This DLC has the most to talk about for both better and for worse. It offers access to randomly generated dungeons that give chests and allow you to level up fairly quickly. It's genuinely a good way to improve your team and inventory. I was quite impressed early on, but I quickly realized it's just a hassle that I don't find much enjoyment in after a couple attempts. Needing to look through every room to find a monster with a key around it gets a bit repetitive. The rooms feel too similar most of the time. I did see a lot of monsters I was unfamiliar with but the game overall is good in this aspect so it's not really a dungeon specific pro. This DLC is absolutely the most content filled and debatably the most useful depending on your play style, but I will be ranking it under Mole Hole due to it being more to the point compared to this slower dungeon crawling mode. The longer dungeons just get boring too quickly even with immense difficulty cause hard battles and running around randomly is all it is for an hour. The fact that you can leave at any time but lose all items if you do just feels discouraging like why make it so that players actually have to play the dungeon for so long to get their reward? I guess they signed up for it if they chose harder difficulty dungeons and you can save within the dungeon but still.

I went into this expecting an uninspired Pokemon clone. The only Pokemon game this even vaguely plays like is Legends Arceus but even then this is far more like Ark or a random generic survival game than Pokemon. That's probably why I found the game to be very boring because it doesn't even play like the games people build it up as a rip-off of. If you remove the Pals then it's literally just the most basic survival game ever gameplay wise. When it comes to the monsters yeah it is exactly what it's hyped up to be or rather whatever the opposite of hype is. These monsters have no originality. They're made to look like Pokemon but be different enough to loosely avoid getting sued. It feels like those mobile game ads that try ripping off Pokemon for a quick dollar before getting taken down. I'm genuinely surprised such a sloppy and unoriginal game has become mainstream debate. Like this would be the kind of game I see an ad for, forget almost immediately, and then never talk about again cause it's such a nothing game, but instead people want to make it the main talking point of the gaming industry for some reason. Anyways if you want a good survival game or a good monster tamer there's dozens out there that are better than this even within just last year. Play Tears of the Kingdom if you want an adventure game that actually tries new concepts instead of being the most barebones concept. If you want a monster tamer that isn't Pokemon (which i think is the reason people even try this game) from last year I'd recommend Dragon Quest Monsters but there's also many other cool monster tamer series like Yokai Watch, Fossil FIghters, Digimon, and so many more that are actually worth investing your time into instead of this slop. I'm not usually this negative towards a game but the fact the monster tamer genre has suffered from "Pokemon rip-off" allegations for decades when nearly none were yet something comes along that actually does rip-off Pokemon but gets hyped up like this is just really annoying. The genre deserves better than the way it has been treated and the fact so many actually quality games with unique premises get skipped for this just does not sit right with me. Anyways I'm going to attempt to move on from this game now cause it really is not worth discussing in mainstream discussions for that long. Just needed to vent my thoughts before moving on.

Edit:
Increased the rating from ½ to 1 ½ cause it's not that bad. Just really annoying this is the discourse game that won't leave my timeline.

Really useful DLC that makes capturing monsters you already had much easier. I do feel like this could've been in base game though, possibly as a late game unlockable dungeon. I'm not too upset by this being locked behind an additional paywall but that does make my score of it go down slightly.

Edit after beating the game's main storyline:
Okay this is actually way more useful in late and post game when you have multiple monsters that are only obtainable through synthesis only leading to more monsters that are synthesis only via the other synthesis only monsters. Almost feels like this mode is the only thing keeping me sane trying to get every monster. My rating isn't changing though since it still kinda sucks it's behind a pay well but def better this exists at all than if it didn't. Def the most worthwhile of the day one paid DLC.

A short yet charming retro style indie game with fun power ups, plenty of puns, and a well designed difficulty curve. Some early levels were a little difficult for me since I hadn't played many games in this genre but it felt satisfying bring much better by late game. Cookieroid Monster (the 2nd boss of the game) was definitely the hardest for me. Some mini bosses were repeated a little too much and even a few main bosses played a little similar but that's not too problematic since there's a lot of variety amongst most enemies in this game. I do have 2 genuine complains. The first is I lost half the story worth of progress because I clicked start game which instantly saves over all your progress with no real way to get it back. This may have been patched as to not erase progress but I'm not sure. Regardless, it did genuinely make me disappointed in the game for about an hour before I sucked it up and played through half the levels again. The other complaint is the final boss crashed on me a few times and I know that has not been fixed as of this review. Overall though I did have a blast playing this game and for the very cheap price I can absolutely recommend it. I genuinely hope to see more games like this one. Shout out to Ryan and Exalin for their work on this game.