Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Dreams

Welcome to the forums! It's good to have you. :> And it's an interesting offering you've brought us; Comet has a curious relationship with the world, as someone who's clearly played Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, and who's bringing that knowledge to bear on events as they unfold. Makes me wonder about the relationship between the pokémon world and its representation in the real one, though I guess maybe that's not something that will necessarily get cleared up. It's just a thing I always think about when I read PMD fic, I suppose.

Anyway, Comet's also a legendary, but one that canonically holds a lot of its power in reserve, and true to form Comet's not exactly great with the old telekinetic powers. It's an interesting position for someone to be in – powerful, inexperienced, naïve, and presumably something of a celebrity among the pokémon of this world. Should be a neat journey to follow as it develops.

Particularly since Comet's foreknowledge … isn't even all that useful. There's a lot of planning here, a lot of theoretical, abstract thought, that seems to come partly from the unreality of the situation (who wakes up as a pokémon and thinks it's real, right?) and partly from like, a place of thinking that video game logic will carry the day even here in a more realistic setting – and, of course, as the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. All Comet's attempts to use foreknowledge to gain an advantage sorta fail; Koffing and Weezing, even after Comet starts thinking of them as people instead of animals (I notice that they're introduced as 'it' and only later become 'he', which I guess is like a sign that Comet's getting into the mindset of the pokémon world more?), manage to come out on top twice before Comet panics and hits them with a bigger attack.

And that's the very first encounter! So like, I can't imagine things are going to get any easier, huh. In short, it's going to be interesting to see how far Comet can push against the prevailing narrative, and how hard the narrative will push back.

I do think that the initial descriptions of the pokémon are a tad much, though. Obviously you can assume that everyone reading a pokémon fic knows what pokémon look like, same as a writer of original fiction can assume that people know what a dog looks like, so that amount of description seems a bit excessive. There's an argument to be made that you might want to have some description because Comet's shocked and focusing on the fact that there are pokémon around, but like, there's not much emotion in the description, so it doesn't really come across that way.

I also think that sometimes the language is a little clinical and detached for a first-person narrative; Comet is that kind of person, sure, but lines like 'The possibility of this being a dream is more likely than any other scenario I can conceive' still don't sound that much like things people actually say. Maybe a related issue is the sometimes slightly weird phrasing – describing Koffing's grin as so broad that it would be fitting if its face split in two is not something a person would say when the well-worn phrase 'grin broad enough to split its face in two' is right there, for instance.

Anyway, these are minor things that can be fixed with a bit of polish; overall, this is a really interesting start! I'll just finish off with some typos and things that I spotted as I read through:



I'm not sure why this is italicised. Is it to indicate shock? If so, it might need to be made a bit clearer.



There's something missing after 'hands' here. Also, you want a dash rather than a hyphen there – that's something that recurs a bunch throughout the fic, too.



You've got an extra space before the comma there.



Given the prevailing tense, that should be 'haven't', not 'hadn't'.



Again, given the tense, that should be 'don't'.



'Ole' doesn't need an apostrophe after it.



I don't think that 'an' should be there.



I'm not sure 'wades' is the right word here – if it's a metaphor, I'm not sure it quite works, and if it's literal it doesn't make sense, since Comet and Paws are doing the wading, not the dungeon.



That should be 'us', not 'use'.



That's a weird use of 'two'; I'd say 'pair'.

That's all from me for this time! Welcome again, and I look forward to seeing where you go with this next! :>