This review contains spoilers
Note: I'm going to do my best to not mention the changes Sky made to this game and simply review Time/Darkness as is.
Sequels to games can be hit or miss. They can blow the previous game out of the water, or be a complete letdown. They might not even be bad on their own, but simply the association with the game it's succeeding can give it a much more negative view. I've played many "2"s in games before, both good and bad, but I don't think I've ever seen a sequel improve upon its predeccesor in almost every way as strongly as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers. Perhaps it's nostalgia speaking, as this is the game I truly grew up with, moreso than Rescue Team despite it being my first, but playing this game right after an entire Red Rescue Team playthrough really highlighted to me just how amazing this game is, in so, so many ways.
Starting with gameplay, on the surface it appears pretty similar to the first game, but there's a variety of changes that were made, both quality-of-life and new additions, that make the whole experience feel much better. First of all, my nitpicks from Rescue Team were solved: You can feed team members straight from the bag rather than making them hold the item or throwing it at them, and you can now take four team members into a dungeon. Having to send back new recruits when your party is full rather than being allowed to switch someone out is a little annoying, but hey, at least you can still recruit Pokemon when your party is full, which I don't think was possible in Rescue Team. I'll admit some changes were made that I don't care for, though. Held Items are no longer seperated into their own menu, and as a result, you have to re-equip the item every time you enter a dungeon. Yes, I forgot to equip my held item half of the time. This game also removed the post-game feature of being able to switch the player character in the middle of a dungeon. I can understand why they did this, but it was a fun feature and led to some creative strategies. But what the game lacks in held item mechanics and one interesting post-game mechanic, it makes up for with a massive Treasure Bag size and a plethora of new items. New Seeds and Orbs have been added to the mix, and with the huge increase in items you can take with you, this makes building fun and unique strategies much more possible. The game also adds new types of missions and reward types such as Eggs, so that's fun too. There's also new dungeon layout generation patterns, but I'll admit, from what I could see, a lot of them just found new ways to screw you over by making you go down very long and windy dead-end trails. It's something new though, and in a game built around travelling randomly generated floors repeatedly, any new additions are welcome ones. Overall, the gameplay is just much smoother and more interesting. It feels like a definitive version of Rescue Team's gameplay, taking something that was already good and making it better.
Then there's difficulty. I've had mixed experiences with this game's difficulty, to the point that I can't even properly review it. I've seen many people say this game is the easiest in the series, and I don't remember having any sort of difficulties the last time I played this game, which was through Sky. This run, however, may have been the most trouble I've had with any PMD game in recent years, and while most of my pain comes from the post-game, I still had my fair share of issues in the main story as well. I'll start off by saying I was a Charmander and my partner was a Turtwig, and I think this is the first time I've had a team with no status effect moves except my Charmander's Smokescreen, which gives the Whiffer status in this series. Unfortunately Whiffer sucks, not because your opponent still has the possibility to hurt you (it never happened), but because it wears off so fast compared to other status conditions. In my Red Rescue Team playthrough, I used a Bulbasaur with Sleep Powder, which I found to be infinetely more reliable than Smokescreen. Not being confident in my player's moveset may have been the cause of some of my difficulty, but another reason was that I simply lacked Reviver Seeds most of the time, and when I say lack, I mean no Reviver Seeds at all. Please don't try and play the game like this, it's hell. Most of my losses occured in post-game dungeons I'll admit, but not the optional on-purpose difficult ones, but the mandatory post-story ones. I found myself to be underleveled most of the time, and unable to take more than two hits from opponents. I'm not saying this game is too difficult though: rather, I think difficulty is a matter of how you play. The game gives you a wide variety of items to save your ass at your disposal, and there's a good chance I didn't use nearly enough items due to constantly having a "gonna save this for later when I need it" mentality. Can't save it for later if I'm dead. If you take time to prepare and use your items wisely, the game can be much less difficult than I made it out to be. That being said though, bosses are a total pushover. They weren't the hardest thing in Rescue Team if you had the right items, but X-Eye Seeds and Violent Seeds almost completely removes any difficulty to the bosses, except for the very few battles where multiple enemies gang up on you. I never even got to see any bosses catch or dodge the Seeds I threw. Anyway, to basically sum this section up: difficulty is up to you, depending on how you play your cards. You can take your time to obtain the right items you'll need (mostly Reviver Seeds) for the challenge ahead, or stupidly rush into everything the game throws at you. It felt good to have a challenge though, and I appreciate this game for allowing that, even if it wasn't intentional.
Time to finally move on from gameplay and talk about the story. I am being completely serious when I say this is genuinely one of the best stories in a Pokemon game. Not only is it a compelling tale of saving all of time, but it's surprisingly heavy, with a significant focus on the theme of self-sacrifice regarding Grovyle and the player's mission. Playing through the latter half of the game is always an emotional rollercoaster, especially the "sent to the future" arc, and the ending is nothing short of one of the most heart-wrenching endings I've seen in a game. That's not to say only the more serious side of the story is worth playing, though. I think the time you spend at the Guild is equally as important to the story as the time you spend in the future and/or with Grovyle. What I really love about this game is the time it takes to build up its story. The story is segmented into chapters, with 20 in total, and I love what the game does with them. I'm really sorry for repeatedly dragging Rescue Team into this, but something I mentioned in my review of it was how I liked the premise of the story, but wish the game did more with it. It had a good cast of characters, but I felt like it didn't use them to their full potential, not even the partner, and it sped through the events rather quickly. That's what I like about Explorers, the time it spends with its wonderful cast and the bond with your partner. Yet it doesn't feel like the main conflict of the game, that being the topic of time stopping, comes out of nowhere; it's also given time to develop with moments such as the occassional cutscenes of Grovyle stealing Time Gears or meeting Azelf at the end of the expedition, but it takes a while before the Guild starts getting involved with preventing the planet's paralysis. The game also uses mandatory days of taking missions from the board as well as Sentry Duty as a way of passing time in the story. I know some people don't care for this, which is completely understandable, but I think it's a good way of building up story events, even if it's a bit of an artificial method. Now, as much as I adore this game's story, it does have some issues I'd like to discuss. First, the complaint I usually hear about the story is that Dusknoir is a painfully obvious twist villain. I've played the game enough times that it's hard for me to judge if he's actually that obvious or not, but I'll admit the game does spend a bit too much time on certain moments such as his reaction to first hearing the player's name. Second, here's something I only noticed now on this playthrough of the game: Team Skull sucks. Well, not Team Skull themselves, I acually like them, but the way the game uses them sucks. It's funny to say that they're a downgrade from Team Meanies when they obviously have the cooler name, but for a game that does a good job of utilizing its characters, Team Skull is a very odd exception. You fight Zubat and Koffing as a tutorial boss, and afterwards they occassionally show up to terrorize you and bring about the infamous Perfect Apple incident, but... you never actually fight them again. Apple Woods would've been a perfect opportunity for a fight, but you never get a chance to actually face off against Skuntank. Their last appearance was in Brine Cave, which ends off on a touching moment with them, but they never appear again despite Skuntank's claim that they'll be back to their old tricks when they get out of there. Maybe this is a nitpick, since they clearly weren't intended to be as important to the story as Team Meanies was (or rather, just Gengar), but it's still a letdown for me. Finally, for as amazing as the overall story is, the game has an issue with flashbacks. I understand this game is intended to be playable by kids, but sometimes it'll go out of its way to replay cutscenes that happened a minimum of 5 minutes ago. It gets very repetitive, especially when there are shorter ways to call back to a previous event. Otherwise, it's a very mature story, and it rarely if ever feels like it's talking down to its audience or purposely oversimplifying things for children. It doesn't feel like it's held back by its target demographic, and that's something I really respect this game for.
I've probably spoken about the story enough, but I'd also like to take a moment to talk about the post-game, since that's something I mentioned in my Red Rescue Team review. I am once again comparing Rescue Team to Explorers, sorry, but basically my main issue with Rescue Team's post-game was how disconnected it felt from the player and partner and didn't really have much going for it. Explorers does not have that issue at all, and it's a massive improvement. It has several events, with the last one serving as a conclusion to the main story by revealing the mastermind behind everything. The post-game is great because it's a perfect mix of introducing new stories while still letting the player do their own thing, and then it wraps everything up with one final dramatic finish in the form of the space-distortion plot. This section of the post-story is just as heavy as the main story, calling back to the self-sacrifice theme but with a much darker undertone, and it's almost surprising to me that something not even apart of the main game delves into this. It makes for a great finish to an already amazing story.
Something I neglected to mention in my Red Rescue Team review was the art and music of the games, which is something I only briefly touched upon in my Blue Rescue Team review. I want to start by saying Rescue Team's graphics and OST are great, and I regret not discussing it. A good portion of the Pokemon graphics from Rescue Team were reused in this game, and for good reason. The new sprites created for the Gen 4 Pokemon look great too and fit in with the style. Where this game really shines, though, is its landscapes. Overworlds such as Treasure Town are lively and fun to explore, and the many dungeon tilesets are great. This game also makes use of the second screen to create some really beautiful cutscenes, both pleasing to look at and deep in conveying emotion. The OST, of course, is fantastic too. It's hard for me to describe it other than "music good" but something I think this game in particular does really well is use instruments to connect to the themes of dungeon environments. This is something I noticed while playing the optional dungeons, which don't have their own music but tend to stick to a theme, such as Shimmer Hill only playing music that uses the chime-like instrument. I also feel like this game has a wider variety of music genres in its OST, if that's the correct way to put it, suiting all sorts of different moods. And of course, the game has a fantastic use of motifs as well, using them to strike the right emotions into you. Even when the game reuses certain music for cutscenes, it never feels lazy, but more like a clever way of recontextualizing a song. Through the Sea of Time can convey two different meanings depending on where you hear it, the triumph of finally reaching the Hidden Land or the crushing shock of watching Grovyle return to the future with Dusknoir, and I love it for that.
I still feel like there's so much about the game I didn't discuss, and I don't think a simple Backloggd review can do it justice (although this did take quite a while to write, and I'm worried I spoke too much in some sections. Apologies for that). It's not perfect, but it's certainly a great game and a fantastic sequel. I assume you've played this already if you're reading this, since I marked this with a spoiler warning, but if not, what are you doing!! Instead of reading my thoughts on this game, you should really go play it for yourself. It's an amazing game that I'd dare to put up with main series games as one of the greatest Pokemon games made. I first played this game when I was pretty young, and it has stuck with me ever since. Even now, when I go to replay the game, I discover new details about the story and characters that I never noticed before. I know this game is already fairly popular, but truly, I hope this game will go down as a timeless classic that no one will forget.
do you get it. do you get the joke. timeless. it's not as funny when im reviewing darkness instead of time oh well
Sequels to games can be hit or miss. They can blow the previous game out of the water, or be a complete letdown. They might not even be bad on their own, but simply the association with the game it's succeeding can give it a much more negative view. I've played many "2"s in games before, both good and bad, but I don't think I've ever seen a sequel improve upon its predeccesor in almost every way as strongly as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers. Perhaps it's nostalgia speaking, as this is the game I truly grew up with, moreso than Rescue Team despite it being my first, but playing this game right after an entire Red Rescue Team playthrough really highlighted to me just how amazing this game is, in so, so many ways.
Starting with gameplay, on the surface it appears pretty similar to the first game, but there's a variety of changes that were made, both quality-of-life and new additions, that make the whole experience feel much better. First of all, my nitpicks from Rescue Team were solved: You can feed team members straight from the bag rather than making them hold the item or throwing it at them, and you can now take four team members into a dungeon. Having to send back new recruits when your party is full rather than being allowed to switch someone out is a little annoying, but hey, at least you can still recruit Pokemon when your party is full, which I don't think was possible in Rescue Team. I'll admit some changes were made that I don't care for, though. Held Items are no longer seperated into their own menu, and as a result, you have to re-equip the item every time you enter a dungeon. Yes, I forgot to equip my held item half of the time. This game also removed the post-game feature of being able to switch the player character in the middle of a dungeon. I can understand why they did this, but it was a fun feature and led to some creative strategies. But what the game lacks in held item mechanics and one interesting post-game mechanic, it makes up for with a massive Treasure Bag size and a plethora of new items. New Seeds and Orbs have been added to the mix, and with the huge increase in items you can take with you, this makes building fun and unique strategies much more possible. The game also adds new types of missions and reward types such as Eggs, so that's fun too. There's also new dungeon layout generation patterns, but I'll admit, from what I could see, a lot of them just found new ways to screw you over by making you go down very long and windy dead-end trails. It's something new though, and in a game built around travelling randomly generated floors repeatedly, any new additions are welcome ones. Overall, the gameplay is just much smoother and more interesting. It feels like a definitive version of Rescue Team's gameplay, taking something that was already good and making it better.
Then there's difficulty. I've had mixed experiences with this game's difficulty, to the point that I can't even properly review it. I've seen many people say this game is the easiest in the series, and I don't remember having any sort of difficulties the last time I played this game, which was through Sky. This run, however, may have been the most trouble I've had with any PMD game in recent years, and while most of my pain comes from the post-game, I still had my fair share of issues in the main story as well. I'll start off by saying I was a Charmander and my partner was a Turtwig, and I think this is the first time I've had a team with no status effect moves except my Charmander's Smokescreen, which gives the Whiffer status in this series. Unfortunately Whiffer sucks, not because your opponent still has the possibility to hurt you (it never happened), but because it wears off so fast compared to other status conditions. In my Red Rescue Team playthrough, I used a Bulbasaur with Sleep Powder, which I found to be infinetely more reliable than Smokescreen. Not being confident in my player's moveset may have been the cause of some of my difficulty, but another reason was that I simply lacked Reviver Seeds most of the time, and when I say lack, I mean no Reviver Seeds at all. Please don't try and play the game like this, it's hell. Most of my losses occured in post-game dungeons I'll admit, but not the optional on-purpose difficult ones, but the mandatory post-story ones. I found myself to be underleveled most of the time, and unable to take more than two hits from opponents. I'm not saying this game is too difficult though: rather, I think difficulty is a matter of how you play. The game gives you a wide variety of items to save your ass at your disposal, and there's a good chance I didn't use nearly enough items due to constantly having a "gonna save this for later when I need it" mentality. Can't save it for later if I'm dead. If you take time to prepare and use your items wisely, the game can be much less difficult than I made it out to be. That being said though, bosses are a total pushover. They weren't the hardest thing in Rescue Team if you had the right items, but X-Eye Seeds and Violent Seeds almost completely removes any difficulty to the bosses, except for the very few battles where multiple enemies gang up on you. I never even got to see any bosses catch or dodge the Seeds I threw. Anyway, to basically sum this section up: difficulty is up to you, depending on how you play your cards. You can take your time to obtain the right items you'll need (mostly Reviver Seeds) for the challenge ahead, or stupidly rush into everything the game throws at you. It felt good to have a challenge though, and I appreciate this game for allowing that, even if it wasn't intentional.
Time to finally move on from gameplay and talk about the story. I am being completely serious when I say this is genuinely one of the best stories in a Pokemon game. Not only is it a compelling tale of saving all of time, but it's surprisingly heavy, with a significant focus on the theme of self-sacrifice regarding Grovyle and the player's mission. Playing through the latter half of the game is always an emotional rollercoaster, especially the "sent to the future" arc, and the ending is nothing short of one of the most heart-wrenching endings I've seen in a game. That's not to say only the more serious side of the story is worth playing, though. I think the time you spend at the Guild is equally as important to the story as the time you spend in the future and/or with Grovyle. What I really love about this game is the time it takes to build up its story. The story is segmented into chapters, with 20 in total, and I love what the game does with them. I'm really sorry for repeatedly dragging Rescue Team into this, but something I mentioned in my review of it was how I liked the premise of the story, but wish the game did more with it. It had a good cast of characters, but I felt like it didn't use them to their full potential, not even the partner, and it sped through the events rather quickly. That's what I like about Explorers, the time it spends with its wonderful cast and the bond with your partner. Yet it doesn't feel like the main conflict of the game, that being the topic of time stopping, comes out of nowhere; it's also given time to develop with moments such as the occassional cutscenes of Grovyle stealing Time Gears or meeting Azelf at the end of the expedition, but it takes a while before the Guild starts getting involved with preventing the planet's paralysis. The game also uses mandatory days of taking missions from the board as well as Sentry Duty as a way of passing time in the story. I know some people don't care for this, which is completely understandable, but I think it's a good way of building up story events, even if it's a bit of an artificial method. Now, as much as I adore this game's story, it does have some issues I'd like to discuss. First, the complaint I usually hear about the story is that Dusknoir is a painfully obvious twist villain. I've played the game enough times that it's hard for me to judge if he's actually that obvious or not, but I'll admit the game does spend a bit too much time on certain moments such as his reaction to first hearing the player's name. Second, here's something I only noticed now on this playthrough of the game: Team Skull sucks. Well, not Team Skull themselves, I acually like them, but the way the game uses them sucks. It's funny to say that they're a downgrade from Team Meanies when they obviously have the cooler name, but for a game that does a good job of utilizing its characters, Team Skull is a very odd exception. You fight Zubat and Koffing as a tutorial boss, and afterwards they occassionally show up to terrorize you and bring about the infamous Perfect Apple incident, but... you never actually fight them again. Apple Woods would've been a perfect opportunity for a fight, but you never get a chance to actually face off against Skuntank. Their last appearance was in Brine Cave, which ends off on a touching moment with them, but they never appear again despite Skuntank's claim that they'll be back to their old tricks when they get out of there. Maybe this is a nitpick, since they clearly weren't intended to be as important to the story as Team Meanies was (or rather, just Gengar), but it's still a letdown for me. Finally, for as amazing as the overall story is, the game has an issue with flashbacks. I understand this game is intended to be playable by kids, but sometimes it'll go out of its way to replay cutscenes that happened a minimum of 5 minutes ago. It gets very repetitive, especially when there are shorter ways to call back to a previous event. Otherwise, it's a very mature story, and it rarely if ever feels like it's talking down to its audience or purposely oversimplifying things for children. It doesn't feel like it's held back by its target demographic, and that's something I really respect this game for.
I've probably spoken about the story enough, but I'd also like to take a moment to talk about the post-game, since that's something I mentioned in my Red Rescue Team review. I am once again comparing Rescue Team to Explorers, sorry, but basically my main issue with Rescue Team's post-game was how disconnected it felt from the player and partner and didn't really have much going for it. Explorers does not have that issue at all, and it's a massive improvement. It has several events, with the last one serving as a conclusion to the main story by revealing the mastermind behind everything. The post-game is great because it's a perfect mix of introducing new stories while still letting the player do their own thing, and then it wraps everything up with one final dramatic finish in the form of the space-distortion plot. This section of the post-story is just as heavy as the main story, calling back to the self-sacrifice theme but with a much darker undertone, and it's almost surprising to me that something not even apart of the main game delves into this. It makes for a great finish to an already amazing story.
Something I neglected to mention in my Red Rescue Team review was the art and music of the games, which is something I only briefly touched upon in my Blue Rescue Team review. I want to start by saying Rescue Team's graphics and OST are great, and I regret not discussing it. A good portion of the Pokemon graphics from Rescue Team were reused in this game, and for good reason. The new sprites created for the Gen 4 Pokemon look great too and fit in with the style. Where this game really shines, though, is its landscapes. Overworlds such as Treasure Town are lively and fun to explore, and the many dungeon tilesets are great. This game also makes use of the second screen to create some really beautiful cutscenes, both pleasing to look at and deep in conveying emotion. The OST, of course, is fantastic too. It's hard for me to describe it other than "music good" but something I think this game in particular does really well is use instruments to connect to the themes of dungeon environments. This is something I noticed while playing the optional dungeons, which don't have their own music but tend to stick to a theme, such as Shimmer Hill only playing music that uses the chime-like instrument. I also feel like this game has a wider variety of music genres in its OST, if that's the correct way to put it, suiting all sorts of different moods. And of course, the game has a fantastic use of motifs as well, using them to strike the right emotions into you. Even when the game reuses certain music for cutscenes, it never feels lazy, but more like a clever way of recontextualizing a song. Through the Sea of Time can convey two different meanings depending on where you hear it, the triumph of finally reaching the Hidden Land or the crushing shock of watching Grovyle return to the future with Dusknoir, and I love it for that.
I still feel like there's so much about the game I didn't discuss, and I don't think a simple Backloggd review can do it justice (although this did take quite a while to write, and I'm worried I spoke too much in some sections. Apologies for that). It's not perfect, but it's certainly a great game and a fantastic sequel. I assume you've played this already if you're reading this, since I marked this with a spoiler warning, but if not, what are you doing!! Instead of reading my thoughts on this game, you should really go play it for yourself. It's an amazing game that I'd dare to put up with main series games as one of the greatest Pokemon games made. I first played this game when I was pretty young, and it has stuck with me ever since. Even now, when I go to replay the game, I discover new details about the story and characters that I never noticed before. I know this game is already fairly popular, but truly, I hope this game will go down as a timeless classic that no one will forget.
do you get it. do you get the joke. timeless. it's not as funny when im reviewing darkness instead of time oh well