Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Critics vs. fans

I think it's because the critics mainly look at the game mechanics, rather than the story. The story in PMD is where most of the enjoyment comes from, but the critics don't have enough time to get into it and the actual gameplay can get quite repetitive at times.

 

I think @[member="brsajo"] pretty much hit it on the head. The game mechanics themselves are pretty formulaic and repetitive, and the AI for your partner is quite frankly idiotic. The real joy of Mystery Dungeon has come from the great story and characters, but without them it really wouldn't be a very enjoyable game imho. This reason is probably why GtI was widely disliked, because the story was much weaker and allowed for more of the game to hinge on the honestly often underwhelming gameplay. The new Mystery Dungeon seems like it is going to be taking an epic story approach again, so I really hope it ends up good!

Thinking about this more, I want to add that the gameplay isn't bad. It's just been done before, and they haven't done much to take a spin on the actual dungeon crawling part. So it's very standard, but not broken or unfun. Just kinda dull at points.