Your favorite Mystery Dungeon game?

[FinnishPokéFan92]

Explorers of Time is my favorite. Do you think we're going to have a new Mystery Dungeon game on Nintendo Switch?

Not sure. We didn't get one in Generation VII, and Super was already so jam-packed with content that it's hard to think of any way it could be topped.

 

[SlowGinFizzzz]

I only play Red Rescue Team, then...

You have to play Explorers of Sky, then!

 

[FinnishPokéFan92]

I only play Red Rescue Team, then...

You have to play Explorers of Sky, then!

And Super!

 

[YumeTsuki]

Explorers of Darkness, definitely. Though also extremely biased since it was my first. Sky is very likely better, but never got to play that version

 

[Emelie]

Explorers of Sky is probably the best in terms of story and character development but I have mixed feelings towards Grovyle's suicidal nature. Is it really OK to glorify something like that in a kids game? Especially since suicide is such a huge problem in Japan. Mabye things could have been less black and white?

Or am I just a boring adult?

Gates to Infinity on the other hand has some really good anti-suicide messages. Take Munna for example. There is some discussion about depression and lonliness too like the partner being an orphan and how Keldeo's disappearance emotionally affected Virizion.

 

[YumeTsuki]

Explorers of Sky is probably the best in terms of story and character development but I have mixed feelings towards Grovyle's suicidal nature. Is it really OK to glorify something like that in a kids game? Especially since suicide is such a huge problem in Japan. Mabye things could have been less black and white?

Or am I just a boring adult?

Gates to Infinity on the other hand has some really good anti-suicide messages. Take Munna for example. There is some discussion about depression and lonliness too like the partner being an orphan and how Keldeo's disappearance emotionally affected Virizion.

Suicidal... no not really, more self-sacrificial? I can't fully judge whatever he may have been doing in Explorers of the Sky since I've only seen the Darkness/Time version which doesn't go into detail on character backstory and such. But at most he seemed like the kind of guy who just wanted to fight for a better tomorrow, and if that costed his own life, so be it. Still not the greatest message. I guess the self-sacrificial hero culture is just something that is very prominent.

 

[toastghost]

I love all the Explorers games equally. sue me.

 

[Emelie]

Suicidal... no not really, more self-sacrificial? I can't fully judge whatever he may have been doing in Explorers of the Sky since I've only seen the Darkness/Time version which doesn't go into detail on character backstory and such. But at most he seemed like the kind of guy who just wanted to fight for a better tomorrow, and if that costed his own life, so be it. Still not the greatest message. I guess the self-sacrificial hero culture is just something that is very prominent.

I guess what is good about Explorers of Sky and the reason why people tend to rank it above Darkness/Time is that there is a whole extra story which features Grovyle and Dusknoir as the main characters in the future which is super interesting since they are foil characters.

I guess the problem with this plot is that instead of portraying the situation as morally gray and have Grovyle question himself and mabye try to see Dusknoir's viewpoint it is only Dusknoir who has to question himself. When Dusknoir question if it is really OK to kill all the Pokémon in the future Grovyle replies that he has done some kind of study that shows that most of the Pokémon wants to disappear because they are just that depressed and miserable which somehow makes him morally justified. As an adult I can't help but raise an eyebrown here.

When Dusknoir eventually gives in to the group pressure and agrees to basically commit suicide together with Grovyle and Celebi he is rewarded when Arceus magically saves everybody with Deus Ex Machina. So nobody actually dies here unlike in Darkness/Time when their fate was left up to interpretation. But mabye instead of a cop-out ending like this Grovyle and the others could have mabye tried to find Arceus and solve the problem without seeing the idea of sacrificing everybody in the future as the only solution to their situation?

Then when Gates to Infinity came out Munna tries to argue that suicide is the only answer to everybody's problems but this is actually portrayed as something bad. What is really the difference between Grovyle and Munna? Why is one of them portrayed as a hero and the other as a villian?

 

[Daenerys]

Explorers of Darkness because it had the best plot out of all the PMD games that I've played. Originally I was gonna buy Explorers of Time instead of Darkness when the games came out, but my local Target only had copies of Darkness for some reason.

 

[FinnishPokéFan92]

Then when Gates to Infinity came out Munna tries to argue that suicide is the only answer to everybody's problems but this is actually portrayed as something bad. What is really the difference between Grovyle and Munna? Why is one of them portrayed as a hero and the other as a villian?

Speaking of Gates, it's been a while since I saw a playthrough of it, but one game review I saw a few years back made me realize an important difference between Gates and Super:

In both games, the final boss in an embodiment of negativity, but the way it's beaten is different. In Gates, the partner stubbornly refuses to accept the existence of negative feelings that threaten the relationships between them and their friends and basically everyone else in the world, and the evil is defeated by overpowering the negativity and vanquishing it. In Super, however, the partner accepts the fact that everyone has negative emotions in them sometimes, and the negativity is defeated not by denying it, but by accepting it as a part of life.

Basically, Gates is saying that you shouldn't surrender to negativity and just fight it off, which can be an okay message, but frankly, Super's message is much more mature. It says that you shouldn't deny and bottle up your negativity, but instead learn to live with it and not let it overwhelm you.

I hope I didn't overanalyze this...

 

[Sakuraa]

Red and Blue Rescue Team because they were the very first Pokemon games I ever played so I have a special connection to them.

 

[Stratelier]

I hope I didn't overanalyze this...

Nah, it's fine. Have you by chance played the game Celeste?

Spoiler

Celeste is one of those potential indie-games-of-its-year titles, so you probably don't want the story spoiled for you.

Spoiler: You have been warned.

On the surface, you play as a girl trying to scale a mountain despite warnings about what may happen. In what was initially a dream, her negativity and depression manifest as a physical doppleganger of herself; she tries to ignore, avoid, or otherwise fight it as she continues the difficult climb. After a particularly harrowing episode (and close to the top) she resolves that she must leave this part of herself behind, but that only makes her dark half even stronger, and she is thrown down to the bottom of the mountain. On the verge of giving up, she's advised to simply talk to her other half, ask what she's so afraid of. It is a difficult struggle to reach her other half, but she ultimately prevails, they make amends, and then agree to work together on one last attempt up the mountain, resulting in a whirlwind of a final level that is not only a fitting challenge but also a sort of montage/reprise of all the previous levels combined.

The message being that she NEEDS even her negative half to succeed -- she just can't let it be the one in charge of her.

Aside, I once lurked into a small fic series that (for multiple reasons) I can't name, but involved a Mew who ... shall we say, kind of went off the deep end. I wouldn't call it even lightyears from anything canon, but it does make me wonder what kind of life PSMD's Mew had that its negativity would be central to the creation of Dark Matter....