Game Reviews

From the beginning, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series has shouldered the genetic burden of its unique lineage. It combines two long-running RPG franchises, which would seem to make it a shoo-in for easy success. In this case, however, the two series in question (Pokémon and Mystery Dungeon, just like it says on the box) operate under radically different premises that don't seem to play well together.

The more popular of the two parents, Pokémon, tasks players with capturing a vast array of cute creatures and carefully building perfectly balanced teams around their traits. Game Freak's megahit encourages a depth of planning and forethought rivaled only by similar stat-crunching ventures like fantasy football and the artillery corps. For those who let themselves become sucked into the world of hardcore number management, the rabbit hole has no bottom; truly dedicated Pokémon battlers maintain insanely intricate spreadsheets to track generations of breeding for their teams, much of which is based on invisible stats that can't even be determined within the game itself.

On the other hand, Mystery Dungeon laughs in the face of your planning and forethought. Derived from the PC classic Rogue and its descendants (known as roguelikes), a Mystery Dungeongame typically sends a player into randomly generated dungeons with no gear, no experience, and no hope of survival. Unlike traditional roguelikes, Mystery Dungeon games do feature some small amount of persistence within their random dungeons that carries over after an inevitable death, so the quest grows ever so slightly easier with each new attempt. But ultimately the mission boils down to: Try to reach the end by starting from nothing and improvising with the tools you find at hand, die, and try again.

Both franchises are masterpieces on their own. When the two clashing RPG philosophies combine, though, the results inevitably disappoint. The core appeal of Pokémon is lost as players control a single creature rather than an entire team (tagalong partners operate under computer control), so the exacting strategies of the standard games boils away to a handful of direct commands and a prayer that the AI won't select stupid or counterproductive actions (though of course it usually does). Meanwhile, the fundamental strengths of Mystery Dungeon – deep challenge, seat-of-your-pants improvisation, and the tension of knowing each action could be your last – vanishes as well. Your team never loses its progress upon defeat, and the actions available in the dungeons don't begin to compare to the possibilities inherent in a true roguelike.

The latest Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Gates to Infinity, continues this trend... and unfortunately, it brings a few new compromises to the table as well in pursuit of some phantasmic sense of "accessibility." Everything from the cramped new zoomed-in view to the thoughtless and boring tunnel-heavy random dungeon layouts make Gates a joyless chore to play – something I find personally vexing, since I really enjoy both of the parent series a great deal. The mechanics have been greatly simplified; combined with the walls of text as characters babble endlessly about the most mundane nonsense, the whole thing becomes a grind in every area and quickly wears out its welcome.

While Gates does offer an elevated difficulty level over its predecessor, this proves to be uneven at best. Losses seem to come with random difficulty spikes and can only really be overcome with grinding – something antithetical to both Pokémon and Mystery Dungeon.

The few near-miss encounters with good ideas are just kind of sad to watch. Gates does away with the hunger mechanic that makes Mystery Dungeon games so tense by preventing players from lurking around to gain experience and regenerate health. Yet this doesn't prove to be the compromise you might expect, because combat has been entirely rebalanced. Your teams' basic attacks now do trifling damage, forcing you to rely on your limited (and finite) selection of special attacks. PP (the expendable stat that enables special rationing) replaces the old hunger mechanic, and that makes a lot of sense in the context of Pokémon.

However, even this tweak falls short because of the lenient penalties for death; you never really feel like you need to ration your PP restoratives or other essentials, so everything just degenerates into tedium. It's a shame that the moment-to-moment action proves to be so dull and meaningless, because the elements surrounding the dungeon dives offer a lot to like. The process of building a town from a desert wasteland to a massive metropolis crammed with shops and training dojos provides an interesting motivation for the overall quest. And the ability to play side stories and co-op missions with secondary party members would be great if it didn't ultimately amount to the same dull dungeon-crawling as the rest of the game.

Gates does offer some more traditional (and more challenging) adventures well into the campaign through unlockable special dungeons, but many of these now exist as paid DLC. The way the game makes its rare moments of worthwhile content pay-to-play (rather than leading with it) rubs me the wrong way.

With so many great RPGs like Fire Emblem Awakening and Etrian Odyssey IV having recently landed on 3DS, Gates to Infinity feels superfluous. I suppose it could have some appeal to hardcore Pokémon fanatics eager to see the characters in 3D, but personally I'd recommend waiting a few months for Pokémon X & Y Versions, which are bound to be far more satisfying. But given the time commitment required to even get to some of the moderately interesting content (made all the more interminable by the walls of mundane text that can't be skipped or sped up), this Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is the kind of game you have to want to love. Sometimes, it takes more than a good pedigree to excel.