>>53929258>ExplorersPretty much the best game in the series. There's more Pokemon, side stories you can play through, the partner AI isn't as dumb, and you can simply mod away all the little issues nowadays. The game not dying if you cheat for alternate starters is also nice.
>GatesThey really fucked this one up. The small dex is a bigger issue than it appears at first glance. It's not just having less mons to choose from that's bad, it's having less enemies to fight that's even worse. Coincidentally, there are a TON of Pokemon in Gates that have moves seemingly tailor-made to be horrible in a PMD setting. Incinerate Pansear burns away your seeds and berries and appears in like 6 dungeons, Pluck/Fury Attack Vullaby does the same and appears in a few dungeons, basically all the bugs have Bug Bite which does the same, only now Dwebble cannot be 1shot so there's a good chance you just lose a seed/berry no matter what. Then there's shit like Croagunk who meets you at the hallway corners and spams Mud Slap on you.
The floor layouts are by far the worst part of the game. Hallways are extremely long, rooms are far smaller than in previous games, and the hallways often have little indents or tiny turns that make it so you can't even run quickly through them. One floor here can take you longer than 3 or 4 in Sky.
For some baffling reason, ALL weather prevents natural HP regen. Later games keep this for hail and sandstorms, but when my Water type is weakened from being in RAIN, there's a problem.
All that being said there's a lot of things the game does that I really like. The music's great, the Paradise gang are all cool Pokemon that actually do something, building Paradise itself is nice, and the mysteriosity in dungeons helps make them more interesting. It's just a shame the low dex/awful dungeon layouts totally cripple the game.
