Board 8 > Hot take, but I think the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are really terrible...

(+) Yeah! (+)

...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.)

From what you described, I think you'd have to really change the story, motivations and character arcs if you wanted to go in that direction. And by change, I mean completely remove them. Gameplay is by far the least interesting thing about PMD games and 99% of the people who enjoy PMD games would likely agree with that.

Characters wouldn't exist in the game if you have 1000 pokes to choose from and many different teams. The gameplay doesn't lend itself at all to what you want and would have to be completely changed around. It couldn't be a dungeon crawler.

What would you want, your team of 4 water pokes taking down a lava dungeon and then at the end of it your main character and your buddy just show up in the cutscene after as if they took down the dungeon themselves? >_>

I have never finished any Mystery Dungeon game, but as I remember it, you CAN bring another Pokemon with you to the dungeon (in addition to yourself and your partner). Not sure how big the party is though.

I threw in the towel in the first game at the point in the story when you get exiled and can't change out your party members. I got stuck on a legendary bird who would one-shot both the main and partner Pokemon inevitably.

The real tragedy of pmd is just how many cool mechanics they passed over from other (non-pokemon) mystery dungeon games

Also how the one that had the most unique feature was the WiiWare one(s) nobody played

Can I interest you in pokemon DX, where you can have a party of dungeon-recruited pokemon like up to 8 at a time? Also I'm p sure you can change control of the main character over to the partner at any time? Which should alleviate some of the issue. It's been a while but I feel like that is a feature even in the original.

This just seems like trying to make this into a traditional pokemon game, which it is not. Most if not all of the time, if both you AND your partner pokemon have type weaknesses to a certain dungeon (Like say groudon's for example) just take a 3rd pokemon with you that fixes it. Having just one pokemon with a type advantage can basically solo a whole dungeon, I don't think it's as limited as you do.

I do kind of understand the gripe about the exile portion, but even then the game provides infinite side dungeons that you can grind with should you get stuck on one of the legendary birds. It's not literally unwinnable as it's being portrayed here, especially since your forced 3rd partner is likely leveled higher than you and doesn't have a weakness to any of the birds.

Honestly, I Know this is a double post but I really do think DX would fix a lot of the issues you have. Bigger party size, they got rid of the stupid IQ system and made pokemon have helpful abilities akin to how actual pokemon is, you can befriend pokemon at a much faster rate which helps that bigger party size come into play more. I don't think losing your leader is an auto-loss anymore either. The only thing they really took out is the basic attack that doesn't cost any moves, but there are so many other QoL improvements that make it good enough. Grinding is a lot easier too, there's a special place for it that's akin to hyper training in pokemon in function. Super fast, super effective grinding.

Also if you don't like the pokemon the questionnaire gives you, you can just choose your own

There weren't any side dungeons or third partners in the exile portion, were there? Unless you mean this modded version.

Absol was absolutely in the original game, and the side dungeons were there. In the section before each dungeon, you got an option of proceeding to the main dungeon (IE Mt freeze) or you could take a side path instead. This side path was a few floors long, typically had plenty of items, and took you back to the entrance where you could then repeat this as often as you wanted.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Snow_Path
as an example

Oh, the side path. Yeah, grinding levels and items was something I tried for a while. The third character was not with me and I had no idea it existed.

Okay so I do need to issue a correction, it appears he does not join you until after the birds are defeated, so the last dungeon of the exile is where he joins you. So my apologies for being mistaken on that.

Regardless, that is for one section of the game. I get taking umbrage with that section, I don't think that makes the entire game suck ass because it's not a problem outside of that if you build your team correctly. Are 3 pokemon less than 6? Yes. Are 3 pokemon correctly typed enough to conquer any dungeon? Yes imo.

I won't say the whole game sucks ass, but I feel fine with having quit and never coming back instead of accepting that I should start over because it doesn't like my character picks from the beginning of the game.

Sure, I was speaking more to the OPs stance than yours. Even if the solution of grinding is there, I'm not gonna begrudge someone for being like "This one part sucks, so it's not worth beating the game." I contend more that it's not a problem over the course of the whole game.

Booooooooooo

The balancing on "wide" range attacks was definitely fucked, I remember that