[NDS] Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time - 9NineBreaker9

Sorry, I just had to get this done and over with, anandjones XD

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The boxart and the sticker on the back of my DS​

Developer: Chunsoft​

Publisher: Nintendo​

Genre: Mystery Dungeon RPG​

I’ve been a fan of Pokémon since… well, forever. I remember watching the show back when it was good, or at least seemed that way, memorizing the theme song, collecting the cards, and, when I finally got my father’s GameBoy, getting not one, but all three first generation Pokémon games – Red, Blue, and Yellow. Now, much, much later, I still love Pokémon games, if not only because I’m addicted to it, but due to the game’s surprising depth and strategy involved. In recent years, a few spin-off series have sprung up, one of which being the Mystery Dungeon series, now having its second, or third and fourth, games – Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness.

A noticeable improvement over the last game, the graphics have almost doubled in quality, with sprites being far more detailed and attacks very entertaining to watch. Some of the most impressive visuals lie in the prerendered environments surrounding Wigglytuff’s Guild, filled with a crisp livelihood that is very impressive, as well as the infrequent bits of separate animation, looking over the sea or out to a magnificent fountain. These are amazingly well done, so it’s a shame that the rest of the game – the dungeons – do not follow the same quality, but degenerate into extremely bland and uninspired expanses.

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Animated cutouts like these are beautiful for the DS, but are very infrequent and attached to the most boring of scenes​

The music of the game is also, more or less, an improvement over the Rescue Team games, with the tracks being more numerous and of a higher quality. Sadly, there are only a few songs that are not annoying beyond belief, such as the boss battle theme, whereas every other song, the dungeon themes, are very short, jarring loops that play endlessly, leaving you to leave the sound off for an unfortunate majority of the game.

The story of the newest dungeon games follows the previous one in that you play as a human who has been mysteriously transformed into a human, left unconscious on the beach. You are found by your partner Pokémon, and, together, you set off to join Wigglytuff’s Guild of explorers to search the land not only for treasure, but for an answer as to your predicament.

I have to say, I loved the story of the last game, as it was surprisingly touching and very involving, letting you get a feel for not only the plot, but for your character, as well. This time around, I am wishing that there was some way to skip the entire plot, as, when compared to the last game, or any game, really, it offers up nothing.

The plotline is extremely mundane due mostly in part to you having absolutely no involvement in it; you may think about the situation every now and again, but you’ll always be stuck having your partner ask for your thoughts, then relaying it to everyone else. You can’t even so much as choose what to say, something that made you feel as if you were affecting the story, like you could in the last game. And, to top it all off, almost every single event is foreshadowed to the point where villains might as well just say “I are be bad guy lol” before taking something of yours, walking past and around you, and out of sight, before your idiotic avatar and talking parrot can be astonished as to having something stolen.

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... because you sure as hell can't explore without being registered - what if you were pulled over!​

Thankfully, the gameplay can help to ease some of the pain of a worthless story, as improvements over the previous game help to make it far smoother, quicker, and much more enjoyable.

The general flow of each day is fairly simple – you wake up and check the two bulletin boards for tasks to do. You then check around town, stopping by the bank and vault to drop off money and items, or perhaps to check for items to purchase, before heading out into the wild dungeons to complete any number of tasks. After completing these, you return home for your rewards, and to eventually sleep, ending the day.

Picking tasks from the bulletin boards are easy, thanks to very simple writing and a handy difficulty rating that can inform you as to how much you will be pwned, or how much pwning you will do. There is also the addition of the outlaw bulletin board, a new brand of tasks that ask you to find and take down a strong Pokémon for someone. It’s a nice addition and really helps to break up the monotony, but everything boils down to going here, picking up this, or killing this. Well, every game is more or less about these things, but the repetitive nature of the tasks can really kill your drive to play it through.

The town is, as stated prior, very well done, full of detail and a very lively, cheery nature. Here, you can find a number of services for your party, such as a store, a bank, a vault to store items, a training dojo, an egg watching service, an appraiser for random boxes, as well as a linking service that can chain your moves to be pulled off in succession. Everything here is just as it should be – easy to find, easy to understand, easy to use. This here has no complains, as there is nothing wrong with the town… if there was, I would seriously question whether this game had any merit.

And now, for the bulk of the game – the dungeon crawling. Here is where you will the entirety of the game, and it is here where the game becomes very much addicting, albeit an addiction that causes some nasty side effects.

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Don't worry, I assure you that it's far more fun than it looks, if only for a little while​

The exclusive Mystery Dungeon moniker makes the gameplay different from just about every other game on the market for a number of reasons, chief of which is that every single dungeon floor is randomized, leaving you different rooms, items and enemies to find on every visit. This makes everything seem fresh each time you enter the dungeon, and helps to keep the ultimate drone of repetition off for quite some time.

Another change from the classic is that, while it may seem to work in real time, each action takes a move. For every time you and your partner move, an enemy may take a similar action. You attack, your foe attacks. It’s because of how quickly that this all takes place that things seem a lot more active, making everything much more involving than general turn-based games, yet slow enough so that you can think things through before plowing into the fray.

There are, thankfully, a few things in the dungeon that makes it much more complicated than just this. You can pick up a wide array of items, from money, to consumables that can recover health, to accessories that raise your stats or prevent status effects, as well as a number of seeds and orbs that cause interesting effects, such as poison or transporting yourself to the exit.

There are also a number of fiendish traps that you may encounter. Some may be fairly harmless, like causing you to trip and drop your held item, which can then be held once more. However, some of them are truly monstrous, like the Monster House. This trap will fill up all but a few spaces with full strength enemy Pokémon the moment you enter the room, leaving you bottlenecked and forced to fight everyone by yourself. Due to these, you’ll more likely than not carry a few counters, such as orbs to transport the enemies away or petrify them so that you can take them out one by one. In the end, they’re challenges that range wildly in difficulty, but help to keep everything fresh.

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It's safe to say that that little Bublasaur in the front is royally boned if he doesn't do something clever quickly​

Shortly into the game, you’ll gain the ability to recruit Pokémon, having them join your team. Everyone has an invisible ‘recruit chance,’ and you always have an invisible ‘recruit chance,’ so it’s possible to have anyone you encounter in the game to join your team at one point at another. Were it otherwise, the game would be pointless, but thanks to the insane 491 Pokémon that you can have join your group, there are almost infinite combinations for you to crawl through all of the game’s dungeons with. The only bad thing about all of this is that you can’t ever really know what your chances are, meaning that you may be spending hours to recruit someone when your chance of doing so is in the negative ranges.

Unfortunately, these recruited Pokémon, or the entire AI, rather, are pants on head retarded. You can, thankfully, install a number of routines into your allies, such as commands to follow you or to seek out enemies, but it is damn near impossible to guess exactly what they are going to do, and it is impossible to make them do what you want.

My example – when you command your Pokémon to follow you, they’ll do so to the dot, but they will in turn ignore all enemies, unless an assailant is, well, assaulting your loyal follower. However, should you command them to seek out foes, they will go to attack anything and everything, abandoning you the moment someone bad enters the room. Should you not notice that they leave, they will be left along to not come running back to you, but to wander about the dark depths of the dungeon.

If your partners so much as lose sight of you, they’ll be left to wander alone, usually resulting in their prompt death as there is no way to broadcast your whereabouts and/or have them come back to where you are. I guess, in consolation, we can literally increase a stat called IQ, teaching them new abilities, but these are simply things like double checking if their move has no more PP left, or to not use status inflicting moves when the target already has that status. This is in no way a fix for the ineptitude of the AI that has been copy/pasted from the last game.

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I couldn't find a picture of ineptitude that had anything to do with Pokémon, so I'll just use the next best thing to retarded Japanese monsters​

Once you finish, you are left to get your rewards. Oh yes, I’ve even found something annoying with these – due to the fact they and everything are random, it’s next to impossible to net a certain item, be it money, seeds to revive yourself, eggs, or a Pokémon to join you. It’s nothing major, and I really don’t care in the end, but it’s just extremely annoying when you cannot afford a certain item, can’t get that item from a mission, and can’t find it, leaving you to repeat quests over and over again in search of one little item.

A few other things are worth mentioning, such as the vast majority of the game content is saved for the endgame, the fact that you cannot evolve your Pokémon until much later in the game, as well as the S.O.S system that allows you to send out a code via email, wireless communication or by simple posting on forums so that someone can save you, allowing you to continue on in a dungeon where you died with no death penalties. Most communications are done through very long and very annoying codes, but these allow you to communicate beyond WiFi or personal settings, extending the possibilities to the masses, rather than just friends.

All of this can be sifted down to a very simple statement – the game is pretty fun, as the fighting in dungeons is pretty addictive, but it is all at the cost of a repetitive mission format, idiotic computer intelligence and a completely worthless story. So that can be simplified even further to a pretty mediocre game that has Pokémon in it, making this a game that really just for the fans. It is an improvement over the previous game, but only barely, due to a faster game, more responsive menus and better item usage and management, but all at the cost of the surprisingly good story. If you like Pokémon games and don’t really mind that the game isn’t all that it could be, then you might want to pick up this, or perhaps the first two games, Blue and Red Rescue Team, for the better storyline.

Presentation, 8/10: The menus are much more responsive and better organized, and instructions are very explicit and frequent. This is a very easy game to hop into, but mastering all the little factors takes much time
Graphics, 7/10: The occasional animated cutout is very well done, as are some of the prerendered environments and the sprites, but the dungeons are all very dull and unoriginal. Rare detail is just about the only highlight of the graphical department.
Sound, 7/10: A few of the tracks are great and will get stuck in your head, while everything else ranges from average (sound effects) to mute-worthy (everything else).
Gameplay, 6/10: Seriously. The story is utter trash compared to the first game, and extremely basic compared to everything else, missions are very repetitive and all boil down to the same thing, AI is utterly idiotic unless you babysit their every move, and a number of other, minute things will get on your nerves. The only real merit is that fighting and using moves is pretty fun and almost addictive.
Replay Value, 8/10: The replay value is so high in that you basically will never need to replay it, due to the insane amounts of items, Pokémon, moves, and dungeons to be collected and explored. And, should you chose to play again, you can always play with different Pokémon!

Total Score, 34/50: PMD:EoT/D is a very average game that is reserved only for Pokémaniacs or gluttons for bad story, bad AI, repetitive gameplay and a host of other issues that make it more time than its actually worth. I'm not one to find that graphics and music are better than the core gameplay, but this offering actually has better graphics than gameplay... on a DS. Yeah...

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Technically, the game doesn't lie; there are 491 Pokémon, the game is an epic... failure, you do play as a Pokémon, you can become friends with the coded monsters if you so chose, you can send out SOS's via WiFi, it was made by Nintendo, it is a DS game, there is violence, the dungeons do indeed change, and you can have seizures playing this game.. Don't expect anything else, though.​

... and there is no Cubone starter. WTF?! Cubone is awesome! Is Munchlax and Skitty better!? What about Eevee? He was kind of cool in that he could eventually evolve into a bunch of stuff, but noooooooOOOOOOoooooooo, we'd rather play as the stupid normal types that no one uses because they suck and you can't do jack with them. Cubone wears his mom's skull as a hat and beats people with her bones. If that isn't pimpin', I don't know what is!

 

Re: [DS] Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time - 9NineBreaker9

Well, thank you very much, Winterr. I couldn't help myself when I was set to add a picture of Pokemon being idiotic and my love at poking fun at political figures, so I just through it in, mostly for 'teh lolz'. I could have looked for a Godzilla picture or something, but I'm not really into putting enough effort for a clever joke involving content that is actually Japanese, so I'll just cop out and use an easy joke XD

 

Re: [DS] Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time - 9NineBreaker9

Damn, another awesome review, that definitely beats my one..

 

Re: [DS] Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time - 9NineBreaker9

good review