“Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon” for the Nintendo 3DS is a great game, if you’re willing to stick through five or so hours (if not more) of learning how to play it.

The game is the fifth entry in the “Pokémon Mystery Dungeon” series, a series which historically has had much more success with the fanbase than with the critics, although the last game, “Gates to Infinity,” was pretty much loathed by everybody, this reviewer included. There’s a lot that hasn’t really changed, but there’s much more that has changed.

The gameplay is deceptively straightforward; the goal is to defeat enemy Pokémon with your team as you attempt to get through randomly generated Mystery Dungeons, filled with traps and other nefarious challenges.

The premise for all this exploration is simple, at least at first: Your character wakes up on a planet that’s kind of like Earth, but not really. Suddenly, he or she realizes that he or she has turned into a Pokémon… and if that already sounds kind of weird, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Every living thing in this new world is a Pokémon… and they have their own civilization, too. All of this comes as a shock to your character, as if they weren’t dealing with enough problems already (for one, your character has no memories of what happened before waking up, other than his or her name and the fact that he or she was once a human).

What Pokémon your character ends up as is determined by a personality quiz the game gives you the first time you play it. Unlike past entries in the series, you don’t have to play as the Pokémon the quiz determines you to be; instead, you can now just choose from a list of 20 different Pokémon to play as, which is a welcome decision, especially when I think back to all the time I wasted resetting the first game in the series way back when just so I could be a Pikachu.

That said, the time spent redoing the personality quiz seems to be instead taken up by what I think might set a world record for the longest tutorial ever in a video game. Your character, under the pretense of needing to not raise suspicion because of their supposed youth, is forced to enroll in the local school.

If you haven’t played the games in the past, the tutorial is full of useful information, but it gets repetitive pretty quickly; for a series that is supposed to be about daring, yet meaningful adventures, these early stages of the game are rather humdrum. It’s even worse if you have played the games before. Sure, there are a couple things that weren’t in the series before (such as looplets, which can be filled with gem-like objects called emera to power up your team), but I wouldn’t think it would take a good five hours or more to explain all of it.

It also doesn’t help that the plot is so childishly simple at this point in the game. The Pokémon that populate the school your character goes to are possibly some of the most stereotypical characters I’ve ever seen in ANY form of media. There’s the bully, the smart child, the supposed troublemaker (who ends up being your character’s partner when you finally DO get to strike out on your own), and, of course, the no-nonsense teacher.

The characters outside the school aren’t exactly original personalities, either; for one thing, the Pokémon that takes you in is so Southern in its ways, it hurts.

If all this is turning you off, just hold on. It gets better, and I mean that. Once you get past the seemingly never-ending “school” part of the game, some actual conflict comes into play. The game finally starts to explore bigger problems: why did your character turn into a Pokémon in the first place? Will your character and your partner ever get to join the Expedition Society? Why are other Pokémon turning into stone? Are other Pokémon really as friendly as they seem? It’s surprisingly deep for what seems to be a childish game at first glance (although it’s not so surprising for people who have played the series before), and it does enough to redeem the plot.

If you’re hoping to explore the game’s world, you’ll have a long way to go. The plot doesn’t really allow for much freedom until long after the tutorial is over; when you consider that the older games only did this occasionally, it really is kind of disappointing. If you’re someone who only has a little time every day to play the game, I wouldn’t recommend this – even playing a solid half-hour a day, you’ll have to be playing more than a week to even get past the tutorial. Put another way, the game is a bit slower than most, and that will inevitably be a bigger problem for some people than others.

There are two other details that work in the game’s favor, though — the graphics and the music. There are times when the game’s soundtrack feels like the background to a semi-spectacular Hollywood movie because the music is so well put together. It may be reusing themes from past games, but it does so in an effective way, changing it up a little while not completely reinventing the wheel.

The graphics are also pleasing, at least at first. Once you get to the end of the beginning and the pace starts to pick up, there are moments when the game is absolutely breathtaking. There aren’t many games these days that can pull that off and do it well.

The difficulty of the actual gameplay is actually mildly surprising if you’ve played the earlier games. The dungeons have been made harder, even in the early stages of the game. Enemy Pokémon that started off comically easy to beat in the past games of the series now actually take more than a single push of the “A” button to knock out. The items that you originally needed about once every third blue moon now need to be used much more regularly; you have to think about what you’re going to take into a dungeon, and when you need to use what you end up taking in. It actually makes you consider what you’re doing, and how you’re going to do it. It’s aggravating at first, especially for veterans of the series, but once you get used to the ramped up difficulty, it becomes mildly enjoyable, if not just plain fun.

Nintendo seemed a bit hesitant in putting this game out (the critics didn’t even get copies of the game until the same day the public was able to buy the game, normally a sign of a company not being very confident with what they’re releasing), but they really should have a bit more faith in the series. Barring the everlasting “school” tutorial, the plot is actually pretty well thought out (dare I say, even emotional at points), as is the gameplay, which starts to explore a wide variety of locales and Pokémon.

It’s certainly a vast improvement on the last game in the series, and it easily beats out pretty much everything else Nintendo has put out this holiday season on either of their consoles (sorry, Animal Crossing and Mario Tennis fans). If you get the game, you will have to pay with your time if you want to explore the game’s full potential, but it’s a worthy investment in terms of both time and money.