculous.

3. The coins you win will sometimes glitch and not count. I reached floor 91 with 513 coins in the roguelike pit and died. You're supposed to get half of the coins when you die in that pit, but I received 41 instead, which you can easily get by just going to level 10 and then leaving.

4. The roguelike pit is supposed to have items you can get in each room, provided you have the necessary items, coins, partner, or upgrade. The problem is that it's so rare that you can ever get one of those item before floor 25 or so. Bombette and Bow also seem to be the rarest partners you can get. After over 20 runs, I got each of them once, but got everyone else at least 4 or 5 times each.

6. You can't sell anything at any point. Got extra items or badges you'll never use? Too bad. You can't do anything with them, and you've wasted resources to get them in both pipes.

7. You cannot save in the main pipe. When a roguelike forces you to spend several HOURS of nonstop game play to reach the end and have no save points, only to lose to an Amazy Dazee who one shots you. You lose all your coins, and don't get them back unless you reach that floor on the next run.

8. Items are insanely expensive every 10th floor, and become ludicrously expensive as you go. A mushroom may cost 10 coins at level 10, and then 60 by level 30. You better hope an enemy drops one for you, because you are screwed otherwise.

9. The lack of environments and backgrounds is boring. Yes, I understand the pit of 100 trials in the vanilla TTYD game is like this, but considering this is a romhack, it wouldn't have killed the developer to do at least something every 25 floors or so. It makes the experience less enjoyable. This one is a nitpick, but its still one that bugs me.

I WANT to recommend this romhack, I really do. You may enjoy it the first 2 or 3 hours, but then you realize how ridiculous it gets, and you won't want to pick it up ever again. You will see the first 20 or 30 levels more times than you can count, and only if you get extremely lucky with pickups or grind for a stupid amount of time to get anywhere close to the final floor, and even then you could have it all taken away by a BS encounter or a glitch that fails to give you the coins you earned.

Idea is 10/10, but the execution is 3/10 after 4 or 5 hours.

Note: I highly recommend watching the trailer or joining the discord for this game if you are going to play it. You'll find several hints and pieces of info that should make it a smoother experience.

Paper Mario hacks aren't too common, so I was happy to just find another one submitted here and wasn't really sure what I'd get at first. What you do get though, is a complete and amazing overhaul of the base game of Paper Mario. The base mechanics, partners, moves, items, badges, etc... mostly remain the same, but the actual flow of the game is completely changed. The game basically consists of a "hub" from where you can challenge several different game modes (more are unlocked as you go), get upgrades, and even buy new skins.

I was a little skeptical at first, but the Rougelike sections of this game work great and a lot of fun. You'll find badges, HP & FP upgrades, and partners in a random order as you progress down the pit, and will have to manage your coins, keys, and risk in taking on extra fights in order to get some of these additional items to help in your run. It definitely can be a little grindy at times since you may need to jump back and forth between the classic and rougelike pits to make progress in the game overall. In general, if you can clear the rougelike pit first (which always starts you with nothing), you'll unlock several things that should help make everything else more doable.

Next to the roguelike mechanics, the other really impressive technical change in this hack would be the addition of stylish commands. This game revamps how star energy is accumulated, allowing you to perform stylish moves during combat (ala Paper Mario TTYD) in order to fill it up, instead of having a charge command. Given that in the original game you had to slowly charge it during your turn, which really slowed the game down to a crawl if you wanted to charge up while stalling a fight, this is a fantastic change.

I don't want to spoil any of the other content the game has, but needless to say there is more than just the 2 pits you start with, and there is a way to get to a final boss and beat the game.

Paper Mario Black Pit is amazing in a technical standpoint. It totally feels like this was part of the original game, except this is a separate rom. It doesn't feel fake or artificial is what I mean. Playing a Paper Mario game makes me feel happy inside and this gives me the same feeling.

But this was my first impression of it. Once you actually start playing it seriously, holy cow this hack is brutal!! There's two pits, the regular pit and a rogue-like pit. The game expects you to keep replaying the rogue-like pit over and over, so much so that it's as if the regular pit doesn't exist in a way. This is one thing I didn't like about the hack, the rogue-like pit is all you're mainly going to see. And the hack expects you to play it dozens of times. Which brings me to my next gripe, a single playthrough to get through all 100 floors can take 2+ hours. You literally need to invest a ton of your free time in just a singular playthrough. So imagine doing 10+ runs, that's gonna take some months. It gets super repetitive because every floor has specific enemies. Which means you're going to see the first 20 floors a LOT.

Next on my list of gripes is the fact that you will stay with the regular boots and regular hammer for a very long time. You'll be facing chapter 4, 5, 6 enemies with just 2 damage and 10 HP. You will sweat hardcore as you're facing enemies that are way over your league. Unless you get lucky enough to find the boots or hammer upgrade earlier in the run. This does make you think outside the box on strategies. But overall this feels like those level 1 challenges in rpg's and I'm definitely not the type to put myself in that type of challenge. This hack is definitely for pro players, the diehard type.

It feels a lot like the Binding of Isaac, in which you find random things in each run. Even having to sacrifice your coins or your HP to get new badges or powerups. What I don't understand is how you'll find impossible to get items or upgrades on the first ten floors where you barely have anything. It's just a tease most of the time.

Now here's the story of how I rage quit this hack. So I was having a really good run on rogue-like and I had all the boot and hammer upgrades, and both power plus badges and all or nothing. I was getting OP and climbing my way up the floors, which was 2+ hours in. So I finally reach floor 92 and I come across an Amazee Dazee and I tried killing it first. It ended up surviving with 1 HP! Then it attacked and killed me with exactly enough damage to kill me. Just like that, my entire run was over. I essentially WASTED my time and lost everything that I put into the run! This right here is absolutely brutal and I personally wouldn't touch this hack again.

With that said, I still would recommend the hack because of how well done it is, in a technical sense. I really love the concept, but the execution results in a game that you might regret playing. I'd say give it a try if you're a huge Paper Mario fan, just be warned about possibly wasting your time when you lose. When you're having a bad run, you could lose at floor 40-50 and even that takes over an hour to reach. Winning the run depends on your skill, and your luck. But if you're skilled, you could overcome the odds.