Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is not a particularly good game—this was abundantly clear to me when I set it down following my first playthrough earlier this year. In the months that followed, however, something curious happened… it had been so long since I’d played it, yet I couldn’t stop myself from continuing to think about the game incessantly, turning its characters and its plot over in my head. In all of its 59% Metacritic score glory, Gates to Infinity had managed to somehow do something that inexorably stuck with me.

The second I finished Gates, I started a “Rewrite Thoughts” document in my phone’s notes app that I continue to occasionally add to; I made stupid MS Paint comics of a handful of scenarios and still populate my sketchbook with doodles of the Paradise crew. And every single time I find that I’m adding to these again, I ask myself, “Why in the world am I still thinking about Gates to Infinity?”

The truth is that Gates to Infinity managed to articulate something that I myself hold very strongly and yet never knew how to put into words. Gates is a game about the battle between hope and despair (something that Spike Chunsoft has never done before, I assure you), enough so that the game’s main motif is literally titled “Theme of Hope”. When the end of the world is nigh, it is only prevented by the steadfast belief that the looming future isn’t truly set in stone—fate can be defied, but only if you wholeheartedly believe so. A defeatist attitude does nothing but generate self-fulfilling prophecies of destruction. A better future is within our grasp so long as we know that it’s achievable, so long as we don’t give up halfway through the journey. It’s perhaps fitting that I named my partner “Cringe” at the behest of a friend at the very start of the playthrough—I felt bad about it at the moment, but by the time I reached the plot’s climax, he was the single person trying to convince everybody to have hope in the face a desperate situation. In the end, the only way to save the world was to be cringe, to maintain hope when everyone else thinks it is pointless and naïve.

Yes, it’s a kids’ game. It’s cheesy, and the plot is in many places not nearly as polished as I’d like. I’m sure you could find a million other examples of media about the importance of perseverance. But the way the particular themes present in Gates to Infinity are spun (and the ways they could be expanded, hence the ever-growing “Gates Rewrite Thoughts” note), have found a way to deeply resonate with me. The stories of the other Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games may be much better executed (oh my god, Gates’ pacing sucks), but Gates has so much more of a message to it, exemplified when you start reading between the lines a little.

Playing Gates to Infinity for the first time in the spring of 2024 was… well, an interesting experience, to say the least. As United States presidential campaigns kicked into gear and a Biden vs. Trump rematch became apparent, I found myself surrounded on all sides by a hopelessness thicker than any I’d felt before. So many people seemed to have the result pre-ordained in their mind, and the sentiment of “it’s so over” only grew to echo louder and louder around me.

Needless to say, the election ended up not exactly being a 2020 rematch. Also needless to say, the “it’s so over” crowd was right in the end. I worked as an election judge all day on November 5th (as an aside, it was an incredibly valuable experience I’d recommend to anybody living in democracy) and plopped to bed exhausted as soon as I got back—it wasn’t until the next morning that I grabbed my phone, hastily searched up “US election results” and groaned at my screen. In a rapid-pace election cycle where one campaign laser focused on the central theme of hope, I expected November to bring a starkly different perspective than it now does when I look back on that original spring Gates playthrough held in such a climate of uncertainty. On the contrary, hope ran and lost.

And this is when I know that I’ve really lost it, that Gates to Infinity has actually driven me insane, when the one thing granting me solace, the number one thing I point to to keep my head on straight when all around me people are ringing the doomsday alarms, is some stupid, mediocre 2012/13 Pokémon spin-off game. Because the “it’s so over” crowd I’d been surrounded by might have been right about the outcome of the election, but one question still remains: what exactly is “over”? I still woke up this morning. So did you. We’re all still here, we’re all still alive! We can all still do things, so long as we have the will to act. What would Cringe do in this situation? I think he’d tell us not to give up on our values.

…Yes, I seriously just wrote that. Because to be cringe is to hold onto hope. And the world doesn’t end until hope does.