Often overlooked, but Super Mystery Dungeon is a nice step in the right direction in many ways. It has a lot of quality of life improvements, not to mention the dungeons are shorter and often have halfway checkpoints to make them easier to digest in comparison to some of the 20 floor dungeons in previous entries. Story is as touching as always despite some hit and miss twists. It's still a mystery dungeon game so it's prone to get repetitive (let's be honest, most of you only like Explorers because you grew up with it and the story is good), and this game isn't old enough to have the nostalgic edge Explorers will always have, but I still greatly appreciate what they were trying to accomplish with this entry. It's a shame it gets completely overshadowed by its predecessors in the eyes of many.

I originally just wrote a review where I said this was boring, but I think its worth giving a quick two cents on it.

This game was very close to being the Fire Emblem Conquest of the series, being a game with a bullshit story and amazing gameplay that's so good you play it anyways. Unfortunately the speed stat exists, and it sucks. This game is Pokemon MISStery Dungeon. I played as Riolu and Snivy last time, two faster pokemon. I could only imagine the herculean task of playing a slow starter.

The story also makes me irrationally mad just because its like, pretty close to being good. Unfortunately, the execution is just poor because halfway through they just swap out the entire cast. The previous games didn't have any crazy deep casts or anything but at least they didn't just fuck off after a while. I end up not really giving a shit about the expedition society, and by the time we combine the casts, we're just left with Espurr, so what was the point?

The game always felt like it was trying to be the best game in the series and it kinda just crumbled under its own weight. We didn't need to connect all the previous games and explore other continents. It just continues to contribute to the feeling of aimlessness. If they narrowed the scope of the story and increased the hit rates in dungeons I might actually say this game is just as good as the first two games, but it just isn't.

(I haven't played GTI)

I really enjoyed it. It's not the best PMD game by any means (EOS and RT are better) but I had fun with it. Some QOL stuff was pretty sweet, like not having to replay a dungeon a thousand times to recruit someone and the possibilty of linking movements without paying a fee to a NPC. Moreover, being able to rescue yourself is great without relying on strangers on the internet.

The storyline was OK; it served its purpose, and I didn't expect that plot twist at the end.