Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red/Blue Rescue team
Verdict: Dungeon crawling for dummies.
Platform: GBA, DS. Out 10th November.
Rating: 3½/5
Fans of Sex in the city often ask ‘which character are you most like?’. Alongside ‘which A-Team character do you smell of?’ and ‘which Cenobite would you holiday with?’, we now have a new question and a readily available answer - ‘what type of Pokémon are you?’.
At the start of the mysterious red or blue adventure you’re asked a series of entertaining and random questions which inexplicably determine what type of Pokémon you’re transformed into. My stubbornness and quiet courage meant I became a Charmander when I woke from the amnesia inducing dream into the world of talking creatures.
Taking a diversion from the traditional Pokémon format, Nintendo have created a particularly old-school dungeon crawler. Featuring randomly generated ‘dungeons’ in the form of forests and cave networks, the traditional turn-based combat has been replaced with accessible, pseudo real-time mechanics which allow the novice to jump straight in while the simple controls belay a more hardcore structure for the stat crunchers out there.
This time round you actually play as a Pokémon instead of a trainer collecting them. Set in a human-less world you can communicate beyond the original two word style vocabulary (Pika? Chu!) but the queen’s English lamentably removes some of the nonsensical charm that Pokémon normally exude.
With the core hook of the classic Pokémon RPGs gone, the ‘gotta catch em all’ nature has been replaced with ‘gotta befriend em all’ which, while ecologically and sociologically sound, replaces the satisfaction of hunting out rare Pokémon, nurturing and training them with an altogether less immediate prospect.
While the hub world and story is full of character and kawai charm, the majority of the game is spent dungeon crawling through bland, featureless environments. Their random nature replaces the prospect of clever level design with endlessly meandering corridors and rooms and coupled with the repetitive and simplified combat, speedily working your way through each mission quickly becomes a priority over curious exploration which was such an enjoyable part of the originals.
With link-up between versions and the expected DS enhancements bettering the GBA, it’s a game best played in conjunction with friends with trading and collecting enhancing the unique but slightly flat experience.
Now if I could just wake up from this dream...