Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Gates To Infinity So Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon is out here soon. (Though when exactly I get it is in the lap of the gods as my copy from Amazon has been delayed and the postal service here is.... variable) In the meantime I've been playing the last title in the Series, Gates to Infinity, and finished the whole story yesterday. So what did I think of it, given many aren't keen on it, including a very prominent gamer on this site! In terms of pure gameplay, I would say it's the best in the series so far. The hunger mechanic has been removed, which I found to be an unnecessary niggle that just took up inventory space. Unlike the previous game, Explorers of Sky (so hard to write that word without an 'e' now) it felt a lot fairer in terms of difficulty. In EoS I felt I needed to grind or cheat to have a chance to just make it through the game. Not so with GtI, which I felt was about right (Which likely means it was a bit too easy ). It even manages to avoid the typical RPG flaw of artificial early difficulty, where the start is harder than it should be because the designers forget that you 1) have less HP and weaker attacks, 2) don;t have a full party yet and 3) don't have any items yet, especially those handy healing ones. (Plus an extra difficulty in EoS if you choose a fire type, the first dungeon is a water one) Part of this reason for a more reasonable difficulty is likely due to the fact that moves now upgrade as you use them. And these upgrades are across your whole party if they share a move, not just one pokemon. This means even the basic moves can rival, and even exceed the more powerful ones with enough use. Upgrading the moves also increases it PP, which means another niggle of early PMD games, that you burned through PP rapidly because it slavishly stuck to the pokemon rules instead of realising that the circumstance being very very different, is gone. And the damage boosts mean you can keep on top of of your foes as the go up in difficulty. Because moves level up across a party, this also makes a one type party a viable option, and almost encouraged to make the most of the leveling up, rather than being forced to have a mix like in most Pokemon games. Add in the fact that all pokemon has the same XP total as the party, even if they haven't taken part in any dungeon missions, and the fact that there is only a minor benefit to evolving (a small one off stat boost) the game could be very flexible in your party choice. Why did I say 'could'....? we'll come back to that in a minute. Another major change is the fact you build 'paradise' a series of shops and services with materials you get from Dungeon Missions. This gives you an incentive to play beyond just beating the game, and something to keep doing once the story is completed. And taking about Dungeon Missions, something else I like is now you can only have one active mission at once. No more cases of trying to get several missions for one dungeon and cursing when there isn't any. So all these are good changes, but they haven't changed all the bad stuff. Party pathfinding is still as dire as ever if the party gets split up, which happens frequently. And while I did say the game was less difficult, it has difficulty 'steps' rather than a curve. In fact, going strange from one story mission to another (with no in-game break between) the difficulty jumped so much my attacks were doing less than 2/3's the damage they were on the exact same pokemon. It also suffers from unfortunate combinations of abilities making the game overly hard. For example, one of the last dungeons has a pokemon going in solo, and has two pokemon you haven't encountered before, both of whom have instant sleep attacks. Add in the random effects of the dungeon which often block your characters from using seeds or berries... then you have a situation where your character falls asleep, is killed before they wake up, and can't revive because of the seed block effect. And before you bring up getting an item to prevent sleep, I will repeat, you haven't encountered that pokemon before. Alone, either of these is fine. In combination, it becomes a slog. As for the story itself, well.... it's alright. Which compared to EoS is a massive left down. It even lifts a LOT of elements from EoS, including... *spoilers for both games incoming* It still has the PMD fall of characters flashbacking all the Darn time, and boy, the characters just DON'T SHUT UP! To give an example of how much text....NPC: "It's a Legendary Pokemon"Your Character: "A Legendary Pokemon?"NPC: "Yes. A Legendary Pokemon" (Not the actual in game lines as I wanna avoid more spoilers, but this pattern occurs)It is extremely annoying when you uses the shops and mini-games that have to explaine how to play them every single darn time, no matter how many times you've done it before. The worst being Victini and his V-Wheel. Which you will wanna use, but his text takes such a long time to wade though. It does make things more of a chore than they needed to be.But... I haven't talked about the most obvious change. It's now in 3D, rather than 2D sprites. As someone usually not bothered by graphics I did like this change. It almost resulted in more varied dungeon layouts, with rooms no longer being perfect squares or rectangles. However... it has some brought in some major flaws. First, the game is so zoomed in now, you can't see your whole team on the screen f they're in a corridor. Which means seeing enemies at any distance is impossible. And makes it harder to spot when a party member starts to wander off, exacerbating the bad pathfinding problem. It also seems to have taken up a lot of space, so there are a lot fewer map types. At the start of the game, when you really need to draw people in, the only dungeons are caves, forests, or forestry caves. More types arrive later, but the limitation is noticeable. And speaking of limitations, the most Darning one. It's hinted at by the fact that there is a disappoint choice of only 5 pokemon to start with. How many pokemon do you think are in this game, keeping in mind it's Gen V? Take a guess. The answer is 144. That's LESS than there was in Gen 1! And once you remove those that are NPC's, and divided the remained by 2 and a half to take evolutions out of the equation, and that's a very small number. As such, you'll be fighting the same pokemon over and over and over again, even over several dungeons. Even when it doesn't make sense, like fire types hanging out in ice caves. That's why I threw out that 'could have a flexible party' line. Because there are so few pokemon it's unlikely you'll get the exact party you want. So... overall... Gates to Infinity is a really good PMD game, but it's lackluster story, and seriosus lack of variety, drag it down immensely. Here's hoping Super Mystery Dungeon solves those problems. At least it has the full 720ish roster of pokemon.
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