Right, but if you have to stop/quit, your progress up to then is saved. That’s my whole point. It’s not saved in Leap of Fate.
And if I may take issue with something: I seriously doubt you’re taking 20 minutes to play through a battle in Forced Showdown. I just checked a video I made in which I stopped and explained everything I was doing, right down to pointing out the hit point bars and card choices and mana expenditures and so on. I don’t think there was a single screen element or card choice that I didn’t pause to talk through. All that stuff would be processed pretty much instantly by someone who’s playing the game. My battle begins at the 15:08 mark and I kill the boss at the 33:13 mark. That’s 18 minutes and 5 seconds. At least half of that time was spent explaining what I was doing. So unless you’re explaining in detail to someone watching the action over your shoulder, I doubt you’re taking 20 minutes.
Besides, the nature of each of the eight arenas that comprise a battle is that the boss is imposing a timing penalty in each arena the longer you take! He’s spawning new monsters or dropping mines or debuffing you. He’s basically light a fire under your tail to move you along, to keep the game from being about sitting in a corner and waiting for the AI to come to you. There is no time-consuming turtling allowed in Forced Showdown (another contrast to Leap of Fate, which eventually throws monster spawners at you to prevent this, but for the first few levels is happy to let you sit in a corner so that everything comes to you).
Anyway, I’m not trying to make an issue out of this, but I seriously doubted it would take 20 minutes to play a battle, so I checked. And mostly, I think we agree that being unable to save mid-battle in Forced Showdown is a non issue, especially since the game is automatically saved before and after every battle. Furthermore, I quite like both Forced Showdown and Leap of Fate, but as you say, the inability to save is a significant problem in only one of them.
I still can’t decide which one to get… Which of both has more to offer in terms of challenge, variety, replayability? Or which one feels better? FS looks better, but I like the Shadowrun look of LoF more… can’t decide, don’t have time for both
the save point discussion is not an issue for me… If I can play Dark Souls for 2 hours just to fight one boss, I think I can handle it without saving mid-game
Having played both I think Forced Showdown is more fun but it’s also very “Hearthstone” in a sometimes irritating way. Leap of Fate is more stylish. Hands of Fate I think is better than either of them. And i’m just getting into Enter the Gungeon. Too many rogue-lites, not enough time! :)
[ul]
[li]Which is more challenging? LoF
[/li][li]Which looks better? FS
[/li][li]Deckbuilding? FS, yes; LoF, no
[/li][li]Which has a higher degree of randomness? LoF
[/li][li]Whose runs take longer? LoF
[/li][li]How is character development handled? FS uses a player-created deck of cards and offers a random selection of Boons (pick 1) after defeating a boss (every eight Arena); LoF uses three randomly generated skill trees (skills within each tree are randomly arranged within the tree each run), random Glyphs found during a run (can equip only one at a time, but may switch between all found at will), and permanent upgrades awarded as the character completes randomly generated missions during runs
[/li][*]How is each sub-run (8 Arenas in FS; a Level in LoF) different from the previous one? In FS, you choose one of four randomly generated effects (a buff helps you, but adds additional enemies; a debuff hurts you, but reduces the number of enemies); in LoF, each Level is randomly generated from a deck of cards, and the content of the deck is unknown[/ul]
