This is the page for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon subjectives.
General:
- Adaptation Displacement: Many assume these games were the start of the Mystery Dungeon series. Others know that Shiren the Wanderer preceded them, with a Japan-exclusive Super Famicom release, but Shiren wasn't the first one, either. That honor goes to Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon, a Dragon Quest spinoff starring Torneko Taloon.
- Annoying Video Game Helper: AI teammates often embrace this trope with both hands, especially with low IQ stats. Reviving an entire room of petrified enemies with an ill-timed Growl attack, for example.
- Broken Base: The idea that the protagonist always has to be an amnesic human turned into a Pokémon, especially in the later games. Some felt that it allows more emotional investment especially at the end where But Now I Must Go comes into effect and is a need for immersion and bonding between the protagonists, others felt that it became an overused plot device to shoehorn in humans when there isn't a need, considering that the PMD world essentially averts Human-Focused Adaptation and give the Pokémon as a whole much needed Character Focus.
- Critical Dissonance: Of the critic-hated, player-loved kind. The story is generally agreed to be better than the supporting gameplay. Not the same case for Japanese critics though, at least ones from Famitsu. This was a given considering the fact that critics tend to loathe roguelikes.
- Cult Classic: The entire series. Not as widely played as the main series games, but beloved with a devoted fanbase of their own. Particularly applies to Explorers.
- Demonic Spiders:
- Pokémon with multi-hit moves in general. Octillery is probably the best individual example of the trope—it packs Bullet Seed, which hits multiple times from a distance, among other things.
- Any enemy with moves that hit an entire room. Nidoqueen with Earth Power and Ledian with Silver Wind WILL make you tear your hair out. And god forbid you run into the dreaded Ominous Wind Drifloon or Drifblim...
- As well as any enemy that knows Perish Song. Unless you have a Heal Seed handy, you are pretty much done for if it hits you.
- Difficulty Spike:
- Overall across the series, there's a very large difficulty spike once the story is completed, with an increase in floor layout complexity, the appearance of sticky items and new traps, and more powerful Pokémon. Rescue Team and Explorers also start giving advanced IQ skills to enemy Pokémon that render several powerful strategies ineffective.
- Explorers is pretty easy up until you make your way to the Hidden Land and Temporal Tower. Afterwards, it can get downright cruel. Before that, we have Quicksand Pit, which can be cruel with constant sandstorms caused by Hippopotas and Tyranitar. If you're playing as a Normal-type Pokémon, Dark Hill and its bevy of Ghost-types will be living hell.
- Sky Tower in Red/Blue Rescue Team can be pretty rough going, too. Stupid ghost-types and their dumb attacking through walls on earlier floors, Idiotic Aerodactyl and their moronic Supersonics and Agilities further up... and let's not get into the post-game dungeons.
- In the Explorers games, escort missions are hard enough since the escort is usually massively weak. So imagine when you have to escort one of them through a 30+ lvl dungeon, facing Pokémon that can use Discharge or Silver Wind all the way from the other end of the screen every turn, or damaging weather that can wear down weak escort Pokémon... even worse is the fact that the player has no access to tactics/move commands for escorts. If the team leader steps on a Warp Trap and becomes separated from the escort... good luck.
- In Gates to Infinity the spike starts with Glacier Palace's Eastern Spire, and it keeps on spiking upwards until you reach Kyurem.
- Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Many people, even fans, believe the series' gameplay to be So Okay, It's Average at best, but play the game solely for the story.
- Epileptic Trees: The Decrepit Lab
is solid evidence that there used to be humans in the world where Red/Blue Rescue Team takes place. The unanswered question is... what happened to them? Theories include:- Human civilization suffered an extinctionary catastrophe thousands of years ago and the story of Red/Blue Rescue Team takes place in an "After Humanity" era where Pokémon have become capable of intelligent speech.
- Humans have permanently departed from the planet in a massive Space Exodus, leaving behind their infrastructure as the only evidence of their former presence.
- Humans still exist in the world but the location that the story of Red/Blue Rescue Team takes place is largely unknown and inaccessible to them. The Decrepit Lab is possibly evidence to a failed attempt at colonization or just a remote research station that met with disaster.
- Since Mewtwo was created by humans, he might be the only Pokémon in the series who has some knowledge and history about them. But it remains an unexplored Plot Hole since no one bothers to ask and he never says anything about it.
- Escapist Character: The human-turned-Pokémon protagonist. What fan hasn't wanted to become a Pokémon? Saving the world doesn't hurt either.
- Fanfic Fuel: The subseries' entire premise - a human transforming into a Pokémon and living in a world exclusively inhabited by Pokémon, befriending a Pokémon partner and going on heroic adventures together - is absolutely ripe for countless stories and has spawned dozens upon dozens of fan interpretations, scenarios and ROM hacks set in the world of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.
- Fanon: The protagonists' speculated ages in human years:
- Rescue Team: Late teens. (15-19)
- Explorers: Mid teens. (13-18)
- Gates: Early 20s. (20-25)
- Super: Older child. (8-13)
- Super has an unusual take on this, as while the age of their Pokémon form is speculated to be an older child, the intro heavily implies that the protagonist was older as a human and aged down.
- Game-Breaker:
- Unlike the main Pokémon series, "movement speed" actually provides a Haste effect, giving the user multiple turns in a row. It wears off quickly, but a quickened Pokémon can inflict a lot of damage if they also know attacks capable of hitting an entire room. This goes double in Monster Houses, where an enemy Pokémon using "Agility" can increase all enemies to double/triple/quadruple turns.
- Multi-Hit attacks (Bullet Seed, Fury Swipes/Attack, Pin Missile). Due to the damage calculation in the Mystery Dungeon games being much different than the mainstream titles, these moves now hit as hard as most other attacks each individual hit. Bullet Seed in earlier games, in particular, had the advantage in that, as it deals damage in a straight line, it could potentially KO multiple Pokémon in the same turn. This is made worse for the fact that the STAB bonus from the mainstream titles is also implemented in the Mystery Dungeon games, meaning with the right Pokémon (A Treecko with Bullet Seed and the Concentrator skill for instance), this can be quite lethal. Gates to Infinity onwards nerfed Multi-Hit moves so that they cannot knock out multiple Pokémon in the same turn, but those same games provide means to patch up their mediocre accuracy or increase their dangerous power even more.
- Silver Wind. Like in the main series games, it has a chance of increasing all of your stats. In these games, it also hits all enemies in a room, and it has a separate chance of boosting your stats for each enemy it hits in the same turn. Add the fact that the increased speed grants you extra turns to use it again if there are any enemies left, and it can snowball from there. This clip demonstrates how broken it can be when an escort Venomoth uses it to utterly decimate a big swarm of enemies.
- Petrify or Foe-Seal Orbs render Monster Houses pretty much trivial: they freeze every enemy in the room until attacked, letting you mop them up one by one and gather the sweet loot. What's more, your A.I. team is smart enough not to attack any enemy under the effect, so you don't have to worry about them ruining it and dooming you.
- The X-Ray Specs mean that you'll never be surprised in dungeons where visibility is at a premium (essentially all the time mid-to-late game.) It tells you exactly where all the enemies and items are on the floor which drops massive hints as to what might be in there. A ton of treasure but no visible Pokémon? That's a monster house. A bunch of items with only a single enemy in the middle? That's an item shop. A yellow dot on the map when you and your partner are together? That's the Pokémon you need to rescue, deliver an item to, escort your guest to. This essentially blows side missions wide open and makes escort missions more bearable.
- Smeargle and its Power Copying can trivialize any challenge in every game, if you can assemble the right moveset. Smeargle's Necessary Drawback in the main series games has always been rather lackluster stats, but these games only have a universal hard cap on stat boosts, meaning Smeargle can be just as strong as your average Olympus Mons if you shove enough Rare Candies down its throat.
- Gateway Series: All things considered, these are probably some of the more easy and accessible Roguelikes of the genre. Being tied to a popular franchise also helps. These games are often responsible for getting people into the greater Roguelike genre.
- Goddamned Bats:
- Pretty much anything that can inflict Poison status, attack from a distance (most Water-type attacks have ranged capability), or from within walls (the Ghost types).
- Doom Seeds: You better pray that an enemy 'mon doesn't throw these at you...
- Spinarak, a mon that can cause the aforementioned poison along with a slow, causing it to go twice as much as you.
- He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
- The fans were not happy about some review scores, particularly the 3/10 Game Informer gave Blue Rescue Team.
- Of particular note is IGN's 4.9 rating of Explorers of Sky, even lower than their score of Explorers of Time/Darkness. It's certainly not helped by Explorers of Sky being seen as the best installment in the series by many PMD fans.
- As a whole, the Mystery Dungeon games are never well received by IGN and never putted above a 6/10. And they let everyone know that IGN just doesn't like the core structure for its 'repetition' and 'grindy nature'. When that was the point for any RPG or Rougelike.
- Low-Tier Letdown: Pretty much any Escort Mission you do will include this. You can't assign tactics to them if they get separated, and in Red/Blue Rescue Team the escorted Pokémon was almost always at Level 1, making it easy for enemy Pokémon to KO them. To put it nicely, these are the guys who tend to waste all your Heal Seeds and Reviver Seeds for doing annoyingly stupid things like wandering off and walking into lava/fire. Explorers was just a little bit nicer in the levels department, but your clients are still under-leveled.
- Memetic Mutation: Don't say "Stun Seed" backwards Explanation
- More Popular Spin-Off: While not for the Pokémon franchise itself, PMD is definitely the most well-known series in the Mystery Dungeon franchise, to the point many are unaware the Mystery Dungeon franchise even includes games like Chocobo's Dungeon and/or Shiren the Wanderer, the game that started the franchise in the first place.
- Most Wonderful Sound: The jingle that plays when you recruit a new team member. Especially if it's a legendary Pokémon.
- Nintendo Hard: Especially the bonus dungeons, some of which totally empty your inventory and level you down to 1. It's because of this that Purity Forest and Zero Isle South are many players' favorite dungeons.
- Older Than They Think: Shiny Pokémon and evolving mid-dungeon are features that were introduced in Adventure Squad. Since they're Japan-exclusive titles, most people don't know this.
- Popular with Furries: While Pokémon already has a good following in the Furry Fandom, this series receives heavy attention from it due to focusing on the viewpoint of the Pokémon themselves. The main characters being humans transformed into Pokémon also makes it popular with furries who enjoy the concept of transformation, or who appreciate the easy way to insert their original characters into the plot.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop: Relative to the rest of the Mystery Dungeon franchise. The Pokémon games are considerably easier than most typical Mystery Dungeons, as common mechanics like Level Drain are not in effect, being knocked out is less punishing and the On-Site Procurement aspect is downplayed by the ability to carry a full inventory with you. The series' most difficult dungeons are usually just giving players a taste of what a typical Mystery Dungeon game plays like.
- Sequel Difficulty Spike: In a variety of ways, but notably with regard to Monster Houses: The first Monster Houses in the Rescue Team games would be seen in late-game dungeons like Uproar Forest or the Magma Cavern, but in the Explorers games they can occur as early as Amp Plains halfway through the Story Arc. Explorers of Sky spikes even earlier than Time/Darkness thanks to the special episodes and the change of bosses at Amp Plains.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Adventure Squads has taken flack for being Lighter and Softer than Rescue Team and Explorers, particularly as that included having a much lighter plot.
- Gates to Infinity has also been hit with this since the Japanese demo was first released. For details, see its entry below.
- Tough Act to Follow: Gates to Infinity is having a very hard time following the Explorers games, mostly for "not having a deep enough plot", and the fact that there is a lot less post-credits content compared to the other two games.
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Some fans feel that Mystery Dungeon spinoff series tried too hard to be Darker and Edgier without adding aspects of explicit violence, swear words and other adult things in order to appeal to young players.
