So about HMs for "progression"

Suggestions and Contributions
1

Can we remove most HMs from the entrances to the “gateway” dungeons? Like Cut and Rock Smash from the ways to Winden Pass/Tanren Tunnel. …Honestly, you can go right to Tanren once you have cut and something that can walk on water, but… why not go the full route and make PMU a true open world experience? Of course, there’s a suggested order in how you’d go about things in PMU – like any open world game – but why not save the HMs for exploration/dungeon discovery?

Like… blocking off regions with arbitrary obstacles is rather… lackluster. It’s not even just a PMU problem, it’s a Pokemon problem! As a fan game… we have the chance to do better than what GameFreak does.

And yes, it’s possible for a newbie to wander right to Tanren Tunnel and get bodied, but you know what? It’d be a learning experience. They’d find the way to Tanren, commit it to memory, and have a goal to train for.

Honestly I made this thinking about how stupid it is that a tiny lil tree can stop a trainer with, say, a fire type from walking on, because it needs to be Cut down, not even slashed, or incinerated, just Cut down…

2

I brought up a similar argument in " Reusable Items to Substitute HMs for Easy Access to Dungeons for Grinding? ." I think since even the main series has discarded HMs due to annoyances, it’s silly to have them be such a key feature in a Pokemon Mystery Dungeons game. Although I understand the intent, I think as the main series has demonstrated there are alternative ways to content lock in a pokemon game. So personally I support anything that makes HM blocks more practical, one way similar to what you are saying, make the game more open worldy, additional suggestions would be to

A. Make barriers blocked by a linear dungeon completion progression instead of HMs

B. Have HM blocks in front of dungeons but have a chimecho outside the block for easy HM retrieval, and remove them in the overworld

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