YMMV / Mystery Dungeon

• Adaptation Displacement: It is very likely that if you bring up Mystery Dungeon, most will assume that you are talking about Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. There are even players who are unaware that Mystery Dungeon is even a franchise outside of the PMD games.
• Common Knowledge: Quite a number of players incorrectly assume that Shiren the Wanderer started the series before being spun off into licensed games. The actual first Mystery Dungeon game was itself a Spin-Off, of Dragon Quest IV specifically. The first Shiren the Wanderer game is even titled "Mystery Dungeon 2".
• Critical Dissonance: The Mystery Dungeon games have historically underperformed with Western critics, who have often cited their brutal difficulty, bland graphics, and uninteresting combat. Western players, on the other hand, tend to side with the Japanese in their substantially more positive opinions of the games, leading to the franchise's Cult Classic status. This has since been alleviated with the popularization of the roguelike genre worldwide in the early to mid 2010s, with recent Mystery Dungeon games receiving overall favorable critic scores.
• Nintendo Hard: A very persistent element of the Mystery Dungeon games, and one of the main reasons the series has struggled to gain widespread appeal outside of Japan. Dungeon crawls are exhaustingly extensive, combat can get very brutal and challenging in later stages, dying is extremely punishing, and Random Number God is always in play even when measures are taken to limit it.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: This is generally how most Mystery Dungeon games are made. The storyline in roughly of Mystery Dungeon titles are typically an afterthought or kept short and concise, leaving players to focus primarily on the challenging gameplay. Ironically, the most popular Mystery Dungeon games, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, earned a reputation for the inverse, being praised for excellent storylines while criticized for the gameplay.

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