LogFAQs > #975745896

...and it's solely because of ONE specific reason.

The thing is, I like dungeon crawling roguelike games, and I like Pokemon a lot, so it should have been a match made in heaven. The games themselves have a ton of great aspects; it has great music, a surprisingly good story, and a fun concept. But there's one glaring problem, and it's the fact that they felt the need to have a "main character" Pokemon that you're forced to play as throughout the entire story mode. It's utterly baffling to me that they would take a genre in which one of the highlights of the games in it is number of options you usually have to play and experiment with on multiple run attempts, and take a franchise where the biggest selling point was the number of playable monsters to use, and throw both of those into the trash and instead go with the stupid idea of using only one Pokemon throughout the entire story. PMD should have instead been a series where you could collect and use tons of different Pokemon and assemble a variety of teams to tackle the story, which would have been so much fun and worked extremely well with the randomized dungeons and missions.

The lack of options in your choice of player character also highlights the glaring problems in Pokemon's gameplay. The limited amount of moves Pokemon can have, the limited amount of moves they can learn and how long it takes to learn good ones, and rock-paper-scissors elemental gameplay work fine in the main game because your character has a team of 6 Pokemon at a time, and on average has at minimum dozens more to choose from. In PMD these limitations are just awful. Having essentially 6 attack options (not counting items) is vastly inferior to 24 different moves you can potentially choose from (by switching Pokemon in battle) in the main game. And type-effectiveness sucks a huge one when you have no option to change your party to counter that. If you roll a Fire-type as your character and you happen to need to go to the dungeon filled with Ground-type Pokemon you're just out of luck. I remember distinctly being hard stuck in the first game because my partner was Chikorita and the Legendary Birds are three major bosses in the story (Articuno alone has a super-effective Ice attack that has infinite range!)

It's just so upsetting because not only is it one of the worst ideas to ever include in a video game, but since it was in the first game it DEFINED what the series would be like. It wasn't just some random idea that turned out to not work, the sequels all followed suit because "that's just the way the games are". It's a depressing waste of a fantastic concept for a spinoff series, and it doesn't matter how good the rest of it is when they flubbed this critically important aspect of it. It's like having a delicious cake made by an acclaimed baker on your wedding day that a dog took a huge shit on; it doesn't matter how good every thing else is, that one negative aspect ruins everything else.

(I had the random urge to replay the first game in the series recently, and that's what brought this up.)