YMMV / ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal

• Character Tiers: Because of how the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors works in the game, some elements have inherent game-theoretical advantage in most matchups^note specifically, five-vs-five battles with no duplicate elements within the same team, giving rise to following tiers:
  • S-Tier (a.k.a. God-Tier): Light and Ice fairies control the top tier, by themselves effectively countering every other element except one (see below).
  • A-Tier: The Dark fairies sit here, being almost as powerful as their Light counterparts, but not quite reaching the S-tier in sheer versatility.
  • B-Tier: Energy, Stone, and Psi. While Energy fairies are good all-rounders, Psi and Stone get this high mainly thanks to their ability to counter the S-tiers: both of them in Psi's case, and only Ice in the case of Stone.^note Otherwise, Psi would sit closer to the D-tier and Stone, all the way in the trash-tier. For the record, the most (game-theoretically) optimal party consists of a Light, an Ice, a Dark, an Energy, and a Psi fairy.
  • C-Tier: Metal fairies sit at the farthest frontier of viability, countering Light, but losing out to Ice. On average, including any fairy from this tier onward is likely to lower your party's overall effectiveness.
  • D-Tier: Water and Fire fairies both display subpar performance, getting easily knocked out by the S- and A-tiers.^note Fire's ability to counter Ice is negated by its weakness to both Light and Dark.
  • E-Tier: Air fairies perform even worse than the D-tiers, but not quite bad enough to get dumped in the...
  • F-Tier (a.k.a. the Trash-Tier): Nature and Chaos. Despite being one of the Starter Mon, Nature fairies have terrible elemental matchups, only beating Psi, while getting dominated by S- and A-tiers. And Chaos easily has the most useless fairies overall, whose only redeeming grace is their ability to, under very specific circumstances, sub in for the Dark ones.
• Disappointing Last Level: The game's main appeal are the colorful and extremely varied locales and character designs, yet its final stages consist largely of black-and-brown dungeons populated by a very limited selection of Dark and Chaos fairies, as well as a Boss Rush of one Dark Elf after the other.

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