People seem to hate so much on Gates to Infinity -- and trust me I can see the obvious hurdles -- but it's a good 20-hour-ish game.

The story is great and definitely is on par with everything that Explorers put down. Side characters have semi fleshed-out personalities and backstories. There is an option to make sleep/totter/whatever seed farms which adds to the overall goal of your partner. It's very cute.

It's the extremely slow text speed, limited character roster and unwavering dungeon designs that make this game hard to get through. The first couple of dungeons and the final dungeons have the same layout and are all hallway spaghetti.

It's not as replayable as EoT/D/S but I had fun playing it nonetheless!

Definitely watch a playthrough if you are not as invested in the Mystery Dungeon saga but want to experience the story.

[Dammit Larry, You're Hard to Love, But You're Harder to Hate]

Gates to Infinity is definitely the weakest game in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon franchise due to its inconsistency in quality save for one notable aspect. Does this make it a bad game? Well, yes and no. For every good thing I can say about Gates to Infinity, I can point to an equally opposite bad thing.
- "Oh cool, the graphics are in 3D!"
- "But this makes the dungeons feel far less distinct, and characters far less expressive".
- "I love the fact that I don't have to worry about hunger in this game!"
- "But I hate having to navigate the dungeons in this game because the hallways and floors are much less interesting to explore."
- "I love that my party members get experience and eventually level up even if I don't bring them along on missions!"
- "But combat in dungeons is so awful because of the zoomed in camera that I can never even try to generate strategy when I approach a given room in this game."

Every time I think I can award points to Gates, it finds a way to immediately earn a demerit, but every time I think the game does something really really bad, I'm surprised at a cool decision the designers made. The plot is overly simple and reductive in its simplifications of tropes about friendship and trust that we've come to expect from the first two Mystery Dungeon games, but then it uses those predictable tropes to create a plot twits that genuinely surprised me. The dungeons presented a really interesting way to break up the pace of the mystery dungeon layout with the overworld floors, but then these same floors provided little to no challenge and were more or less abandoned beyond one or two dungeons late in the game (not that I particularly enjoyed these breaks in the gameplay, they really didn't fit with the gameplay loo I came to expect from mystery dungeon). The Paradise was ultimately an overcomplicated hub zone that I didn't find myself developing whatsoever just because the game made it nearly impossible to efficiently complete missions, but Post Town, despite being nearly pointless beyond flavor reasons, won me over as a genuinely comfy spot in a video game. And speaking of missions, I found myself really frustrated that I couldn't select many missions at once in the same dungeon (a clear attempt by the game to not allow you to grind), but then at the same time, I found myself feeling relieved that I was finally done with a single mission after 4-6 floors because I really really didn't enjoy the dungeon crawl with more than two party members (but also the game was definitely balanced around you having four party members at once which is cool UNTIL THEY START RUNNING OFF AGAIN). So between all these positives and negatives I sit here struggling to consider how I really feel about this game.

At this point in time, the only part of the game I can unequivocally vouch for is its soundtrack. Almost every piece of music in this game after the first few dungeons is simply perfect for its respective application. Dungeon themes are filled to the brim with explorative passion and capture the exact feelings of excitement, anxiety, determination, and dread one might feel when exploring places named "Forest of Shadows" or "Great Glacier". I am particularly fond of the musical leitmotif that carries through each Magnagate dungeon (Telluric Path, Kilionea Road and Tyrian Maze) as the same musical notes carry through each piece representing the mysterious ability to travel through the ley lines of the planet. Keisuke Ito absolutely knocks this soundtrack out of the park and makes even the most grueling, unpleasant dungeon crawls slightly more manageable. I had heard the soundtrack long before playing the game, and I found myself struck at just how much I could still enjoy the game having listened to the official soundtrack in a vacuum. There was nothing quite like being ejected from the mysterious Kilionea Road and finding myself potentially without a single reference point in the forest of Shadows, having only my instincts and the music of "Forest of Shadows" playing. What a great feeling.

I struggle to outright recommend this game to anyone beyond those who would care to play every mainline Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game. It has the weakest gameplay loop by far, and its story takes a lot of effort to really take seriously. While it might be the case that I am just too old for what is essentially a YA-literature piece, I just couldn't make myself care about the plights of Emolga and Dunsparce. But then again, I found Virizion's arc to be pretty interesting and I really enjoyed Espeon and Umbreon as characters, as simple as they were. Once again, the duality of Gates rears its two-faced visage. For every good there is a bad, and for every bad, there is a good. This is the Gates to Infinity experience.

Genuinely the best cast from one of these games. They do manage to be more than one note for most of it and the game doesn't repeat itself as much as explorers. Partner is also a complete and true bro tbh

Now the actual dungeon design and gameplay is a mess when you have guest party members constantly outlevelling any of your own. Even though most locations have two times less the floors of explorers and rescue team, it still feels the same length due to how so much of GTI is narrow corridors in dead ends.

If you can get past how repugnantly slow text scrolls, since there’s no speed option when playing natively, and even holding B to auto scroll it is still slow, which bogs the unusually tutorial infested earlygame down (seriously, there is a tutorial for getting sand tombed in this game), or how the game’s mechanics are simplified a lot, what with no IQ skills or hunger, as well as its reduced roster of Pokemon, which repeats quite often early on, there is a beautifully heartfelt story here. I think in spite of it being my least favorite PMD to play through, it has one of my favorite casts. The dialogue is extremely charming, and the cast on the whole feels like a large family who are consistently active in the story. There isn’t a single one who’s shafted narratively, and I really appreciate that. And though this plays the weakest, I think the PMD gameplay loop is fundamentally so solid that there’s no way I could dislike the game. It’s just. Terribly tough to sell someone on the earlygame, which is everything people accuse Gen 7 of being, and then some. And yet, once you overcome that hurdle, you’re rewarded with such a brilliant cast. I’m just not sure how to sell someone like that. “Keep playing bro, it picks up 1/3 in” is a tough thing to say, especially when the gameplay remains fundamentally simpler to other entries, and you will notice enemy repetition. But beneath that, you do have a beautiful story and cast elevated by a leitmotif-imbued soundtrack that pulls at your heartstrings. The replay made me like this game more. I understand its status as the “worst” PMD, and am generally inclined to agree outside of the original Rescue Team’s jank, but I’ll also call this game worth your time, just probably if you mod a text scroll fix.

Very underrated game and the story seems to me to be the second best of the pokemon mysterious world, also hydreigon is god as a character and the music is very good it is true that the pace of the game is tedious and the bosses are not very memorable but the ending seems to me the best of the saga and the message it also gives:
Characters:6
History:8
Rhythm: 4
Final grade:5