Wildfire Highland -- PMD Wildfire Adventure Squad Ch. 8

The Wildfire Adventure Squad begins their postgame! A lot of strange things happen in this video and I'll have to wait and see if they're all just extreme luck or not.

Before I get into that, though, elephant in the room, yes, I'm going to be abusing savestates for the postgame. I've mentioned it before, but this is just how I play Mystery Dungeon games. They're not made to be binged a-dungeon-a-day the way I'm playing the games for this project. You're meant to take the time to grind and replenish supplies between dungeon attempts. I know save state abuse can and will affect my decision making and willingness to take risks, but it also means I won't be pulling my hair out because I died on the 97th floor of Wish Cave and have to do the whole dungeon again. Too many tiny things can go wrong and I find it incredibly stressful.

As for the oddities, we meet Entei in Pokemon Village. I didn't expect to just be given a powerful legendary for free like this. I'm wondering if this is a guarantee from the start of the postgame, as a reward for completing the Path of Treasure dungeon, or if it's a random event and I got super lucky to encounter Entei on the first day. I'm more likely to believe the former over the latter, as it does make sense to give you a Size 3 pokemon considering most pokemon up to this point have been Size 1 or 2.

The next oddity happens in the middle of the dungeon: At some point, the Kecleon Shop owner leaves his shop and starts behaving like an enemy even though I haven't stolen anything, nor has the thief event played out. I'm under the assumption that if you steal from Kecleon, he'll warp to you, call you a thief, and then Kecleon will start to spawn all over the floor like in Explorers. I'm really curious what happened here.

Oh yeah! The dungeon itself! Wildfire Highland, and all the postgame dungeons we'll be exploring for a while, are all unlocked upon clearing the game's Path to Treasure dungeon. Upon booting back into your save, the dungeons will be unlocked automatically. This does mean they all technically have the indirect requirement of you being at Gold Rank. This dungeon introduces Stack Platforms, a mechanic that I really don't like and they really just serve as decoys on the map when you think you've found a Stack Spot.

A Stack Platform lets the leader ride on a single larger pokemon in their squad. That larger pokemon will then automatically begin exploring on their own. You can set their tactics to prioritize different tasks. At the start, you can only search for the stairs but I assume the longer you use the mechanic, or the more you travel with that pokemon, level them up, or increase their IQ, the more options will become available. I'm not super interested in making this any more efficient though. It's just an auto-play mechanic masked as some sort of powerup. I trust the AI in this game about as far as I can throw it. No thank you.

The dungeon itself is filled with some pretty nasty pokemon. It's not so bad early on, but as you reach the lower floors, you're having to watch for Earth Power and lots of pokemon with Flash Fire rendering your fire attacks useless. I really advise taking Entei to Slaking before setting foot in this dungeon and learning Stomp or Bite if you want to use him. I didn't exactly consider that step.

This is also the first dungeon to feature a boss! I'm not sure if recruiting Groudon is guaranteed or if I just got lucky. If it's not guaranteed, I imagine he probably has a 50% recruitment rate. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if it were guaranteed. I think future PMD games after this start to do guaranteed recruits more commonly.

More concerningly, though, it seems that you don't get healed before boss fights like you do in Explorers. So you have to manually prepare for an upcoming boss just like in Rescue Team. Not sure how much of a fan I am of that one.