“Uncanny Valley” is not a dungeon, but it’s been visited tonight
So uh. Discovered something slightly disturbing about this game. Not like, intentionally disturbing or put in there on purpose (Lavender Town, anyone?), more like a minor code oversight, but still kinda wigging me out.
Turns out, in Super Mystery Dungeon, if a Pokemon is a certain number of tiles away from the party leader, and therefore the camera, they count as “Off screen” and the game won’t bother to animate their walk cycle. Normally this is perfectly fine, you’d never see it.
But. There are certain Pokemon (Onix, Steelix, most if not all of the larger legendaries) that count as “massive,” meaning instead of taking 1 tile they take 3x3 tiles. In addition to posing a few pathfinding AI problems that range from humorous to annoying (A Kecleon in a dungeon shop was positioned right next to the entry to the room so Xerneas got stuck... again... *le sigh*) it also means that, with some of them, if things are juuust right, you can see the lack of walk animation in action. If they’re enough tiles away to count as “off screen” but are big enough to poke into the screen, they’ll just kinda... slide along motionlessly. It’s kind of eerie and I just. No. Do not like. Do not like.
So far I’ve only found a few Pokemon that do this; Yveltal’s head will poke up from the bottom of the screen when you’re moving up/north and have it positioned right, and the unmoving tips of Xerneas’ feet will be visible if you’re moving down/south. There are probably others, I just rarely take massive Pokemon into a dungeon unless they’re Motivated that day (see above: AI issues). I also don’t know if the same effect is found in Gates to Infinity, although it’s reasonable that it would, given that Super is made on the same engine (as far as I’m aware of). I may have to go back and test that. For Science.