>>24691236>>24691225>handcraftedYou give the Connection Orb missions way, way, way too much credit. These aren't hand-crafted missions. Handcrafted missions would actually have some meat to them.
What Chunsoft has done is taken a big, finite handful of randomly-generated missions, and then tossed them into Super without much thought. Yes, they aren't "randomly generated" in the sense that everyone will have the same missions - everyone has to do the Axew mission, etc etc - but the jobs don't have any kind of substance to them. They have the same amount of "backstory" or whatever the hell you want to call it as all the randomly-generated missions in the previous games did, except this time there's a finite amount of them.
Alongside that, the ability to recruit overpowered mons through the Connection Orb doesn't feel satisfying because it never feels like you actually earned them. Salamence is one thing, since you actually fought him, but stuff like getting Team ACT from a fucking-easy-go-to-3F-and-find-an-item mission feels unsatisfying as hell.
Alongside that, there's no sense of progression in terms of the actual skill and strength of my team. The Emera replacing the IQ system means that it's a series of small, fleeting microprogressions rather than a single long-term character progression. No matter what, you always go back to square one, and the different Looplets don't make that much of an impact. You always start off a dungeon as a weak fuck, find some Emera and get to a point where you're actually competent, then finish the dungeon or job and go back to being a weak fuck. I'm not struggling with the difficulty, mind you, but it feels so unsatisfying to use the Looplets when you know that once you leave the dungeon, they're done, even if you have a good "build" going.
Like, Super is fun, yeah, it's going alright even though the pace of the game is weird. It's definitely second-best. But saying that this is the best PMD ever? Hardly.
