Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX

Genre: Dungeon-Crawler / RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are a series of Dungeon-Crawler RPGs that started on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS in 2006, with the series seeing multiple installment in the time since. The series has now come full circle with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, a remake of the first game in the series, coming to the Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation here, while certainly well beyond what was in the original game this remakes, still feels very much like something that could have released on one of the Nintendo DS platforms, featuring rudimentary cel-shaded 3D visuals that are bright and cartoony, much as you’d expect a Pokemon game to be, but very, very far from anything you would consider impressive. Likewise, the game has a chipper soundtrack that’s pretty forgettable. If you’re already a fan of the creative designs of the Pokemon critters, you’ll undoubtedly find them as charming as ever here, but otherwise this whole thing will seem very underwhelming to you.

As for the gameplay, this is a game that combines the core gameplay and mechanics of the multi-franchise Mystery Dungeon series with some of the gameplay elements of the Pokemon series. From Mystery Dungeon series, you get a turn-based top-down RPG where enemies move and attack only when you move, and from the Pokemon games, you get a small team of characters with a limited move set of four elemental-based attacks, with a part of the strategy of the game being to use the correct attacks on the appropriate enemies.

It’s not a terrible formula, but it doesn’t have the addictive “catch ’em all” element that makes the mainline Pokemon series so compelling, and it doesn’t really do anything as a Dungeon Crawler to draw in the player either. As a result, this is a game that’s just… okay. It’s not particularly good in any way, but it’s… eh, fine.

I should note that while this game does feature completely remade visuals from the original game, it doesn’t really do anything to make use of the Nintendo Switch’s unique features – most notably, there’s no touchscreen controls, which seems like a shame since this sort of game seems like it could only benefit from that sort of thing.

In the end, I can’t help but feel like the only people who would enjoy Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX are absolute die-hard Pokemon fans who need to play every game in the franchise. For those players, this game will be a decent distraction, but it’s far from anything particularly noteworthy for the Pokemon series or for the Dungeon Crawler genre.

tl;dr – Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a remake of the first game in the series, originally released on Game Boy Advance, upgrading the graphics (although they’re still not all that impressive), and rehashing the same mix of Dungeon Crawler gameplay and Pokemon mechanics. It’s fine, but doesn’t really do anything noteworthy or compelling. This one is just for the most die-hard of Pokemon fans.

Grade: C

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