some thoughts on Pokémon Mystery Dungeon
authored: Jun 24, 2026, 8:08 AM EDT
"even though they barely know you... it feels like they all really love you."
Ages ago by now, I at some point acquired a copy of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness for the Nintendo DS. I was pretty young at the time, though, so it took me a long while before I actually got around to playing it in full. But when I did, I was very charmed by the story the game presented me with. I'd gotten frustrated by some of the final dungeons, but I was very satisfied when it came time to actually complete out the story and see the last few scenes. Back then, not much would make me cry, but I did tear up a bit at the bittersweet ending, even if it was quickly reversed to allow the player a chance to engage with postgame dungeons and other such things. Also I don't think I was fully sure of what my queerness amounted to at the time but it was very easy to read something gay onto my player character and my partner and I kind of wonder how that affected me, but more on that later.
Later, over the past month, I decided to give the next PMD game a shot; Gates to Infinity for the 3DS, which is the root cause of my desire to write about this here, and the main focus. And I definitely liked it, but I do also think there's an amount of things that made it feel a little unsatisfying to me in some respects, too, and I'll go over those as I get to them.
Intro and worldbuilding
From the get go, Gates to Infinity noticeably has a much more pared down intro sequence, compared to how Explorers starts. You just start up, select which Pokémon you will control in the game, get launched into the world after not too long, establish which Pokémon your partner is, give them a nickname, and then you head into the first dungeon. No personality quiz, no gender selection for you or your partner, (or I guess that's something they didn't localize in English? Kind of an odd thing to omit but whatever) and only 5 Pokémon to choose from between you and your partner. This doesn't make a huge difference, frankly, but this is definitely the PMD game with the fewest playable / partner Pokémon to choose from. I don't know why this is the case, maybe something to do with the 3D, and the scarce few moments of bespoke animations beyond the in-engine ones that every 'mon in the game has, but it's weird to feel a degree of less control over your identity, maybe, in this one, compared to Explorers, especially given how important you end up as a character in these stories.
I think Gates to Infinity's choice of setting overall is also something I find a bit odd. Immediately after crash landing from reality into your soon-to-be partner in the Pokémon world, they drag you along to not be late to an appointment they have, for... buying a big plot of wasteland from this Quagsire dude with the intent to build a "Pokémon Paradise". In Explorers, you more or less immediately are dropped (amnesiac, an element that is interestingly, not present in Gates to Infinity) onto the coast of Treasure Town, an already flourishing Pokémon settlement, and set to work for the guild as an exploration team. Comparatively, here all of that exploration team structure is built from the ground up as part of your partner's big project. Only after that are we introduced to the nearby settlement of Post Town. Also looming over the Pokémon world at this time is just, a vague sense that these days relations among Pokémon — generally, like, the majority of them, — are not so great these days; leading to distrust and conflict among them.
Something about it is just... rather strange, to me, as far as worldbuilding choices go. I think to begin with, the utopia thing is immediately something that alarms me somewhat (Why do we get to settle on and colonize this big 'empty' lot out here again?), and sure enough I find that there are some things I think might not be conducive to a proper utopia, like the fact that we just kinda can take anyone's word on the corkboard that someone's being bad or whatever it is and we go get paid to beat them up about it. This is not new to RPGs or other PMD games; Explorers also had bounty hunting quests where you get paid for beating up bad guys too. Maybe I'm thinking harder about this kind of thing while playing nowadays than I did when I was playing Explorers, but I swear the setting and conflict here just feels a bit more... shallow? Like, Explorers didn't present you with the concept of Paradise, or whatever. You work as part of Wigglytuff's guild, and so you do as they do there. You could still critique what it is they have you do there, but it's not being posed as anything it's not, I suppose. It's just not what the story is focusing on. But along with the central conflict of the story hinging on (technically, the ultimate cause of) that general feeling that Pokémon these days have lost hope and aren't being nice to eachother anymore, (and.. frankly also just sometimes the specific way in which the characters talk to eachother, a little bit,) it just kind of comes together and feels ..childish? And like, that doesn't ruin the game or anything, it is a kids game after all, I'm aware of that, but the weird nonsense Gates to Infinity gets up to feels a bit like it's maybe less effective and meaningful as far as actually having a message, compared to Explorers, which has weird nonsense too, in the form of time travel shenanigans and such, but I think the way it was handled there broke my suspension of disbelief less, maybe, for the most part, and I think it was more emotionally resonant to me at least when I played it than Gates to Infinity was, having played it as an adult.
Gameplay
Anyway, broad overview of my thoughts aside, I have a few other observations I had opinions about. The camera was pretty noticeably waaay zoomed in, compared to Explorers. I feel like this got me in trouble a lot, because I would be holding B to navigate long hallways faster, and suddenly before I can react, one of my party members has disappeared from behind me, (especially once they let you have a team of 4) and started attacking some enemy I didn't see or think I'd have to deal with, and the speed at which things happen in the game is context specific, because the B button just means you take turns a lot faster when navigating long stretches, and once you get into actual turn based battle, every action has to go in turn order, and it's definitely speedier than main series Pokémon games, but god, some things just take forever, especially the stat up/down moves that affect everyone in the room with you. You have to wait for everyone's individual stat text to scroll past the screen, and it's like. It does help clarify what is happening, but I do also find it rather choppy, gameplay wise.
I probably should mention at this point, I also was playing the game with faster dialogue speeds, via a cheat code I found on the internet, because the text scroll in this game is remarkably slow. I swear it's slower than Explorers for some reason. I think these also sped up the combat encounters somewhat, due to the text scroll involved in those as well? (It also crashed my 3DS a few times in certain cutscenes, but it was better than having to wait forever for text to go by for the whole game.)
That said, Gates to Infinity's gameplay wasn't horrible, I think. The options available to me between movement, items, moves, team attacks, and so forth let me navigate combat encounters in the dungeons in a decent variety of ways. I will say it's weird that the baseline attack doesn't do much damage in this game, unlike Explorers. They also removed the hunger mechanics and food items relating to that in this title, and in its place, now moves are upgradable by doing them a bunch in sequence. So over the course of the game, your moves get stronger, more accurate, and have more PP, meaning you don't have to expend Max Elixirs as much. (also I had so goddamn many elixirs I found in dungeons by endgame.) So in that sense, I guess it pushes you to just use moves way more compared to plain attacks, but frankly at that rate the plain attack is so wimpy it almost doesn't warrant existing in the first place. Also, not having the hunger system means that you can, under most circumstances, regain health just by walking back and forth. I did start making use of this once I figured it out, but it's not the most interesting gameplay.
The dungeons are only part of the game, of course. Your partner's got a utopia to build with you, and you need materials to build it. On paper, this sounds like a decent way to break up the monotony, and I think sometimes it does manage that decently enough. Intermissions in town don't just amount to stocking up on items or whathaveyou, you also sometimes get to terraform the area outside your house a bit, decide what little plots you want to use for what shops or whatnot, and eventually you can upgrade them, and give them cute little colors, and whatnot. And the materials you need are given as rewards for the request board missions, so on top of just wanting to get money and items and such, you have that as motivation to seek out specific dungeons, i.e. for rare materials, you have to venture into more difficult dungeons, and so on. I think for the majority of the duration of the game, this more or less worked out well enough, especially since the game will on occasion also give you materials for other things, like a certain minigame you can build in Paradise, exploration rank up, and so on. It does cause problems sometimes, I think, but for most players it isn't an issue, and I'll get to what I'm referring to later.
But over time, I do think the gameplay does wear on me a little. The dungeons are fun enough to explore starting out, but over time I get to feeling like I've seen every component room and connecting hallway already, even in dungeons I've pretty much never been in. It's odd to me that throughout the whole game there's like .. no variation in how wide a hallway is? There's all sorts of different dungeon settings and backdrops and whatever the word for it is, and some might use some kinds of room more than others, and sometimes there's like different terrain and so forth, water that only water types can cross, pits that can only be crossed safely by flying types, but everything always feels so closed off sometimes. There's also a small handful of more open set piece areas in some plot-important dungeons, but they're not super common, and also they're a distinctly different thing from the Mystery Dungeon floors, because they are static from one visit to another, in an area you have grid unaligned 360° movement like in Post Town and your Paradise, and they also handle combat encounters differently somewhat for that reason, having to have a visual transition before snapping you and your party onto a grid to fight your opponents as you do in a normal dungeon, and then letting you go back to 360° freedom when combat concludes. These help with the monotony of it a little bit, but they're not in most of the dungeons, and when you've seen one before you kinda can just beeline right to the end without any trouble by just moving fast and dodging enemies, which is not hard in those. I still didn't mind getting through the main story and postgame doing this, but I wish it had a little more variance in it. I don't know if this is just how Mystery Dungeon as a series is, I probably ought to look into Shiren the Wanderer at some point just to see how the gameplay goes divorced from Pokémon or any other pre-existing IP's conventions, but I don't think roguelikes are exactly my favorite, so I don't know if I'd stick with that long.
Emotion, queerness, and non-human identity
Despite my qualms, what really kept me playing Gates to Infinity was the simple fact that a game where every character is (at least visually) a Pokémon, and I'm a furry who really wants to play games where weird colorful animals or fantasy creatures are the main focus, and the story sure does focus on them here. It's probably why I liked Explorers so much too, looking back. I think it also helps that the general dynamic all the PMD games tend to have is one of you befriending one of them the instant you get isekaied into Pokémon world, and then you're just ride or die for eachother the whole rest of the game. I am not the first person to read queer feelings onto Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, but as a queer person it sure is easy to read them into it, especially if you name your ingame partner after a real life loved one.
That said, Gates to Infinity specifically doesn't go so far as to say that you, or really most of the plot-important cast of characters even, really do anything beyond 'be friends', which kind of reads a bit funny sometimes. For example, Virizion, a legendary Pokémon best known to Post Town as that one beautiful lady who is chill but aloof and distant, and pretty much everyone really wants to be friends with her, and has asked her out to facilitate this, but has been turned down, to the point of it being something they all laugh about because they are trying really hard not to cry about it. Like, obviously not literally every Pokémon in town wants to kiss her, but I feel like it really would not have been much different if that's how they worded it. I think actually one of the townfolk who isn't interested in Virizion ends up being the actual most explicit depiction of romantic interest is the Rampardos that runs the Box Buster shop, who for the whole game is crushing on the Cinccino in the Friend Gift shop opposite to him, trying to work up the courage to confess and failing, and she's completely unaware that he feels that way. But the most developed relationships in game are definitely those between you, your partner, and characters like Emolga, Dunsparce, and Virizion, who you recruit through plot events rather than merely by engaging with the game mechanic of recruiting a typical dungeon enemy that decides to ask to join you rather than fight you. But as much as the game won't directly acknowledge the possibility of the most established relationships in the game as possibly having at least a little bit of a romantic aspect, it still treads near it in some respects, and frankly, the fact that they don't come out and say it about characters like Virizion makes it almost seem easier to read the player and partner's relationship as something that grows a romantic aspect over time, too, because it doesn't feel much lesser than any of the other relationships that get much focus on them.
And as previously stated, this whole setting, where I get to inhabit the role of a weird little creature among other weird little creatures, and travel with them and bond with them and struggle through difficult times with them is core to what appeals to me here. It's something I think I don't get to experience super often in games. There's maybe something to be said about how the PMD games I've played want you, the player, the human, to be a part of the experience. I've played other games where you play as furries and loved them. Games like Super Lesbian Animal RPG have also resonated a lot with me; a character like Melody Amaranth is someone I feel I can see a lot of myself in which is also really nice. I've played all sorts of games that simply have you playing as a furry, but Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has this inclination to ask about you, (especially in the ones that have the personality quiz in the beginning) and then make you a part of that world, in the form of a human-turned-Pokémon. I think that can't land perfectly for everyone, especially when the writing for the player character doesn't match to what the player wants to do, but it takes itself fully seriously about it. There's something strange in how it acknowledges the player's reality in comparison to the game world; the characters wonder about the people you might miss, they worry about if you're not from here to begin with, and you're brought here for some specific reason, when that all is said and done, will you be able to stay? The game itself doesn't get fully meta about it, and makes some amount of assumptions about what your life might be like without really asking. But they build up your relationships with these other little creatures over the course of the plot, and then when you do get to the end, and you have to come back to reality, you have to leave behind the characters you've spent your time getting acquainted with. It makes your partner, your crew, even the mere townspeople on occasion, sad to think about. They miss you, and it hurts. And they're just a story telling itself to you, but you feel bad for them. You don't want to leave them alone.
Leaving the world of Pokémon behind
I think in some sense, that's why they have the postgame where suddenly you are granted access once more to the world, and your partner's missed you so much, and everyone's happy to see you again. If you don't want to put the game down just yet, you don't have to. But all the same, I think I was disappointed both times I was allowed back in, like nothing had happened. In Explorers, it felt like they moved along through that whole bunch of emotions too quickly. After the end credits, it's stated that months have passed, sure, but they didn't waste any time for you, the Player, returning to the status quo of you and your partner being present together. The ending in Explorers was so emotional for me at the time, so seeing that feeling of closure be undone like that so quickly made me actively want to put the game down for years after, because I felt that it wasn't quite honest, in some sense. Having come back to it after Gates to Infinity, it felt slightly new to me again, and I was excited to talk to the people around me again. But it was still strange, because I'd already gotten onto the start of the postgame plot, before saving and quitting out and putting the game down. So there was a mismatch between my absence as experienced in the game's story and my IRL absence from the game. I swear my partner cried tears of joy, seeing me released from time paradox jail or whatever it was, those years ago, and then I disappeared again, and when I really came back they didn't notice I'd been gone. Returning for the postgame in Explorers didn't really emotionally affect me until I progressed through the first little part of the postgame, and graduated from Wigglytuff's exploration guild, and got to move out into the little shelter in Sharpedo Bluff with my partner, and this little song started to play. That got me to tear up a bit. Something about it made me feel a bit like I did seeing my partner cry for me on the beach at dusk before the credits rolled, again. I still have yet to play through the rest of the postgame in Explorers, but I do like that it seems like I'm not quite done just yet with the postgame, even if it probably would have been more emotionally resonant to return to Explorers in universe at the same point chronologically as actually getting back to playing more of the game.
Comparatively, in Gates to Infinity, I think I liked how the postgame started out a bit more. The Voice of Life informs you that it's coming up to your time to go home after all, not a moment after you step away from the festivities from having restored hope to the world of Pokémon, and not only that, but they're going to forget you when you go. So you think it over, and you decide "well, if they're going to forget in the end, I guess it'd hurt them more to say goodbye on the way out." And so you turn in early, and wake up before your partner, feel guilty a bit, and then soon enough, you're on your way out of the world, floating gently away. You see everyone get so far away, and eventually you see your partner and allies outside by the request board, and they look up at you. And the Voice of Life gives you a message from them, that they recorded by hand some time earlier. And one by one, your whole exploring crew, even most of the people in town, too... they all tell you, in so many words, that you did a lot for them, and it'd be ridiculous for them to ever forget you after all you did, literally restoring hope to them. And that's the note you get to close on before the credits. I knew there would be a postgame, because that's what these games do, but I was actually a bit surprised hitting Continue on the game and finding that they now had me play as my partner instead of myself, and there was a bit of diagetic exploration of the feelings the characters had, having been separated from me, the human. There were some odd small details that I felt like were missed opportunities, like switching into Companion Mode (a feature that lets you play as any one of your recruits in a condensed version of the hub world with Post Town inaccessible and a handful of its utilities moved into the Paradise Center, and also allows for local wireless multiplayer. haven't really made much use of it aside from to work from paradise to send reviver seeds up to the team with me and my partner for some of the harder dungeons, which is a cute thing to imagine happening in universe, but there's not really any story or writing that acknowledges its presence once the game has told you about it, so it's kinda eh to me. i did get to walk around in paradise as a Lilligant though which i liked.) at this point in the game revealed to me the main-story-cast mode of the game was still referred to in the menu as "(Your Name) Mode", despite it now, for this period of time, probably being better described as "(Partner Name) Mode", or something like that. But a lot of the remnants of my character's presence honestly made me smile in a roundabout sense because I could imagine it being something that adds to the feeling of like, grieving the loss of a loved one in that way, for the cast of allies that knew me.
Oppositely to Explorers, what really bothered me in Gates to Infinity was that bringing me back to the world of Pokémon is the only postgame plotline that there is. There's a little while in the postgame where you get some amount of vignettes that show what Post Town and Paradise are up to in your absence, i.e. a few of the later additions to your crew get formally recruited to the Paradise team, and some other little interactions occur. But it's not very long until the Voice of Life is hanging out and suddenly looks through the fourth wall at you, and looks closer, until interrupted by Dunsparce about something. I thought this was lightly teasing the idea of being able to bring my character back into the world, but it kind of is the immediately next thing that comes up, after that. And the reveal is formally made that it might just be possible, somehow, if someone wants it badly enough, that in the center of the world's core, there's a obscure place you can go to make a wish for the world to fundamentally change somehow. And so, your partner goes down there to that place and wishes really hard. And the cave starts crumbling on itself from the weight of it, and you at last get this yes or no prompt, "do you want to return to the world of Pokémon?". And... honestly, neither of the answers are especially satisfying to me, I think. Saying no is pretty objectively the more interesting thing to do here, much as I do love the world of Pokémon and said yes here without too much thought when I was prompted. But if you say no, there isn't really much that happens, and the game just kind of ends, and you go back to the main menu screen, and on continue, the game acts like you wiped out in the dungeon and puts your progress back like that. There isn't much consequence, it just expects you to say yes there.
Comparatively, if you say yes, you are brought back to the world, and then without too much fanfare, it just fades to black, you wake up the next day, and it's just another day in Paradise again. This really underwhelmed me. There wasn't even really any cutscenes or anything, not at waking up, not at walking out of the house, not at walking back into Post Town again for the first time since my disappearance, not even for waking up the next day after that. Just some pretty plain dialog from your allies when you go up to them on your first day back. They're happy you're back, but weirdly your player character doesn't really express much or maybe any feelings about it, and is altogether just nowhere near as talkative as they were during the main story events in the game. It felt a little bit flat. I think at some point during the period where my character hadn't been brought back yet, I wondered if they'd end up doing something kind of similar to the folklore story of Tanabata, which I learned about in one of my Japanese classes. It was said in Gates to Infinity that the player, as a human, couldn't remain in the world of Pokémon forever, or else risk destroying the balance of things. And so, like Orihime and Hikoboshi, the player and the world they'd spent so long in had to be divorced from eachother. That was the connection I made, and I wondered based on that if there'd be some reference made to that story in the context of letting the human player back into the world of Pokémon, like maybe only for limited periods of time or whatever, something like that, like how in the story Orihime and Hikoboshi can only visit eachother one day a year.
But ultimately, in game, once you've been allowed to freely visit Pokémon world as you wish, it feels like everything just abruptly stops. You can still go to dungeons, pass days by, wake up next to your partner like you always have, but that's the point where they stop having new cutscenes or dialogue with NPCs for you in Post Town and Paradise. And it's only natural for a game to come to that point, because you can't put infinite material in a game, but it just really snuck up on me, I think. I really wish there was a bit more time spent exploring the characters' feelings about things in the postgame, because it feels like the partner being sad about my absence thing was kind of told not shown a bit more than I'd have liked, and because I think it'd have been fun to see that play out over the course of a smaller arc where they go to do some things that would have been nice, but they're kind of grieving throughout it, and processing things in that way. I also think one last postgame arc with the gang back together would help to make room for better closure, both in the sense of 'what it means for me to keep on with them even after there's nothing super pressing to do' and in the sense of "there's a handful of characters I kinda liked that I wish we paid more attention to in postgame (especially the antagonists! I'd have liked to have a bit where the gang runs into them again but on better terms maybe. I want to hang out with the Purugly because Purugly is cute)"
I also do want to complain a little about Emolga's last postgame dialogue when interacted with in town.
"Hey, (player)! Were you disappointed 'cause everyone's just taking it for granted that you're back? Well, you saw how nuts everyone went that first night you came back, (player). We were so ecstatic that night that I guess we just got it all out of our systems, huh?"
So here Emolga is, providing an in-universe reasoning for why not much else happened when the player was brought back to the world. It's like, not an awful one, it makes some kind of sense that after some months away, they wouldn't necessarily be as crazy about it all as when the entire world was saved from falling into absolute despair. This bothers me a lot, because the game is acknowledging the possibility of a feeling of a lack of closure there, and suddenly feeling uncharacteristically unconcerned about it. A plausible Doylist explanation is simply just that the devs weren't as focused on the postgame as on the main plot, and they didn't have as much wiggle room compared to Explorers to flesh out the postgame more with stuff after you return from Worldcore. And a game can't be perfect, and I know the postgame is at least partially a means to an end so you can keep playing new dungeons on the same save file if you'd like, but it feels frustrating that this is essentially the last you hear from Emolga once you're through the postgame. I wish the closure provided by the normal ending was valued more by the inclusion of the postgame, maybe. You could omit the postgame entirely, honestly. Maybe a little bit of postgame is fine, but it feels like the only ending that really acknowledges the "One day, you're going to put this game down and stop playing, for the last time" aspect of it is the normal ending. If they were aiming to lean into that, I wish it would've expressed more feelings about that before settling into its final status quo.
Conclusion
I loved Gates to Infinity while actively playing through it, even with the quirks, but I think I still was left wanting, somehow. After the postgame wrapped up and I was simply left with the mechanics of the game to continue toying with, I weakly hoped that there'd be some reward for seeing my partner's vision through as much as I could, to some extent, by filling every spot in Paradise I could with structures. I wanted to have every plot be something unique, because that seemed like a fun way to go about it, and it's more expensive to build the same thing again, because they increase the material cost for it, as far as I can tell. So I spent most of the main game building a lot of the more interesting looking structures, not really bothering much with the farms and the dojos, and then by the time I'd gotten through the postgame, the farms and dojos were almost all that was left to make. But these things by and large require what I feel is a 'just tedious enough' amount of resources, that it means that having spent through all the resources earlier, I ended up having to get more base level materials way more than I ended up having to get upgraded level materials, because I wasn't especially concerning myself with upgrading every building to max, because that'd involve doing a lot of really hard dungeons that I didn't feel like doing at that moment. So instead, I had the opposite problem, where I had to repeatedly go to dungeons that didn't really pose any threat to me at all because they were some of the easiest dungeons the game had to offer. And that kinda just felt like busywork.
There were some interesting elements I ran into in this aspect of the postgame, namely running into Meloetta in my paradise suddenly one day and being prompted to work towards building a Music Paradise, (I liked how Meloetta was characterized with the switching between her princess and prince forms, it was cute.) and noticing that one day the owner of an Elite Boutique facility I'd built had vanished, prompting a cutscene emphasizing their absence, which scared me a lot encountering at 2:00 AM. That ended up kinda just being annoying than anything because it was just a weird quirk of that kind of structure in of itself. But when I finally did build all the facilities I could, it just wasn't acknowledged at all. I would go on to find there were some bits I did fail to get to before putting the game down, as I never actually prompted Meloetta to join my team, and I also never encountered the random-chance Drilbur who offers to start digging around to find money and dungeons for you to explore, so I never tried that. Honestly, the last thing I really bothered trying to do in the game was go through a kinda long dungeon just to see if I really cared that much about what happened if I were to do that, and I wiped out after trying to take on a second Monster House in a row and getting fried by a pack of about a dozen Jolteons. Starving for characterization, I almost felt it'd have been a funnier way for the postgame to end, you come back to the world of Pokémon and you go out to some strange uncharted place to see what goes on there and then just suddenly unceremoniously the exploration team is never heard from again. And sometimes I feel like that kind of making my own story out of pure gameplay is kind of expected, once the role playing game's done telling the story it wants to tell, all that's left is for you to keep role playing along in the game. But if I wanted to roleplay by myself, or tell my own story any number of other ways, there's no reason I couldn't just do it without the game, at that point.
And if I'm really honest with myself, I'm not starving for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon these days. I still have the rest of the postgame material in Explorers of Darkness to go through, and if I really want, I could look into Explorers of Sky's added Special Episodes as well, though I feel like at that point I could frankly replay all of Explorers if I were gonna look into specific things that Explorers of Sky has. I haven't played much of the original Rescue Team game, nor its 2020 Switch remake, and I haven't touched Super Mystery Dungeon at all. Many people like myself have been creating works inspired by PMD for a long time, including but not limited to a vast array of Explorers of Sky mods and hacks, for gameplay tweaks and quality of life features, as well as for bespoke campaigns, stories, and so on. I don't know how soon I would want to look into any of these things, as I still think I'd like a break from Mystery Dungeon gameplay for a bit. I think probably the most likely thing to be in my near future is that I look to the postgame of Explorers of Darkness since I'm already partway through it, but I'm not fully sure what I'll end up picking up next after I'm done with that and Deltarune. But it's comforting to know that people are as passionate if not more than I am about these games, and are interested in exploring storytelling within settings like that themselves, whether by making a game of their own that centers on what they found special in these games, or by hacking an existing title to tell a whole new story, IP holders be damned.
It's funny that I'm writing all this about the way these games develop a relation with the player, only a few short days before Deltarune's fifth chapter comes out. Both Undertale and Deltarune have a similar sort of feeling of exploring what the player is to the characters in the fictional world, but taken to what I think is much more logical extremes, getting far more meta about it, Undertale especially acknowledging the mechanic of saving progress and reloading progress in-universe, both for gameplay convenience like pre-battle cutscenes being minimized or skipped, and for heightening the drama in the story, or making a point about what you, the player, are actually doing (in-universe) in the process of playing the game. By comparison, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is maybe a bit tied up by IP and series conventions, here. These games aren't likely to just require you to choose between leaving the happy ending you made behind, or resetting your whole save file, like Undertale did. But it feels like more honest of a way to make the happy ending feel alive, that way. The emptiness in Gates to Infinity's postgame, even with all of my allies available to say hi to at any time, feels so much lonelier. I miss seeing them interact with eachother, and being able to more really interact with them. Of course they're not real, and the game can't go on forever, and it shouldn't; the game itself draws attention to the important relationships you're likely to have with people in real life, too. It's exciting to see games like Deltarune grapple with these sorts of themes too, in the sense of the relation between you, the player, and the game world, somewhat mirroring the relation in-universe between that of Lightners, who before anything else, live in the Light World, and Darkners, who only live in the Dark World, and who sometimes destabilize if moved from one Dark World to another. It's incredible stuff, and I swear that kind of careful worldbuilding and consistent internal logic and overall message is why so many people got so attached to Undertale and Deltarune's casts of characters. I don't know if Pokémon Mystery Dungeon was a big inspiration for either of the games, but it's hard not to see these games resonate so much with people and imagine what could be, if a new PMD were to take a page out of their book in that way.
In the end, though, I had fun with Gates to Infinity, even if it's a game that sometimes does things that confuse me or bother me. But I think that just means there's a lot to learn from. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon as a series may never give me exactly what I want, in video game or whatever else form, but sometimes it gets close, and I think that is still enough for it to feel like it's done something special for me, something that resonated with me in a way that makes me inspired to make some art of my own, something weird and colorful and queer and furry. Video games are really hard to make, but hell if this isn't a series that keeps making me think I oughtta keep trying.
thank you for reading
ooghh thank you for reading my . well it was gonna be just a normal blog post i think at first but it kind of got really out of hand and became an almost 7000 word essay about everything this game made me feel. i think there's still more i didn't go into but you don't need me to go over every plot point in excruciating detail, and these are probably my most concrete thoughts. i had some thought about the twist with hydreigon / munna in gti reminding me of the twist with grovyle / dusknoir in explorers, but i think in the end they felt different enough that i didn't mind, and i didn't know where i'd have put it anyway so it didn't make the cut. and also honestly i just need to be done with writing this haha..
but yeah..! my first real blog post, or at least one that isn't just talking about how i've been working on the website itself. haven't made any big updates to the website for some months.. i was a bit overwhelmed last semester in college so i couldn't focus on web site. i still really wanna make a proper art gallery but i have not gotten around to it. every summer i'm always so torn between all the different things i wanna fill my time doing and i can't get to em all, so we'll see if i manage that anytime soon.
but yea thanks for reading if you made it all the way here that's . a lot of reading. i hope my thoughts on pmd were interesting and fun to look through! i havent really made much in the way of other posts or anything on this site yet but feel free to subscribe to the blog's rss or atom feed if you havent but are interested in whatever i'm doing. i'm not active on any social media really these days but i did put out a silly video on youtube not too long ago. anyway. i've done a lot of staying up way too late writing this over the past week, it is once again light outside my window, and i do not have anything left to add to this post anymore. thank you for reading! dont forget to be yourself. ^_^