➤ The importance of being Tepig 🎮

We have never been big fans of Spike Chunsoft spin-offs, miniature roguelikes conceived mainly for a very young audience: the older fans of Game Freak pokémon have found unexpectedly deep themes and twists after hours of battles and dungeons too easy, and this imbalance made the Mystery Dungeon series a rather difficult experiment to catalog. It's been eight years since The Explorers of Heaven and The Explorers of Darkness, double version of the second Pokémon Mystery Dungeon that fans generally consider the best of the series, and after the misstep of Gates to Infinity we expected that it would be difficult to raise the quality bar. Times, however, have changed. Once upon a time children, at the age of ten, played for hours and hours with LEGOs; today they upload photos to Instagram with their iPhones while they wait for the PlayStation 4 to finish updating Bloodborne. Spike Chunsoft must have understood that too, because he has spent the last three years studying a compromise. The result is this amazing Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon that manages to put all players on the same level.

Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon has bewitched us: it is the best spin-off of the Game Freak series

Patience is the virtue of monsters

Anyone who has tried at least one Pokémon Mystery Dungeon will immediately recognize the first few minutes of the game. By answering a simple aptitude questionnaire, the game will choose an alter ego and a companion for us, selecting them from among all the "starters" of the series to which Riolu and the inevitable Pikachu are added.

Do not worry, however. If you don't like the pokémon arbitrarily chosen for you, you can safely select another one. We, for example, preferred Tepig to the Chespin assigned to us because, always remember, Tepig is life. As "partner" we chose Piplup and we started the adventure in the usual way, that is by waking up in an unknown place after having mysteriously assumed the form of a pokémon (Tepig, in fact). Fortunately, we immediately ran into Nuzleaf, who practically adopted us and took us to Borgo Quieto, a lively village inhabited by pokémon where we met the local troublemaker, Piplup, and started attending school. If it seems to you that all this incipit makes very little sense, well, you are absolutely right. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, after all, drops us into the unsuspected world of pokémon without trainers, gyms and PokéDex: in this colorful universe every little monster has a personality, a way of expressing himself and a real story. The Spanish adaptation works wonders, in this sense, giving each character a character if not a distinctive language. In this way, the pokémon that we usually captured and stored without thinking twice become protagonists or special guests. From the point of view of the plot, the first hours are not particularly exciting: the school setting is hilarious and the dialogues sparkling enough, but nothing special happens for at least six out of twenty-two chapters; only after four or five hours of play some interesting twists begin to follow one another and the threat we will have to face is revealed, or the mysterious transformation into stone of the pokémon. The last few chapters will exalt younger fans and make older children move and reflect, we are sure. In conclusion, once you have overcome the obstacle of what is, in effect, a very long tutorial, Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon opens up and allows the player much more freedom, allowing the protagonists to recruit new adventure companions and freely explore the game's many dungeons.

Together for strength

Coming to the gameplay, not much has changed compared to the foundations laid by the progenitor in 2006, but all the various improvements implemented by Spike Chunsoft have helped to make the new experience cohesive and satisfying on several levels. In this sense, Super Mystery Dungeon looks more like a simplified version of the recent Etrian Mystery Dungeon, but those who have played the Atlus roguelike will probably sigh with relief: we are in challenging territory, but not as prohibitive.

With the spin-off of Etrian Odyssey, Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon shares a graphics engine that gives us curated and beautifully animated three-dimensional models together with colorful and detailed scenarios, supported by a qualitatively over the top stereoscopic effect. Together with the soundtrack, pleasant if far from unforgettable, the title Spike Chunsoft is a small pearl that does not make you regret the cel shading of the last two mainstream episodes developed by Game Freak. Returning to the game, however, We will find ourselves exploring numerous procedurally generated dungeons at each access: our aim will be to reach the stairs that lead to the next floor, moving on an invisible grid. Each movement or action represents a turn for both us and our enemies, regardless of where they are, which is why it will be important to coordinate the movements of our three pokémon by studying the actions of the targets and the structure of each room. The sword of Damocles of hunger will always hang on us, an indicator that is consumed at every step and that we will have to keep an eye on constantly, since it will be important to balance the experience: better to run to the stairs or face some enemy while we look for the scattered objects for the map? This is a dilemma that always involves risks. Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon does not skimp on the unpredictable peaks of difficulty, especially when facing super effective pokémon against ours. In this sense, we must play following the rules of the parent series and therefore thinking about the weak points or the moves that strengthen us or that weaken our targets. To our aid come dozens of objects with the most disparate effects, on which Spike Chunsoft would seem to have focused more than in previous chapters. The strategic consumption of wands, spheres and other gadgets is not only recommended but sometimes necessary, especially if we consider that our defeat involves the loss of objects and money in our possession.; in this case Pelipper Island comes into play, a hub from which it is possible to ask for help from other players in various ways or to send our subsidiary teams in search of the missing protagonists. To these more or less established mechanics are added a couple of interesting features that add depth to the hybrid combat system, such as the Circles, in which it is possible to set temporary gems that give pokémon special bonuses, or the combined moves that allow our team to attack in the same turn at the cost of a few more hunger points. Fans of pokémon, at this point, will immediately prick up their ears, because Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon allows in effect to put into practice new strategies based on the numerous abilities of the various monsters. And this is where the Intersphere comes into play.

The 3D effect

The stereoscopic effect is generally of great impact, but in terms of gameplay it has no value at all. Spike Chunsoft designed the settings and positioned the camera in an intelligent way, for example when overlooking Borgo Quieto from the adjacent hill.

Pokemon also use Facebook

Completed the sixth chapter of the story, our protagonists become part (well, more or less) of the GIP, the Pokémon Investigative Group that deals with helping monsters in difficulty. At that point, in the options menu, the so-called Intersphere is unlocked, a real network of contacts through which we can undertake secondary missions. The concept is quite simple.

Some pokémon that we will come across while we explore the villages will become our friends and will appear in the Intersphere together with their friends, forming a network that will gradually become wider and more intricate. Between one story mission and the next, some of the pokémon cataloged in our Intersphere will ask us for help: maybe they've lost an item - if they haven't lost them! - or maybe they want to teach a monster a little too overbearing a lesson; be that as it may, helping them means facing the dungeon in question to complete the mission and recruit the relative pokémon in our team. At that point, we will be able to select that same pokémon every time we leave for an adventure, but above all we will unlock the possibility of facing the secondary missions that will allow us to recruit its friends in the Intersphere. By carrying out the various secondary missions, in short, a list of supporting actors is expanded to say the least immense: in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon it is possible to recruit and control all 720 existing pokémon, evolutions and mega evolutions included, even if in these last two cases it is necessary to respect some limits imposed by the narrative structure. While many pokémon are recruited by fulfilling particular requirements, most of them are unlocked by completing the same dungeons over and over again, which results in an experience that becomes decidedly repetitive a little too soon. There are various benefits, such as the fact that pokémon "on the bench" gain experience even when not fighting, which help to lighten the game dynamics but the latter, in any case, remain faithful to the roguelike nature of the Mystery Dungeon series: if do not like the genre, in short, pokémon will not please you.

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Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon surprised us precisely because Spike Chunsoft managed to find an almost perfect balance between the complexity of the gameplay and the carefree nature of the brand. The result is a challenging, but never particularly frustrating, adventure that will test the skill of new players without appearing overly superficial to fans of the roguelike genre. The liveliness of the setting, the sympathy of the pokémon and the over-the-top quality of the technical sector complete an absolutely positive picture that gives us hope for the future of this spin-off. Finally, it goes without saying that if you hate the genre and / or the Nintendo monsters you would do well to avoid it like the plague.