Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon (3DS) Review

As if the Pokémon 20 celebrations weren’t already starting to make me feel old, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games have spanned three entire generations of consoles thus far. Red Rescue Team released for the Game Boy Advance in 2005, 2006 for us. Since then the series has grown to over ten games across multiple consoles and has presumably enjoyed some success. And I’ve never been a huge fan admittedly. The first time I played the game was when I reviewed Gates To Infinity three years ago. I was told that wasn’t the strongest in the series from some diehard fans shortly thereafter. So here I am to give it another try with Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon – an allegedly more accessible Mystery Dungeon game.

I can’t be sure but Super Mystery Dungeon takes place in a world where humans and Pokémon live together and all everyone cares about is exploring and adventuring. Whereas the previous game had your character being turned into a Pokémon, Super Mystery Dungeon has your character merely waking up and simply finding yourself to have become a Pokémon and lost all of your memory. After some events transpire, you’ll eventually join a village and choose a partner Pokémon to go adventuring with to kick some Pokémon ass and explore some dungeons. As with other games in the franchise, it’s a rather by the numbers affair and a story that’ll probably appeal to the younger demographic than the older ones – but the main villain feels really strange and out of place in this game which isn’t bad but just distracting.

One thing that I never got to touch upon in my Gates To Infinity review is that the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games all do one thing that other games don’t. They give personality to their Pokémon. In the anime and in the mainline games we only ever see the Pokémon talk their own name mindlessly. In Super Mystery Dungeon, the cast speaks words and it gives each of the Pokémon their own little idiosyncrasies and personalities that you might’ve never even thought of them having before. Super Mystery Dungeon does a great job of developing the Pokémon into more people-like beings than just pets you use for battle from time to time.

The brunt of Super Mystery Dungeon is riddled with Mystery Dungeons. These are locations that are procedurally generated – that is, randomized – and are filled with all kinds of loot and Pokémon across multiple floors. While the game itself isn’t turn based in the same sense as the mainline Pokémon games, it still has a turn based ‘style’ to it. Every step you take in the dungeons gives your enemies an opportunity to take a step too. Stay still and nobody will move – allowing you to plan your approach. Each step also eats into your ‘hunger’ meter, which can be replenished with certain items but can cause damage to you if you leave it depleted.

The benefit of randomizing dungeons means that the level design is somewhat unpredictable in terms of layout. Besides the physical layout of the dungeon, there may be traps placed throughout the dungeon. There’s also elemental effects that alter how your Pokémon reacts or travels depending on their own type. Sometimes these elements genuinely alter how you’ll play the game, but generally speaking their randomly generated nature means they’ll fall flat more often than not. I can’t begin to count how many times I saw these effects in place and just thought “wow glad I didn’t bring that Pokémon”. The procedurally generated nature of the mystery dungeons removes the intricacies that planned level design can introduce to the game, essentially, which can be a bit disappointing.

Barring the story dungeons, which forces you to use preset Pokémon, every dungeon lets you select a group of Pokémon to take in with you. Up to three can join you in your trawling of the mystery dungeons and each has their own elemental type and skills just as they do in the mainline Pokémon games and these affect how your Pokémon do battle. You’ll also have a bunch of items that you can take with you – and the management of these items can usually be the difference between failure and success. Especially where various status effects like Confusion, Burn and Poison can easily cut your dungeon expeditions short.

The combat itself is rather simple. You hold the L button and select from four moves that the Pokémon might know. Lots of effort has been made to bring the world of Pokémon into the Mystery Dungeon format, but the moves ultimately feel like they do the same thing, just with different visual effects. More perplexing is the inclusion of wands – which feel like components of the Mystery Dungeon that the developers just couldn’t be bothered changing to fit in with the Pokémon theme. They have various effects, including inducing status ailments and changing positions of your party. They’re nice, but they do make the game slightly easier than it probably should be.

A new inclusion is the game’s “looplets” which can be upgraded with Emeras to provide a wide variety of effects that will aid your party in navigation and/or combat. Emeras themselves are temporary power-ups that disappear from your inventory once you finish a dungeon. Mixing emeras with looplets (think a gem in a crown, or a notch on a belt) will grant the player all kinds of effects. Stat buffs, enemy debuffs and even mega evolutions are just some of the things you can expect from the use of looplets. They’re easily the simplest and yet strongest inclusion in Super Mystery Dungeon.

Whereas previous games had you beat the crap out of a Pokémon and then force it to become friends with you, Super Mystery Dungeon has revamped the way you capture Pokémon. Where the Quest Board used to be in the previous games comes the Connection Orb. With it, players will be able to see which Pokémon need help in certain quests and such quests will offer the Pokémon as a companion should players choose to complete them. It’s much more straightforward than previous games but it also isn’t particularly balanced.

Given that over 700 Pokémon are available it’s inevitable you’ll unlock a Pokémon who is clearly meant for later stages of the game, which can literally break the difficulty curve of the game. There are cooldowns for higher level Pokémon, which I assumed would help to mitigate this issue but as I played more and more it became more and more obvious and tempting to just rotate between my higher level Pokémon rather than play properly. The challenge was, more or less, gone.

Those looking to just do a clean run through Super Mystery Dungeon will no doubt be able to get at least twenty or so hours out of the experience. Rather disappointingly, but also expectedly, the game is incredibly easy and poses little to no challenge to the player. If you die, you just send a rescue team of reserve characters to save them. There is little consequence. But Pokémon fans will appreciate the ability to catch and use all 720 of the known Pokémon in the game. Those looking to catch everyone could easily get at least forty or so hours out of Super Mystery Dungeon, though we wager that most players will get a bit tired of the repetition at that point.

In terms of presentation, Super Mystery Dungeon is a pretty nice looking game. It’s incredibly cutesy, bright and colorful. The Pokémon themselves look great and the environments themselves look great too. It’s not the strongest visual presentation on the 3DS but it is a serviceable one. While some rooms are repetitious which can get grating to constantly explore, others cause a drop in framerate from time to time. But performance and especially cutscenes look great. Especially in 3D.

Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon is exactly what it sounds like. It takes the Mystery Dungeon formula, “supers” it up and offers more and more content for those who love this kind of thing. It’s somewhat superficial, for sure, in terms of battles and the actual RPG elements and mechanics but while Super Mystery Dungeon is much more straightforward than its predecessors, it’s still unfortunately not going to win over any new fans. The Mystery Dungeon series is clearly improving but not in increments enough to elevate Super Mystery Dungeon from “for genre fans only” to an absolute must buy. Your mileage will most definitely vary, but Pokémon fans looking for something different but markedly less impressive than the mainline games may enjoy the distraction while we wait for Sun and Moon to rise.