mid???
Mediocre con ganas, y ademas viniendo del mejor juego de la historia
I really can't understand how people think this way about Gates to Infinity. Even though there are caveats it's better than the first game and very close to second in story and character department. They were also actually bold with the ending this time, it's sad and feels stronger compared to other two.
there's something bugging me about this one but i'm not quite sure what it is exactly??? i keep trying to play it but when i do it i feel like i don't want to continue. maybe it's the uncomfortable dungeon layouts to move around in and odd choice of camera angle where i feel like i can't see properly that's bothering me? maybe it's the fact i had to add a cheat code for sped up text that crashes the entire thing sometimes because the default unchangeable text speed is so unbearably slow? maybe it's the game looking so dull because the 3d style is generic and stiff and i miss the spritework of the first two games? the story is cute which is why i even play these games and the music isn't bad either. but it's not enough to keep me hooked on it. i was forcing myself to push forward but i can't do it anymore. i'm genuinely not enjoying the experience. feels very bad because i know this is the one people hate the most of the mystery dungeon spinoffs and i really wanted to give it a chance but i just can't.
abandoned when i got the first 3 members of the pokémon paradise 4 hours in.
abandoned when i got the first 3 members of the pokémon paradise 4 hours in.
Bro I went to Walmart on Black Friday as a kid and tried to get this game, I had exactly 30 bucks I think and this game was traditionally 40 with a sticker on it for 10 dollars off on Black Friday. When we brought it up to the counter the evil lady there told us the sticker deals were only until like 8am that morning despite no signs in the building saying that. I was fucking devestated, and ended up never getting this game. Maybe one day man.
Hoo boy. Last year I played the beloved cult classic Explorer's of Sky and came out of it thinking it was good, but not really the peak Pokémon experience everyone says it is. So before I went in to this game, all I knew about it was that there's only 144 recruitable Pokémon, and 5 starters to choose from. If I thought the shining diamond in the series was more like a decent gold, what will I think about the participation trophy game?
When I started playing it, I actually loved it. As you go through the opening hours and unlock more stuff there's just so many features that I feel really compliment the series well. The V-Waves give a fantastic motivation for changing up teammates regularly, something I never did in Sky because I never cared who I brought into a dungeon other than me and my partner. Having exp given between everyone even those not in the dungeon also helps Pokémon not fall behind until you need them. Though the fact they don't GET the exp until you bring them into a dungeon is very annoying as it often leads to a lot of slow move learning dialogue at once.
They didn't really change dungeons much other than the general 3D visual transition. But a small handful now feature outside areas every other floor, which have very tiny, very simple puzzles, which is kinda cool? It's a baby step in the right direction for making dungeons feel less repetitive and blending together, but it needed to be expanded way more. So dungeons aren't really worse than before, but they're not really better either.
Building up paradise was one of the biggest things I loved while playing the game. The joys of unlocking a new facility and making decisions of which to prioritise. It does somewhat go against the new story direction which forces you into huge stretches of taking you away from the hub area to large dungeon marathons. I'm pretty sure in the entire second half of the game you only return to the games town area once. But they thought of that too and added "companion mode". This lets you take a break from the story and take control of any Pokémon in your team except you and your partner. While doing this you can do as many missions as you want in a row, and build up your paradise, with zero story breaking your stride. It comes with the weird limitation of not being allowed in the town area though, so you do lose out on some features, like the ability to open treasure boxes and spend gold bars. It's a very arbitrary restriction and unfortunately does mean you can never truly get the full game while taking a break from story beats until you've already cleared the story. To contrast, the last game basically had a ton of times that were "the game will only continue if you go to this dungeon", allowing you to ignore that and go to any other dungeon as many times as you wanted. In this game the story is always pushed forward automatically after you clear a mission or two.
I do like how the game compensated what appeared to be a huge downgrade in missions. You're now limited to only taking one at a time. Seems awful right? No more stacking up 8 missions for one dungeon and getting tons of rewards at once. Well, it kind of is annoying, but the rewards from missions actually matter now, since they're materials for expanding your paradise. In the past game even though I could do 8 missions at once, I never cared what the missions gave me, it was always just something I could basically buy or farm elsewhere. In this game I actually chose my missions carefully based on what material I needed at that specific time. It'd still have been nice to be able to do even just 2-4 at a time, but I'd still rather have the mission choices actually matter over being able to pick 8 random ones for the sake of a bigger payout of less important items.
The story is pretty much on par with Explorer's too. Very similar plot twists and an emotional ending even. Not much to say about it other than it follows the expectations already set. Including some unnecessarily long-winded dialogue (seriously if you try to take on a mission when you need to go somewhere else for a story event, your partner will basically say you need to go do the story thing like 5 times in a row, worded slightly differently).
It was all going so well. And then while I was taking a break from the main story, grinding missions in companion mode, I levelled up my team rank and noticed the next rank was a very large number of points away. Like obviously not intended for completion with the level of missions available. So I finish the game to get the post-game missions and rank up again only to realise the game is no longer rewarding me with extra facilities I can build (one of the biggest benefits to ranking up, along with extra inventory space which also stopped increasing only about 3 ranks in). Long story short, I looked it up and yeah, there's no meaningful unlocks once you've reached platinum rank (other than a single facility where you can plant this games 'rare candies' to grow more at a much higher level). Platinum is rank 4 out of 10. And requires 700 points out of 99,9999. It really felt like the paradise progression stopped dead in its tracks just as it was picking up steam. Obviously there's still loads to build and upgrade, but it still feels like a bummer to know there's no more surprises. No more mini-games to unlock (there's exactly 2, which were cool as hell to unlock, but now feel weirdly out of place).
I might have been able to get past that if there was really anything else to do post-game. PMD have always had basically an entire second story after the credits, but Gates to Infinity has maybe about 2 hours and then you're done with basically all scripted story. Now you can just...recruit every Pokémon and fill up your paradise, I guess? I might have even done that if recruiting Pokémon wasn't some true RNG bullshit. Obviously actually getting them to join you upon defeat is random, but now a lot of them are locked behind these secret areas you only have a chance to visit while going through specific dungeons. So it's RNG on top of RNG. I'm not about to do that, even for a small roster of 144 Pokémon.
Some things that I didn't really like from before are still here, most notably multi-hit moves and AOE moves are still over powered.
Some things are similar but improved (in my opinion), like levelling up moves for increased power, pp and accuracy is still here but no longer require special items (that's definitely how it worked before right?) and just happen with repeated use of that move. This means it's especially good to take Pokémon with the same moves into dungeons to level it up much faster. But you also still can't level up status moves, even just for the pp increases.
Some things are improved, even if they were only minorly annoying before, like no more cutscenes after waking up and before going to bed.
So low expectations going in because the starters and recruitable Pokémon gave off a lazy kind of feel, followed by being humbled by the amount of additions and well thought out features, and back to being let down by the lack of content in the post-game. In many ways I like this more than Explorer's of Sky, and if it just had that games level of stuff to do after beating the story, I'd absolutely put this as the shining diamond everyone says Sky is.
When I started playing it, I actually loved it. As you go through the opening hours and unlock more stuff there's just so many features that I feel really compliment the series well. The V-Waves give a fantastic motivation for changing up teammates regularly, something I never did in Sky because I never cared who I brought into a dungeon other than me and my partner. Having exp given between everyone even those not in the dungeon also helps Pokémon not fall behind until you need them. Though the fact they don't GET the exp until you bring them into a dungeon is very annoying as it often leads to a lot of slow move learning dialogue at once.
They didn't really change dungeons much other than the general 3D visual transition. But a small handful now feature outside areas every other floor, which have very tiny, very simple puzzles, which is kinda cool? It's a baby step in the right direction for making dungeons feel less repetitive and blending together, but it needed to be expanded way more. So dungeons aren't really worse than before, but they're not really better either.
Building up paradise was one of the biggest things I loved while playing the game. The joys of unlocking a new facility and making decisions of which to prioritise. It does somewhat go against the new story direction which forces you into huge stretches of taking you away from the hub area to large dungeon marathons. I'm pretty sure in the entire second half of the game you only return to the games town area once. But they thought of that too and added "companion mode". This lets you take a break from the story and take control of any Pokémon in your team except you and your partner. While doing this you can do as many missions as you want in a row, and build up your paradise, with zero story breaking your stride. It comes with the weird limitation of not being allowed in the town area though, so you do lose out on some features, like the ability to open treasure boxes and spend gold bars. It's a very arbitrary restriction and unfortunately does mean you can never truly get the full game while taking a break from story beats until you've already cleared the story. To contrast, the last game basically had a ton of times that were "the game will only continue if you go to this dungeon", allowing you to ignore that and go to any other dungeon as many times as you wanted. In this game the story is always pushed forward automatically after you clear a mission or two.
I do like how the game compensated what appeared to be a huge downgrade in missions. You're now limited to only taking one at a time. Seems awful right? No more stacking up 8 missions for one dungeon and getting tons of rewards at once. Well, it kind of is annoying, but the rewards from missions actually matter now, since they're materials for expanding your paradise. In the past game even though I could do 8 missions at once, I never cared what the missions gave me, it was always just something I could basically buy or farm elsewhere. In this game I actually chose my missions carefully based on what material I needed at that specific time. It'd still have been nice to be able to do even just 2-4 at a time, but I'd still rather have the mission choices actually matter over being able to pick 8 random ones for the sake of a bigger payout of less important items.
The story is pretty much on par with Explorer's too. Very similar plot twists and an emotional ending even. Not much to say about it other than it follows the expectations already set. Including some unnecessarily long-winded dialogue (seriously if you try to take on a mission when you need to go somewhere else for a story event, your partner will basically say you need to go do the story thing like 5 times in a row, worded slightly differently).
It was all going so well. And then while I was taking a break from the main story, grinding missions in companion mode, I levelled up my team rank and noticed the next rank was a very large number of points away. Like obviously not intended for completion with the level of missions available. So I finish the game to get the post-game missions and rank up again only to realise the game is no longer rewarding me with extra facilities I can build (one of the biggest benefits to ranking up, along with extra inventory space which also stopped increasing only about 3 ranks in). Long story short, I looked it up and yeah, there's no meaningful unlocks once you've reached platinum rank (other than a single facility where you can plant this games 'rare candies' to grow more at a much higher level). Platinum is rank 4 out of 10. And requires 700 points out of 99,9999. It really felt like the paradise progression stopped dead in its tracks just as it was picking up steam. Obviously there's still loads to build and upgrade, but it still feels like a bummer to know there's no more surprises. No more mini-games to unlock (there's exactly 2, which were cool as hell to unlock, but now feel weirdly out of place).
I might have been able to get past that if there was really anything else to do post-game. PMD have always had basically an entire second story after the credits, but Gates to Infinity has maybe about 2 hours and then you're done with basically all scripted story. Now you can just...recruit every Pokémon and fill up your paradise, I guess? I might have even done that if recruiting Pokémon wasn't some true RNG bullshit. Obviously actually getting them to join you upon defeat is random, but now a lot of them are locked behind these secret areas you only have a chance to visit while going through specific dungeons. So it's RNG on top of RNG. I'm not about to do that, even for a small roster of 144 Pokémon.
Some things that I didn't really like from before are still here, most notably multi-hit moves and AOE moves are still over powered.
Some things are similar but improved (in my opinion), like levelling up moves for increased power, pp and accuracy is still here but no longer require special items (that's definitely how it worked before right?) and just happen with repeated use of that move. This means it's especially good to take Pokémon with the same moves into dungeons to level it up much faster. But you also still can't level up status moves, even just for the pp increases.
Some things are improved, even if they were only minorly annoying before, like no more cutscenes after waking up and before going to bed.
So low expectations going in because the starters and recruitable Pokémon gave off a lazy kind of feel, followed by being humbled by the amount of additions and well thought out features, and back to being let down by the lack of content in the post-game. In many ways I like this more than Explorer's of Sky, and if it just had that games level of stuff to do after beating the story, I'd absolutely put this as the shining diamond everyone says Sky is.