Pokémon the Dungeon Crawler

Pokémon is something of an autonomous force these days. It's the largest IP in the world, and essentially everything it does will be met with the loud cheers of fans the world over. This is especially true in the case of its mainline games, which have changed enormously over the years but consistently sold millions (often tens of millions!) of copies. Increasingly, the series has leaned into narrative and online play with features such as raids and even coop while changing its level design foci away from the traditional JRPG design of its early years towards paradigms of narrative-first set pieces or open world sandboxes — echoing the trends of the RPG genre at large. While these new directions for the series have their origins in the early entries, there has been a steep decline in dungeonous level design that's worth looking back on. Pokemon's move toward narrative and open-world has de-emphasized the gameplay of its levels. The days of labyrinthine levels that wind between webs of…