Hatred stems from disagreement. And disagreement, in turn, most often seems to stem from misunderstanding. Its the absolute rawest form of negativity, meant to communicate said disagreement as loud and clear as possible.
You cannot hold proper discussion on this game without first acknowledging just how deep in its predecessors shadow it lies. Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time&Darkness – and later Sky – was such a perfect followup and incredible game in general, both refining everything Rescue Team had established whilst also holding heaps of content to dig into that gave the game its own identity. Aside from a wonderful, charming story of growth and self-confidence, it features an absolutely massive world that's just begging to be explored, with difficult optional missions galore and oh so many Pokèmon to find. It was a brilliantly rewarding gameplay loop paired with a well-paced, meaningful story, that resulted in a damn near perfect game, beloved by 2000s kids the world over.
So when the expectations thus became higher than ever for the series, not just to keep raising the bar of quality but also to debut the series into a new era entirely on the 3DS, it seems obvious in hindsight that the results would never live up to those high standards set. Yet it was worse than that - as the game released, with every review that came out that I read as a teen, it seemed more and more like the game had fumbled the ball entirely, missing every crucial point that had made Explorers so perfect. "Only 140 Pokèmon?!" "No hunger bar?" "Next to no postgame?" “No personality test?” The issues just seemed like they mounted on and on, for a series I had come to believe was infallible. Sure enough, Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity had been released – and I Hated it.
But looking back, there’s a lot there that doesn’t really seem to add up. I and many people my age loved Explorers, sure, but…critics never really did, with most official reviews of the time giving the game middling scores. So back then the critics were wrong, but…now they were right? Or were the critics always right, was Explorers always a mediocre game? The answer is less black and white than it would first seem.
When I described Explorers earlier, I noted that it didn’t just have a good story, but a meaningful story. My word choice was deliberate: my reading of Explorers is that it’s very specifically a story about individual’s self-worth and their quests for validation. Your partner is weak and cowardly, and wants to prove themselves to the world by being a successful explorer, achieve their dream through essentially climbing a corporate ladder. Together you end up working at the Wigglytuff’s Guild, and whilst you do end up on speaking terms with all of your colleagues, they’re still just that, colleagues. Doing missions day by day, challenging yourself to take on harder ones in dungeons you’ve already been to, really does convey a sense that you’re getting better at this job: The reason stacking missions together to fell them all in one swoop feels so good is the same reason it feels good to turn in multiple assignments in a single day, or why it can feel so good to get paid extra for your labor at a 9-to-5 job – What I’m getting at is that Explorers is a game very much about finding self-worth in a capitalist system. It’s not a scathing critique of the system, but it nonetheless shows the flaws within it: Your life becomes that of routine under your bosses, you’re forced to put up with obviously manipulative and toxic co-workers, and even with your nice co-workers your relationship with them never goes beyond solidarity for doing a good job. Most of the game’s pathos and many of its mechanics feed into this theme, in a way that makes the entire game come together extremely well. Even as the story turns to an adventure to save the world, the focus remains strictly on half a dozen key characters and their trials within that conflict.
But did you notice what I did in that paragraph? With the game’s theme established, I was able to turn what would otherwise be interpreted as issues in the game, into things heightening its thematic throughline. You need to revisit Dungeons a lot, many prominent characters are shallow and one-note, a lot of the game is spent doing the same things over and over, and crucially: The easy dungeon-crawling gameplay honestly isn’t all that fun. What critics may have found fault in, fans clicked with. It's akin to how those who grew up with the survival horror games of the 90s understand the value tank controls added to those games, whereas new players often feel more like they're an issue to work around. When a game's goals are understood, its issues can turn to strengths, and disagreement slowly dissipates.
I don’t want to frame this review as if everyone who’s critical of Gates to Infinity are just plebians who don’t understand it. Hell, there’s a lot about the game that makes me enjoy it less than Explorers at the end of the day. My point with all of this is that it’s been a very important playthrough for me specifically in terms of reflecting on how I evaluate media. Because now that we’ve established how perceived faults can work to strengthen a game’s thematic core and overall narrative, I’m going to put the cards on the table and make my case.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is a game made in direct response to its predecessor, that turns all of that game’s ideas inside-out and shows the benefits of veering in a completely opposite direction. That’s right - since Explorers was a game about capitalism, Gates to Infinity is thus a game about communism. Buckle up.
We’ll start the same place we did with Explorers: Your partner. Though its easy to perceive the Partners in the Mystery Dungeon games to all be copy-pasted stand-ins, its immediately noticeable in comparison to Explorers just how much more lively and energetic Gates to Infinity’s partner is. They have a genuine dream not of self-success or becoming stronger, but to bring other people together, for the sole purpose of helping each other live happier. In Explorers, “enemy Pokémon” were framed as a necessary obstacle to work around to succeed in missions, an unfortunate side effect of the world’s collapse but one the Guild would only help solve by punishing those branded as outlaws. Gates to Infinity’s focus on community meanwhile reframes them as being angry, lost souls, that you help give a new home in your Pokémon paradise. The main plot at the start of the game even centers on you and your partner helping hurt people like Gurdurr and Scraggy overcome their faults, whilst also befriending those willing to help build this community like Emolga and Dunsparce. Suddenly these people around you aren’t tools or passerbys, but genuine friends, characters with arcs and dynamics and reactions to the world. You don’t have a job demanding you do as many missions as possible, so the requests you do one-by-one in this game are framed as your team having a genuine desire to help others, with the thanks gained mainly being materials that feed into town building. By just changing the reward so subtly from money to materials, the loop of doing missions has gone from being self-fulfilling to being toward the betterment of a community, a group of people all helping each other to form a better world. It's not a game about exploring new frontiers so much as it's a game about bettering the home you've built.
Do you see what I mean? Once it clicks that Gates is deliberately trying to show the other side of the coin that Explorers gave us, it lets you appreciate most every decision made in Gates to some extent. View cynically, the townbuilding gameplay is just a gimmicky distraction from the core gameplay loop - but viewed within what the game is trying to do, the townbuilding flat out becomes part of that loop, as you’re now doing missions to help build it rather than to better yourself. Dungeons aren’t so massive in size in this game just for padding, but because you’re gonna need every scrap of money you can find from them to buy what material resources cannot. You’re unemployed, after all! And since they want you to cover so much ground in dungeons, hunger would become a hugely annoying issue. Arguably, its existence before was mainly just to encourage you to keep moving through dungeons to get work done, which would again clash with the game’s direction. Take any controversial change made from Explorers to Gates to Infinity, and I would gladly argue there’s a thematic reason there that helps the story and overall gameplay experience click together better.
But I’ll drop the deep-goggles for a bit and just say, simply: Playing the game is still pretty fun. It starts out a bit slow, but overtime you get to appreciate a lot of the quality of life done to evolve the gameplay of the series forward. Moves can level up, meaning if you have a niche-use move with low damage or accuracy, you can keep using it and eventually be rewarded for your efforts. While there’s less Pokémon to choose from, in return all the Pokémon you do encounter are allowed to evolve whenever rather than having to wait for the postgame, and that leads to you forming a greater connection to them. Explorers made the teammates a bit disposable given that they would inevitably lag behind, but in Gates they’re both allowed to evolve and gain EXP even without participating in battles, which is both a great boon for building your own teams and also feeds into the game’s themes of community - Okay, I’ll stop! You can now access any of your four moves without opening a menu, which is the kind of streamlining this menu-reliant series absolutely needed. You absolutely CAN still deep dive into menus and item descriptions if you so choose, but it’s a lot more avoidable now compared to in the prior two games and the menus themselves have a much more beginner-friendly UI. Combine that with the aforementioned shared EXP with all your recruited members and lack of hunger, and I felt a stronger drive to be experimental in this game compared to Explorers, where I’d usually rely on one Set move and a bunch of Max Elixirs to make battles go by as menu-less as possible. Going further with this I think some of the controversial changes discussed prior actually do have benefits for the gameplay, with the limited Starter selection sticking out to me as the most interesting one. There’s now less choice, and the lack of a personality test makes the story’s shift from focusing on individuality clearer than it’s ever been, but in return the five available Starters feel like they’ve had the game balanced specifically around them. For instance, in the dungeon Forest of Shadows, taking place at a point where the player and partner go off solo on a dangerous mission that’s about to make things turn for the far worse in the story, every single Pokémon there exists to “counter” one of the available starters, making it a difficult Dungeon to traverse no matter who you play as. Plus, each of the starters are now a lot more distinct from one another to play as: Oshawott gets moves like Encore and Fury Cutter for a slow-burn massacre, which gives it a wholly unique playstyle from Tepig, who relies on Flame Charge and Rollout to quickly overwhelm.
To keep things spoiler-free, I’ll just say that the story does evolve in a very interesting and enjoyable way. The evil presented in Explorers stemmed from two people’s individual feelings of insecurity and self-doubt spiraled into chaos, whereas in this game we’re shown the results of what a poor, unhealthy community can result in. People who stick together because they feel rejected from the rest of the world, and using that negativity to push hatred toward others…it’s a bit corny, maybe, but I really do think it works, and it was an easy way to make the villains sympathetic despite their actions. Though the story works well, I can’t act as if it’s all perfectly executed: its pacing really is the main thing holding the game back for me. The start of the game is a lovely slow-trickle where the plot and the townbuilding feel like they're of equal importance, yet by the second half the story starts taking so much prominence that it becomes overwhelming. When you're taken away from Paradise for about eight dungeons in a row, sure you could argue that the game is intentionally trying to make you miss home and long to return to your community, but…it kinda takes that a bit too far. I love all the characters you meet though, Munna, Hydreigon, Virizion, they’ve earned their places in my heart right alongside Grovyle, Dusknoir and Wigglytuff from Explorers. I also love how every Mystery Dungeon game makes the origins of your human-turned-Pokémon player-insert character a key point of intrigue and that they tie it into the overall theming of the story. You’d think there would only be so many ways to tell the story of a human being sucked into the Pokémon world, yet the small variations in how its executed really do go a long way and made this game’s ending hit all the harder.
Small variations in how a similar idea is executed…it’s wild that for a series so often derided in its main series for being stagnant, that this one spinoff spawned so much discourse for the complete opposite reason. But I can’t really defend it all the way through: As a sequel to Explorers, it really is woefully lacking in content. While the lack of connection you hold to the outside world works wonders for the tight-knit homey feel of the story, it leads to you not really caring about exploring the rest of the game once that story is beat: There’s no real drive to become better, and without an evolving narrative townbuilding becomes more of a chore. Even for how much I’m willing to forgive Gates to Infinity, it was just never going to be able to live up to Explorers’ high bar. But I’m happy that the developers seemingly knew that going into development, and chose to make an excellent opposite-approach rather than try to one-up themselves. Even then, they really did succeed greatly in some areas - I think the jump to 3D is absolutely breathtaking for instance, adapting the environmental design of the old games’ pixelart to 3D ludicrously well and the soundtrack is enchantingly good. With the unbelievable workload already placed upon them to basically recreate the series’ fundamentals onto a 3D framework, I’m amazed they still decided to make such a boldly unique-feeling entry in the series.
Though my few issues remain, the disagreement between me and ChunSoft has dissipated, and my understanding of the game has improved. And I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong.
[Playtime: 51 Hours]
[Key word: Misjudged]
You cannot hold proper discussion on this game without first acknowledging just how deep in its predecessors shadow it lies. Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time&Darkness – and later Sky – was such a perfect followup and incredible game in general, both refining everything Rescue Team had established whilst also holding heaps of content to dig into that gave the game its own identity. Aside from a wonderful, charming story of growth and self-confidence, it features an absolutely massive world that's just begging to be explored, with difficult optional missions galore and oh so many Pokèmon to find. It was a brilliantly rewarding gameplay loop paired with a well-paced, meaningful story, that resulted in a damn near perfect game, beloved by 2000s kids the world over.
So when the expectations thus became higher than ever for the series, not just to keep raising the bar of quality but also to debut the series into a new era entirely on the 3DS, it seems obvious in hindsight that the results would never live up to those high standards set. Yet it was worse than that - as the game released, with every review that came out that I read as a teen, it seemed more and more like the game had fumbled the ball entirely, missing every crucial point that had made Explorers so perfect. "Only 140 Pokèmon?!" "No hunger bar?" "Next to no postgame?" “No personality test?” The issues just seemed like they mounted on and on, for a series I had come to believe was infallible. Sure enough, Pokèmon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity had been released – and I Hated it.
But looking back, there’s a lot there that doesn’t really seem to add up. I and many people my age loved Explorers, sure, but…critics never really did, with most official reviews of the time giving the game middling scores. So back then the critics were wrong, but…now they were right? Or were the critics always right, was Explorers always a mediocre game? The answer is less black and white than it would first seem.
When I described Explorers earlier, I noted that it didn’t just have a good story, but a meaningful story. My word choice was deliberate: my reading of Explorers is that it’s very specifically a story about individual’s self-worth and their quests for validation. Your partner is weak and cowardly, and wants to prove themselves to the world by being a successful explorer, achieve their dream through essentially climbing a corporate ladder. Together you end up working at the Wigglytuff’s Guild, and whilst you do end up on speaking terms with all of your colleagues, they’re still just that, colleagues. Doing missions day by day, challenging yourself to take on harder ones in dungeons you’ve already been to, really does convey a sense that you’re getting better at this job: The reason stacking missions together to fell them all in one swoop feels so good is the same reason it feels good to turn in multiple assignments in a single day, or why it can feel so good to get paid extra for your labor at a 9-to-5 job – What I’m getting at is that Explorers is a game very much about finding self-worth in a capitalist system. It’s not a scathing critique of the system, but it nonetheless shows the flaws within it: Your life becomes that of routine under your bosses, you’re forced to put up with obviously manipulative and toxic co-workers, and even with your nice co-workers your relationship with them never goes beyond solidarity for doing a good job. Most of the game’s pathos and many of its mechanics feed into this theme, in a way that makes the entire game come together extremely well. Even as the story turns to an adventure to save the world, the focus remains strictly on half a dozen key characters and their trials within that conflict.
But did you notice what I did in that paragraph? With the game’s theme established, I was able to turn what would otherwise be interpreted as issues in the game, into things heightening its thematic throughline. You need to revisit Dungeons a lot, many prominent characters are shallow and one-note, a lot of the game is spent doing the same things over and over, and crucially: The easy dungeon-crawling gameplay honestly isn’t all that fun. What critics may have found fault in, fans clicked with. It's akin to how those who grew up with the survival horror games of the 90s understand the value tank controls added to those games, whereas new players often feel more like they're an issue to work around. When a game's goals are understood, its issues can turn to strengths, and disagreement slowly dissipates.
I don’t want to frame this review as if everyone who’s critical of Gates to Infinity are just plebians who don’t understand it. Hell, there’s a lot about the game that makes me enjoy it less than Explorers at the end of the day. My point with all of this is that it’s been a very important playthrough for me specifically in terms of reflecting on how I evaluate media. Because now that we’ve established how perceived faults can work to strengthen a game’s thematic core and overall narrative, I’m going to put the cards on the table and make my case.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is a game made in direct response to its predecessor, that turns all of that game’s ideas inside-out and shows the benefits of veering in a completely opposite direction. That’s right - since Explorers was a game about capitalism, Gates to Infinity is thus a game about communism. Buckle up.
We’ll start the same place we did with Explorers: Your partner. Though its easy to perceive the Partners in the Mystery Dungeon games to all be copy-pasted stand-ins, its immediately noticeable in comparison to Explorers just how much more lively and energetic Gates to Infinity’s partner is. They have a genuine dream not of self-success or becoming stronger, but to bring other people together, for the sole purpose of helping each other live happier. In Explorers, “enemy Pokémon” were framed as a necessary obstacle to work around to succeed in missions, an unfortunate side effect of the world’s collapse but one the Guild would only help solve by punishing those branded as outlaws. Gates to Infinity’s focus on community meanwhile reframes them as being angry, lost souls, that you help give a new home in your Pokémon paradise. The main plot at the start of the game even centers on you and your partner helping hurt people like Gurdurr and Scraggy overcome their faults, whilst also befriending those willing to help build this community like Emolga and Dunsparce. Suddenly these people around you aren’t tools or passerbys, but genuine friends, characters with arcs and dynamics and reactions to the world. You don’t have a job demanding you do as many missions as possible, so the requests you do one-by-one in this game are framed as your team having a genuine desire to help others, with the thanks gained mainly being materials that feed into town building. By just changing the reward so subtly from money to materials, the loop of doing missions has gone from being self-fulfilling to being toward the betterment of a community, a group of people all helping each other to form a better world. It's not a game about exploring new frontiers so much as it's a game about bettering the home you've built.
Do you see what I mean? Once it clicks that Gates is deliberately trying to show the other side of the coin that Explorers gave us, it lets you appreciate most every decision made in Gates to some extent. View cynically, the townbuilding gameplay is just a gimmicky distraction from the core gameplay loop - but viewed within what the game is trying to do, the townbuilding flat out becomes part of that loop, as you’re now doing missions to help build it rather than to better yourself. Dungeons aren’t so massive in size in this game just for padding, but because you’re gonna need every scrap of money you can find from them to buy what material resources cannot. You’re unemployed, after all! And since they want you to cover so much ground in dungeons, hunger would become a hugely annoying issue. Arguably, its existence before was mainly just to encourage you to keep moving through dungeons to get work done, which would again clash with the game’s direction. Take any controversial change made from Explorers to Gates to Infinity, and I would gladly argue there’s a thematic reason there that helps the story and overall gameplay experience click together better.
But I’ll drop the deep-goggles for a bit and just say, simply: Playing the game is still pretty fun. It starts out a bit slow, but overtime you get to appreciate a lot of the quality of life done to evolve the gameplay of the series forward. Moves can level up, meaning if you have a niche-use move with low damage or accuracy, you can keep using it and eventually be rewarded for your efforts. While there’s less Pokémon to choose from, in return all the Pokémon you do encounter are allowed to evolve whenever rather than having to wait for the postgame, and that leads to you forming a greater connection to them. Explorers made the teammates a bit disposable given that they would inevitably lag behind, but in Gates they’re both allowed to evolve and gain EXP even without participating in battles, which is both a great boon for building your own teams and also feeds into the game’s themes of community - Okay, I’ll stop! You can now access any of your four moves without opening a menu, which is the kind of streamlining this menu-reliant series absolutely needed. You absolutely CAN still deep dive into menus and item descriptions if you so choose, but it’s a lot more avoidable now compared to in the prior two games and the menus themselves have a much more beginner-friendly UI. Combine that with the aforementioned shared EXP with all your recruited members and lack of hunger, and I felt a stronger drive to be experimental in this game compared to Explorers, where I’d usually rely on one Set move and a bunch of Max Elixirs to make battles go by as menu-less as possible. Going further with this I think some of the controversial changes discussed prior actually do have benefits for the gameplay, with the limited Starter selection sticking out to me as the most interesting one. There’s now less choice, and the lack of a personality test makes the story’s shift from focusing on individuality clearer than it’s ever been, but in return the five available Starters feel like they’ve had the game balanced specifically around them. For instance, in the dungeon Forest of Shadows, taking place at a point where the player and partner go off solo on a dangerous mission that’s about to make things turn for the far worse in the story, every single Pokémon there exists to “counter” one of the available starters, making it a difficult Dungeon to traverse no matter who you play as. Plus, each of the starters are now a lot more distinct from one another to play as: Oshawott gets moves like Encore and Fury Cutter for a slow-burn massacre, which gives it a wholly unique playstyle from Tepig, who relies on Flame Charge and Rollout to quickly overwhelm.
To keep things spoiler-free, I’ll just say that the story does evolve in a very interesting and enjoyable way. The evil presented in Explorers stemmed from two people’s individual feelings of insecurity and self-doubt spiraled into chaos, whereas in this game we’re shown the results of what a poor, unhealthy community can result in. People who stick together because they feel rejected from the rest of the world, and using that negativity to push hatred toward others…it’s a bit corny, maybe, but I really do think it works, and it was an easy way to make the villains sympathetic despite their actions. Though the story works well, I can’t act as if it’s all perfectly executed: its pacing really is the main thing holding the game back for me. The start of the game is a lovely slow-trickle where the plot and the townbuilding feel like they're of equal importance, yet by the second half the story starts taking so much prominence that it becomes overwhelming. When you're taken away from Paradise for about eight dungeons in a row, sure you could argue that the game is intentionally trying to make you miss home and long to return to your community, but…it kinda takes that a bit too far. I love all the characters you meet though, Munna, Hydreigon, Virizion, they’ve earned their places in my heart right alongside Grovyle, Dusknoir and Wigglytuff from Explorers. I also love how every Mystery Dungeon game makes the origins of your human-turned-Pokémon player-insert character a key point of intrigue and that they tie it into the overall theming of the story. You’d think there would only be so many ways to tell the story of a human being sucked into the Pokémon world, yet the small variations in how its executed really do go a long way and made this game’s ending hit all the harder.
Small variations in how a similar idea is executed…it’s wild that for a series so often derided in its main series for being stagnant, that this one spinoff spawned so much discourse for the complete opposite reason. But I can’t really defend it all the way through: As a sequel to Explorers, it really is woefully lacking in content. While the lack of connection you hold to the outside world works wonders for the tight-knit homey feel of the story, it leads to you not really caring about exploring the rest of the game once that story is beat: There’s no real drive to become better, and without an evolving narrative townbuilding becomes more of a chore. Even for how much I’m willing to forgive Gates to Infinity, it was just never going to be able to live up to Explorers’ high bar. But I’m happy that the developers seemingly knew that going into development, and chose to make an excellent opposite-approach rather than try to one-up themselves. Even then, they really did succeed greatly in some areas - I think the jump to 3D is absolutely breathtaking for instance, adapting the environmental design of the old games’ pixelart to 3D ludicrously well and the soundtrack is enchantingly good. With the unbelievable workload already placed upon them to basically recreate the series’ fundamentals onto a 3D framework, I’m amazed they still decided to make such a boldly unique-feeling entry in the series.
Though my few issues remain, the disagreement between me and ChunSoft has dissipated, and my understanding of the game has improved. And I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong.
[Playtime: 51 Hours]
[Key word: Misjudged]
PunnyPeace
1 year ago