Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon Retrospective

Thanks to Wolfman and Cart Boy for their help editing this series of retrospectives.

Well into the Pokémon franchise’s sixth Generation, the Mystery Dungeon series found itself in trouble following its controversial third entry, Gates to Infinity. While opinions on the game were mixed, it undeniably sold far worse than the first two entries, Rescue Team and Explorers. It was up to Spike Chunsoft to restore consumer faith in the series with a new installment that would unite fans of both Gates and its predecessors. As a result, 2015, the last year to not have a mainline Pokémon game so far, saw the release of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon. Despite the positive reception it received at first, the game has since seen far less exposure from fans of the series, with many of them citing the first two PMD titles as superior. To cap off our analysis of each PMD title, we’ll take a look at Super to find out how it fares when compared to its predecessors.

Released on the 3DS on September 17, 2015, Super sees you exploring dungeons once again with your team of up to three Pokémon (rather than the four seen in previous PMD installments) in order to rescue fellow Pokémon, defeat challengers, and find treasure. The primary difference between Super and its predecessors is that this time, you receive missions from the brand new Connection Orb, a device that lets you see requests and battle challenges from Pokémon all over the world. Once you complete a mission on the Connection Orb, you automatically “connect” with the Pokémon who sent you it. Connecting is an alternative take on recruiting that allows you to make Pokémon join your team much more consistently. Since you’re able to connect with every Pokémon species in the game, your primary goal outside of the main story is to connect to as many Pokémon as possible to expand your team. Super also notably attempts to appeal to longtime fans of PMD by bringing back both features and characters from previous games in the series.

Naturally, Super begins the same way previous PMD entries did with you taking a quiz to determine what Pokémon you will play as before letting you choose your partner. However, Super also gives you the option to choose who you’ll be playing as instead of taking the quiz, which is very helpful in multiple playthroughs or when you just want to choose a certain character without having to take the quiz multiple times. However, instead of your partner being the first Pokémon the player meets once they wake up with no memory, they encounter a group of hostile Beheeyem who attack and chase them for seemingly no reason. The player manages to escape them with the help of a Nuzleaf, who volunteers to let the player stay at his home in Serene Village until they recover their memory. Once the two reach Serene Village, the player meets the partner character and is enrolled in the village’s school. After learning about the partner’s dream to leave Serene Village and become a member of the adventuring group known as the Expedition Society, the two become friends and start exploring dungeons near the village together in order to help those in need. Meanwhile, Pokémon from all over the world begin to mysteriously turn to stone, so the player and partner decide to travel to Lively Town after training in the village for a few months and join the Expedition Society in order to help discover what’s causing this occurrence.

By far one of the most controversial aspects of Super’s plot is the entire first part of the main story. A big issue I had with Gates, Super’s predecessor, was the lack of stakes early on, and this is far worse here. The first few hours of the game are notoriously slow and repetitive as a result of the school, the game’s tutorial section, being extremely boring. The primary conflicts to be found in this act range from delivering dropped items to sneaking back home before you’re caught by adults. Much of the early goings feel patronizing for how light the stakes and repetitive the events are, which is frustrating for a game that caters to people who are already on this series’ level. Fortunately, the plot picks up considerably when the heroes reach Lively Town. The tone takes a massive shift as the pair starts to meet Legendary Pokémon, deal with larger threats, and get to the bottom of what’s causing the Pokémon petrifications.

While some PMD fans claim the gameplay in the latter half of the series’ lifetime are much simpler than the first, I would disagree since, unlike Gates, which oversimplified the core dungeon crawling to a point where little strategy was needed to beat the main story, Super introduces a wide variety of new gameplay mechanics that provide an experience unlike anything found in previous PMD installments. This unique direction is fortunately matched by Super’s unconventional approach to difficulty. Where Explorers and Gates went for a more steady difficulty curve, I found Super to get much harder the second the player and partner leave Serene Village. I enjoyed and appreciated the added difficulty from this since it felt like you really had just left home and were stepping into a tough, unpredictable world. Super and its difficulty progression only get more interesting from here, as seen in both the dungeons you have yet to explore in the main story, as well as the ridiculously difficult Legendary boss fights found in the postgame, which feel extremely satisfying to overcome. Not to mention that Super brings back the hunger mechanic, which was undoubtedly a result of the fan outcry to see it return after its absence helped make Gates feel too easy.

In my opinion, the new features and mechanics introduced in Super are where the game really begins to stand out as a unique PMD experience. While the town building seen in Gates has been done away with, which is unfortunate since the mechanic had plenty of room for growth, Super makes up for it with the inclusion of features like Emeras and the Connection Orb. Emeras are crystal-like objects found in dungeons that, when inserted into a Pokémon’s looplet, gives them a specific benefit. Since Emeras break upon leaving the dungeons they were found in, the benefits they give are temporary and serve to make each run through a dungeon feel distinct. While Emeras are randomly generated and thus less strategy-based, they remain a unique addition to the game that prevents every dungeon from feeling too similar. Even though I was personally disappointed to see the return of forced experience sharing in Super, I found it to be way less intrusive here than in Gates due to your team being dozens of times larger than your Gates one, resulting in you needing to share experience if you’re ever to use a teammate that you haven’t explored with before.

The Connection Orb, meanwhile, is Super’s primary new mechanic, and I personally found it to be my favorite part of the game due to it keeping me engaged in the postgame as I completed missions and established connections with every species in the game. As a longtime fan of PMD, seeing almost every character from past Mystery Dungeon games return as recruitable Pokémon was very exciting for me. One of the highlights of my time playing Super was when I was connecting with various Pokémon in hopes of receiving a request from a certain character that I was overjoyed to see return. Even though I found the Connection Orb to be one of the most ambitious mechanics ever implemented into a PMD games, other fans of the series don’t remember it as fondly due to it resulting in the removal of traditional recruiting. With this omission, players were no longer able to give their teammates nicknames and Evolution was made almost completely redundant since you could just recruit the evolved form of the Pokémon you want instead of training them up. While these are valid complaints, I found the Connection Orb and the new mechanics that came from it to be refreshing changes of pace nonetheless.

With the Connection Orb in mind, that brings us to Super’s roster of available Pokémon. While my least favorite part of Gates was its inclusion of only around 150 available Pokémon and five starter options, Super goes above and beyond to not only make up for Gates’ shallow roster, but also one-up even Explorers’ impressive lineup of 492. As a game introduced in the sixth Generation, Super not only introduces almost every Pokémon from the Kalos region to PMD (besides Volcanion), but also includes every single Pokémon up to that point, resulting in an amazing roster of 720 Pokémon. While recent main series games have had just as much if not more Pokémon in them, Super’s unique in that you are able to recruit every single one of them yourself without the use of an event or another game. Seeing a spin-off of all games be the first to allow the player to earn such a wide variety of Pokémon is something special, and is a far cry from what was found just one iteration before. The roster of available Pokémon for the player and partner also sees a return to form with the inclusion of twenty options: Pikachu, Riolu (who was likely included as a result of its popularity in Explorers), and every starter up to the point of Super’s release. While Explorers’ options for the main characters are more diverse with the inclusion of unconventional Pokémon like Phanpy and Skitty, the sheer amount of playable starters in Super will still keep the player interested through multiple playthroughs.

Fortunately, of all the things for Super to pick up and improve on from Gates, it was the art style. I enjoyed how Gates looked with its 3D models and more realistic areas, so seeing Super expand on that in every way is exactly what I was hoping for. The clearer and more distinct character textures, as well as the inclusion of even more varied environments than those found in Gates results in Super being the best looking handheld Pokémon game in my opinion. Even though the classic sprite art found in Rescue Team and Explorers will always hold a special place in my heart, the accurate character scaling and abundance of unique and detailed character models found in Super never fail to impress me. For example, Legendaries now tower over smaller Pokémon and take up multiple spaces in dungeons rather than one, allowing them to truly live up to their titles in terms of appearance. While Gates had similar scaling for its Legendaries, they weren’t recruitable in that game, so being able to actually play as these massive Pokémon feels that much more memorable.

Finally, we turn to the soundtrack, which is unsurprisingly just as amazing as those of previous PMD installments. While the music sounds just as clear as it did in Gates, Super’s soundtrack makes a name for itself nonetheless with its much larger variety of music. The music’s tone also makes a dramatic shift part way through the story when the player and partner leave Serene Village. While tracks found in the first half sound more whimsical and lighthearted, the music starts to sound more mysterious and adventurous as the story progresses and the stakes continuously rise. Even though my favorite tracks in Super are found in the latter half of the main story, both halves of the story’s music still manage to live up to what is found in Super’s predecessors regardless. Some of my personal favorite tracks in Super include “Partner’s Theme,” “Time to Set Out,” “Lush Forest,” “Revelation Mountain,” “Fire Island Volcano,” “Reverse Mountain,” and “Prehistoric Ruins.” That’s not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of the incredible tracks to be found in Super, since I had to leave out my two favorites due to their ties to spoiler-heavy content. The game also includes a few remasters of tracks from previous PMD installments, such as “Beach Cave” from Explorers and “Great Canyon” from Rescue Team (which is given the name “Sand Dune of Spirits”). While seeing tracks from older PMD installments get remastered is amazing, I do wish a few more tracks received that treatment since highlights like “Dialga’s Fight to the Finish” were only ported to Super rather than remastered.

Overall, Super is an incredible addition to the PMD series that not only lives up to its predecessors, but even surpasses most of them in terms of content and depth. While not everyone was happy with the changes Super brought to both the story and gameplay, I found that the new features introduced allow for a completely unique and memorable experience that can’t be found in any other Pokémon game. Considering this is one of the only games in the franchise that truly allows you to catch ‘em all without the use of any external sources, I think Super is a criminally underrated gem of a game that deserved much more success and exposure than what it got. While we unfortunately haven’t heard much from PMD as a whole following the release of Super, the passion and devotion fans harbor toward the series might just result in the release of a brand new PMD entry sooner rather than later. Until then, what could we hope to see from a new entry in the series? Next time, we’ll see if we can answer just that by looking to PMD’s past to find out what would be best for its future.