A Pedagogy for a Paralysed Planet
Sean Chua
Notes on Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, Darkness, and Sky
1.
Nothing about the past of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, Darkness, and Sky is suggestive of its present legacy. Even following the awkward, series-saving success of Rescue Team, Explorers bears clear signs of being dragged kicking and screaming into year 2007, its dualscreen and touch functions largely afterthoughts to reskinned, grindy gameplay and warrens of nested menus. A stodgy anachronism, even among Japanese RPGs, in a year that also brought the world Persona 3 FES and The World Ends With You — and a cludgy roguelike, at that! — infamously, (and dare I say, deservedly) a middling IGN 4.9 amidst an era of genre-pushing tens.
The format, for those who are new. You play as an amnesiac Pokémon washed up on a beach. You are found by another. They become your first friend in the new world, your partner. You form a team and take on jobs for the adventurer's guild in endless procgenned dungeons. You may add or remove team members but your partner stays the same. The finicky AI is at first a source of micromanagement rage and then flow-state joy; you learn to facetank to proc precise damage thresholds, maneouvre in tight spaces, avoid tripping over your partner so they can drop that final merciless Thunderbolt or Silver Wind that ends the room encounter in one hit; a turn-based, resource-managing, step-counting waltz for two.
Along the way, there is plot. The world is, as it always is, falling apart. Time's stopped in the far reaches of the land, driving Pokémon from their homes and darkness into their hearts. You journey from idyllic Treasure Town into the high mountains and deep seas to find a renegade Grovyle's behind it all, stealing the sacred Time Gears that undergird the world. The all-knowing detective, Dusknoir, pursues Grovyle relentlessly—but in a twist, he's revealed to have ulterior motives of his own, and kidnaps you, your partner, and Grovyle through a portal to the future.
Around the plot, there is the world. Dialga, lord of time, has grown primal through untold aeons. The future is a dead one, held fast in a vise of stopped time. Grovyle, sent to the past, seeks to return the Time Gears to Dialga's tower, which will restore his sanity and proper control over time; grim Dusknoir, loyal to future Dialga, seeks to stop this. His motivation, like Primal Dialga's, is existential: if the past is changed, the dead future (and thus himself) will cease to exist.
The present world is a lush one. The flow of time is the flow of life: you and your partner wake to sunshine through open windows, see each other and your friends grow wiser, stronger, and kinder through countless adventures. (Smiles go for miles!) This is what you fight for at the game's main climax, doped up with Agility boosts and Violent Seeds at the roof of the world, risking life and limb (alongside your very best friend!) to knock some modicum of sense back into the mind of a primal god.
You fight, having realised your function in your past. The portal that brought Grovyle to the present also brought you, too; you are a human, Grovyle's first partner, having become-Pokémon through the turbulence of time travel. You're a child of the doomed future, fighting for the sunlit past even as it leads to your own unravelment. Your partner doesn't know this. On the way back down the tower, victorious over time, you realise you have to say goodbye.
A long sequence follows. The game cedes control from you at this point, for you are no longer here. You watch your partner wrangle with the incoming weight of loss. The weight of growth that comes from another, how you've affected them, and how they've affected you across the thirty-odd hours of gameplay. You watch your character fade into yellow embers—your partner proceeds, for the first time since the game's opening cutscene, across the screen, down the path, by themselves.
A lot of tears have been shed about this moment. It's personally affecting (though you do return later through the literal grace of God). The mechanics, world, and plot hinge around this; it's the emotional mast nut holding up the game's rickety rotors of repetitive kid-friendly writing and egregiously grindy gameplay. Intensity of affect is what charges the banal with the symbolic, even political; to paraphrase Gwyneth Paltrow's review of Neon Genesis Evangelion: "This could spawn something like Scientology." Not quite so for Mystery Dungeon: Explorers, but it is kind of a cult game. There's something about it that keeps, and something about it that calls out to be played again, which causes it to be remembered fondly as such. Why?
2.
Much metatext about Mystery Dungeon: Explorers focuses on what it isn't. Unexpectedly deep (as if seriousness is a merit and not the bare minimum), unexpectedly dark (as if tragedy begets quality). These are statements on how the game is unlike other games and not how it is doing what it is doing. It cannot explain its lingering, wistful shadow. Fanart, fanfiction, and metatext are reactive outcomes; Explorers is a cult game because it has produced a culture. This tract is an attempt to read the game in such terms: text as process; transactive event; resonance.
Pay attention to the echoes and those who listen. My first inkling of the game was through a boy who played the piano better than I did. Once, on the school piano, he played me a cover of 'Treasure Town' from the soundtrack, which loops at all times of day in the main town hub between missions. He played the left-hand part as a tender staccato, tempering the march-like beat of the original into a whispered secret. I hadn't played the game yet—much less paid attention to the soundtrack—but that memory of his left hand lingered. Over Facebook we talked much about death and sacrifice to save the world. Players like me are doomed, he said. But he didn't want to kill himself yet. (We stopped talking after that, for reasons I've forgotten. The possibility continues to hang like a tower in the sky.)
Another example from the comments on a Youtube upload of 'Time Gear', a recurring piece from the soundtrack associated with the game's more pivotal moments: “I want this music at my funeral.” Elsewhere in the comments on 'Don't Forget', which plays at the player's disappearance: “I'll listen to this when the world ends.” Again the wallowing in loss, the preoccupation with one's future death. There is a sadness in first learning that death is not just something that happens to other people, but something that will happen to oneself; and, with greater cruelty, that it will happen in a world which remembers it. This is not the product of the game as it is written. Rather, these are artefacts of the seminal relationship many players have made with the game as transaction: as exchange between one's world and the space of the game, between the self and the space of its grief, more than the sum of its programmed parts.
Fans talking about the Explorers games aren't blind to its eventive nature; it is, after all, one of those formative 'life-changing' video games of so many childhoods. Yet there is little public discussion about how Explorers fosters relationality between text and reader. There is value in isolating what we mean when we say a video game does so. Many a good RPG has dealt with this question, sometimes to great effect (Mother 3, Undertale/Deltarune, One-Shot)—but this isn't a novel question requiring genre-bending answers, because the relational nature of games has also been knocking around for about as long as RPGs or even stories themselves. Rather, the value of reading Mystery Dungeon: Explorers through this lens—an ordinary game, by all other means—is to highlight where else relationality in an RPG might come from, by dint of its format as a video game, spared from the self-aware pretenses of other 'meta' titles or even the simplest extravagance of a branching plot. The medium matters, even when it's not trying to draw attention to its medium-specific possibilities.
This is not as complex as it sounds. I want to listen to how the game is trying to tell you that it loves you.
3.
You are an actor that exists in the game. From the start, the game wants to know who you are.
RPGs play with this at different levels of savviness. For some, they want you to know that they know there is a you who is, which has consequences for the world of the game. Undertale and Deltarune ask you for a name, your true name of course, the entity beyond the fourth wall. Those games do so because Toby Fox acknowledges you as an agent in his story, much as characters in a visual novel acknowledge that they are simulating interactions with a person. They act out the simulacra of agency.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon does not do this. Your choices do not matter to this story. "This is a portal that leads to the world inhabited only by Pokémon."[1] Nothing in the story changes from your being here. No harm is irreversible, and nothing hurts.
But first, you must answer some questions.
How are your mornings? (Always in a rush!)
Once you've decided something, do you see it through to the end? (No…)
Do you think that, no matter what, life goes on? (All the time!)
Now press your fingertip gently on the bottom screen. The game will now read your aura. This decides what Pokémon you become. You can rig the process, sure, by looking up an online answer key or soft-resetting — but the game has asked you to be true. You must hold your finger to the screen. Take a deep breath and be still. The screen blurs, the colours shift; for me, it chose a deep green.[2]
This is the first interaction of the world that is asked of you. Not in picking one of three starters (as one must do in the mainline games, with all the nonchalance of picking the right tool for a job), but by being invited into a conversation. Unlike self-aware titles, the problem statement here is not “how does the game establish that you exist as a person outside of the game”. Rather, what this protracted opening seeks to answer through dialogue is “what kind of person are you?” And thusly, what shape will you take in this world—which one of nineteen starters? What scales, teeth, and fangs?
Thus runs Pokémon Mystery Dungeon's fiction of self-insertion: who, translated into the text's terms, are you? Not quite the usual fiction of setting you in as a puppet-in-the-world. It asks this of you emotionally, as well as bodily, to take part in the ritual of pressing your finger against the screen, to become into the world. Perhaps you've calmed yourself to take a deep breath in respect of this exchange. Call it parasociality, call it playing pretend. “In PMD, there is no 'wrong' personality. Just ones that are more like you, or less like you.”[3] That is to say: come in through the door as you are. And then to say: I am glad you are here as yourself.
[1] Emphasis mine. Pokémon is no stranger to the language of of world-making, though the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games demand something further than the mainline games. In the mainline games, the professor of the land introduces you to the 'world of Pokémon' where, it is implied, your self may enter unchanged. Not so, in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon's implied metamorphoses at the start of every game.↩
[2] The shade that this exercise returns is inconsequential—the game reads from your Nintendo DS user profile, where you (hopefully) have recorded your favourite colour!↩
[3] Commentary in an LP by user 'How Ingratiating!', hosted on lparchive.org in Apr 2016.↩
4.
You cannot shape the outcome of the world as you please. Instead, the game places you in the world and impresses it on you through the surface area of your choices. For the dungeons, the waltz of micromanaging movement and resources, emerging from path of least resistance through the “decision machine” of combat[4], entangles your partner's virtual being into yours.
In the overworld, the surface area is less complex. The player experiences the world through the ritual of the housekeeping loop. After each mission, you eat with the guild, have a good night's sleep, and wake to yellow sun. You greet your partner and your colleagues at the guild house—the same pre-work assembly, smiles go for miles!—and run through Treasure Town day after day to offload items, reorganise moves, unlock lootboxes, and restock supplies. Ten or twenty of these runs and tedium morphs into flow-state. NPCs become familiar. The story becomes experienced through variations to this ritual: guild middle-manager Chatot announces plot developments, new milestones; your fellow colleagues react to your triumphs and little tragedies. Shopkeepers grow warm to you and react to plot events with words of encouragement or commiseration. This is a simulacrum of a town where different locations are reasonably separated by space; in doing so, Mystery Dungeon follows the tradition of RPGs that, inadvertently or otherwise, teach the player to actively grow into a routine and learn to love its familiarity. Not a checklist but a place. The camaraderie of Treasure Town becomes lived through this chronotopic rhythm—from the professional Kecleon shopkeeps to the cowardly Croagunk trader who, despite all his shadiness, still shares in the hopes and fears of your latest adventures. The form is the message: learn the rhythm of a community and get showered with acknowledgement in return. (Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Persona.) And they're all just silly little guys!
Variations to this chronotope exert more-than-proportionate weight. When you and your partner fail an important mission after being set up by bullies, a furious Chatot withholds your dinner, and that's sad! And when your guildmates band together to sneak you food they've saved, it's really heartwarming and cute! That same rubber-banding is intensified when you're sent to distant lands on expeditions, or into the dark future; knowing that no matter how far you go, you'll always be pulled back to that same, warm, familiar rhythm of care.
By the end, you're erased from the world, beyond the power of Dialga himself—you're shown the gulf you've left, the grief of it all—oh, how deep and wide it is!—and still there is work to be done and new moves to learn and new friends to make and new forms to evolve into, and you are missed so much that there is nothing the universe can do but to pull you back. “It's just not possible... for you to be unwanted in this world.” (A love like a home you return to, even from out of space and time. A love that cannot exist without you. A love like a deus ex machina.)
[4] From Mike Piero, who uses the term in the introduction of his 2021 book as a kind of defining factor of the narrative surface of a video game, borrowing it from Rolf Nohr's treatment of AI in games.↩
5.
Around this surface of interaction is the story of two worlds: that of the past, and that of the future. A 'world' is not a natural metaphor to use when referring to a different time; the past is neither a territory nor a space. But it's nevertheless useful to think about what the game is doing with this metaphor. To speak of a setting as a 'world' is to speak of a sphere of actors and actions within which some actions are possible (or at least plausible), and beyond which lies what is not. To 'world' a time is to set a conceptual limit on its possibilities.
The world of the past is the world of change and light. There are no humans, though everyone recalls they exist. In place of cities and routes is a cornucopia of wilderness; beings of various sizes, colours, and shapes live, eat, play, share, and fight together in a land whose limits are defined only by the endless outlines of clouds. “We are not wise, and not very often kind.” (Mary Oliver, Don't Hesitate) But much can be redeemed, understood, changed. Little wonder that part of the postgame is devoted to restoring the powers of the Luminous Spring, the only in-universe source of evolution; to heal the world is also to restore its capacity for miraculous change.
The future world is circumscribed by the impossibility of change. In the world of time gone mad, there is neither sunshine nor wind, and the land is a barren bluish-grey; resonances of madness as impotency, as stasis. The protagonist of the future is an unevolved Grovyle, trapped as he is between first and final stages.[5] There are few survivors, and fewer still not under the thrall of Dialga or regressed into vicious, self-preserving packs. “There's no future in this dark world—it's enough to break your heart.” This language rings close to design-theory depictions of rational modernity as “defuturing”, in its total eradication of other lifeways (cf. Tony Fry via Arturo Escobar): a world, in other words, whose existence ontologically excludes all others, and will maintain the borders of its past with as much violence as it can muster. The evil at the heart of the doomed future is nothing more than its simple, selfish will to persist—personified by Primal Dialga, hellbent on retaining the conditions of its madness—that all-too-familiar persuasion that the status quo (and all who live in its good graces) must remain, even at the expense of all else.
Still, there is light enough to go on yet. “Everyone, except those whose hearts are dark and shrivelled... They all agreed to change this world of darkness.” There are some like Grovyle who would defy the madness of stilled time, even if doing so means the end of their existence. Crucially, this is not exceptional bravery, merely the necessary actions when confronted with the facts. “Everyone [...] they all agreed. Everyone's ready.” To the ones who are still capable of love, the sacrifice of their world is a gift for the past and futures yet to be. Love's givers persist, beaming back like a beacon through the dark.
There are not many of them left at this point. Of the planetary investigation team, we only know of Grovyle, Celebi, and the human that used to be you. Compared to love's exuberance in the world of the past, what love remains in the future is concentrated in the hearts of a few. But it shines still. As transformed into a Pokémon in the world of the past, the player is the receiver of a surface of love; the necessity of receiving it so strong that it negates one's disappearance from time. What the game has conducted with its last-act twist is to reveal that, as agent of the future, you are a bringer of love too. As experienced through gameplay, there is a radical pedagogy of sorts brewing at the heart of Explorers' shovelware plot—it is effectively an affective argument emplacing the player as both receiver and giver of love, which in turn sensitises one to the necessary orientation one must take in love's name amidst the defuturing madness of modernity.
These are timely reminders now. We fight because we must, because we love the world that allows more worlds to exist. We fight even though we must disappear. And when, on the cusp of victory, we find ourselves turning into dust and light — as Grovyle and Celebi know, holding on to each other in the fading ashes of the future — know that we love each other still. “Turns out that love truly is possible in the next world — for new people. And it is too late for us.” (ZAUM Studio, Disco Elysium)
[5] Second-stage evolutions are rarely prominent in mainline Pokémon games and its para/metatext. The only other major example, I think, is the titular Nuzleaf of the Nuzlocke comics, itself a metacommentary on the necessary acceptance of change/loss in a world built on combat. The namesake Nuzlocke playstyle is a fan-concocted attempt to shoehorn the mechanics of contingency and sacrifice into a game series resolute on ignoring these implications of its violence.↩
6.
What does this say about writing that pretends to love you because it can, and what room does this afford for writing in general?
Enough has been said (or osmosed through Twitter) on the deradicalising potential of games about gathering resources and being loved. Animal Crossing, for one, has borne its fair share of invective. That its escapism infantilises, depoliticises, makes an abstraction of the very real issues of scarcity and injustice in a boiling world. The counter-reading is that escape in itself remains revolutionary in holding a candle for that other world to come; that it is necessary for one to see what is possible and hold that hope close in the darkest of nights (albeit on the lit screen of a consumer product, experienced as disjointed bouts of playtime between the suffocations of real-world labour).
Not much in Mystery Dungeon: Explorers is useful in meaningfully advancing this line of discourse. At the end of the day, the affective is only as salient as one allows it to be. For the interaction-surface of Treasure Town to hold meaning to me, I have to convince myself that there is a consistent surface to read meaning from in the first place; I have chosen to suspend my disbelief that there are other reasons for game writing (expedience, editorial interference, dark patterns and emotional pleas to enthrall the addicted) other than the first reason for writing itself — that something here is waiting to be read.
To say that the text is a world that loves you is to submit that there has been an invitation extended to oneself from somewhere, conveying care. This is an act of irrational trust. The intention to care has been extended from some fictional others to a fictional someone, which is believable and palpable in the context of the fiction, and directed through the medium of the game through the focal point of a player sprite under your control. In the absence of strong evidence for the writer's ulterior motives—this is not a live service game, for one—I think one is within their rights to accept this invitation. To trust that the conveyance of love has been made possible in some world, somewhere—and accept that if it does, it can matter to you, too.
This is facilitated through grounding love in action. The initial trust of being-with becomes bodily through player input, is reinforced through gameplay loops; this is narrative finding its best expression in medium specifics. That a story like Explorers' can engage meaningfully with ecofuturist ideology at all hinges on these physical commitments. When one does, the effect is magnifying. For the young player, perhaps it's enough to fill one's world with the sobering certainty that it will end. And that despite it, or because of it, there is still love enough left to give.
More so than that, it's to remind ourselves to trust that the simplest things around us can often spur ourselves to love. I'm trying to think back to the boy who started this for me, who outlined the heart of the matter in so many lilting notes. It wasn't the first song he played for me—I remember, or imagine I remember, some wavering, some hint of sheepishness—as if opening a room in one's house to a stranger for the first time. I am trying to tell you what this means to me, and I don't know quite how to say it. And so his playing for another was also an act of trust, that someone would listen and take seriously the thing that was being said. So it is to make something—to paint, to sing, to make a game, to write. That someone may take your message as it is and come into the door for you.
There is a beach, a partner, a town where you are loved. This is my offer to you. To press your finger to the screen and take seriously that the things that love us are around us and are here, that we may also express it in return for others in these trying times. This is not to force an uncritical reading of the present. Rather, it is to urge towards an openness towards not just stories as they they present themselves to us, but to be aware of the futures that come calling with them, to listen for the love amidst the noise. (We can exist here, cries the end of the game to you. We can live here! And that alone is something to be happy and grateful about!)
When that call comes, I want us to be there. To listen and give ourselves up with open hearts, again, again, and again.