Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (Switch)

Besides the mainline Pokémon role-playing games, the most prolific video game series for the Pokémon franchise has been Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. Still featuring turn-based battles, it shifts the focus away from being a trainer catching and battling their team of Pokémon to being a Pokémon yourself and exploring dungeons with the other monsters you befriend. Perhaps nothing indicates this subseries’s longevity better than the fact it is the only spin-off series to have remakes of its game release at the time of writing, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX aiming to revitalize the paired first entries of the series by combining them into one modern experience. However, going so far back can lead to retreading ground a series has otherwise evolved away from, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX feeling like it is sometimes trapped by what the originals did 15 years ago.

 

The world of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon carries over many elements familiar to those who have played other Pokémon titles. In this dungeon crawler’s turn-based battles, you’ll be able to recruit over 400 possible allies from the creatures that appeared in the first three generations of Pokémon games, as well as a few faces added for the remake so that specific Pokemon like Electabuzz can evolve into Electivire despite that Pokémon being introduced after the release of the original Rescue Team games. The most important aspect of a Pokémon will be its typing, a Pokémon able to exhibit up to two types like Water, Ghost, Fairy, and more. These influence their weaknesses and resistances, a Grass Pokémon for instance taking heavier damage from Fire attacks while a Rock Pokémon would instead take less from those same flames. You can even have full on immunities too, like how Flying types cannot be hurt at all by moves of the Ground type. Since moves also have types though and your Pokémon can learn up to four attacks for use in battle, the strategic value comes from trying to diversify your rescue team not just in what types they are, but what types of moves they use so they can handle a wide range of situations, especially since the first time you plunge into a dungeon you might not have any clue what type of monsters lurk within.

To start with though, you’ll only have two Pokémon on your team, these being decided right at the start as you take a personality quiz. Your answers will determine which of a selection of well-known Pokémon you will be playing as you walk about town and undergo story sections where your choices are restricted, although in less important moments you will be able to construct a team of up to three creatures however you like. You will also be provided a buddy Pokémon at the start, the player getting to directly pick which of the remaining options they want to be their constant companion save the game stepping in to make sure you don’t overlap types too much. No matter which Pokémon you choose, these two will be the core of the game’s story, and the budding friendship between you and your buddy is actually fairly cute and sweet. Your partner is written a bit like an enthusiastic kid, and since you are both unevolved Pokémon, it does feel like two eager young children on an adventure together. Sometimes your partner is silly and overenthusiastic, but they’re also genuine and brave most the time. While there are other characters of note like the ghostly Gengar and his aptly named Team Meanies as well as a rescue team everyone idolizes run by the genius Pokémon Alakazam, your buddy is where the game manages to have a bit of heart, it easy to get attached to them as your adventures go from playful romps to trying to stop world-threatening dangers.

 

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX’s story mostly concerns how you ended up in the Pokémon world to begin with though. Despite playing as a Pokémon, you are actually a human who has been transported to the Pokémon world and transformed into one of them during a time of great crisis. All around the land, disasters of increasing scope are putting Pokémon in danger, this being where the rescue teams come in. When monsters are trapped in dungeons, pass out, or run into other Pokémon who have been driven mad by the chaos, it’s on rescue teams to plunge into the mysteriously shifting dungeons to save them. Your adventure will eventually see you try and tackle the source of these calamities though, but you do gradually build up your own rescue team at first by responding to such requests for help. This is, perhaps, where the game first starts to falter though. Those dungeons you need to explore are likely to only be tough the first time you visit them, the story usually sending you into areas where you will face foes of decent strength that make you weigh how often you want to battle and how often you want to avoid danger and try to instead seek the staircases necessary to head from floor to floor. However, when the story isn’t moving forward, you’ll spend your time doing rescues mostly in dungeons you’ve been to before where foes no longer pose much of a challenge. Even if you do try to head to the toughest dungeon available, it will likely only have one rescue available while weaker dungeons will have more and thus give better rewards since you can tackle them all at once. These periods in the plot where you’re just left to respond to randomized rescues end up rather weak lulls as a result, especially since they won’t be taking advantage of the elements that do make this game’s action format sometimes work.

 

Preparation is the most important part of exploring mystery dungeons. Whether you’re plunging in to face the boss at the bottom of one or searching for characters to rescue, you need to make sure your team of three is properly equipped or you will be left at the mercy of random finds in the dungeon. This means you often need to make sure you have good items with you, your limited carrying space making you judge how many of the healing Oran Berries, Reviver Seeds, and other useful tools you bring along with you, especially since if you bring too many you might find the inventory full when you do come across a particularly nice treasure. As you walk around dungeons, your Pokémon will start to get hungry and even take damage with each step if they’re starving, so you also need to pack some Apples if you’re worried about how long the dungeon will take to explore. While you can have three monsters on your team with four moves each, those moves also run on a Power Points system, and even in moderately sized dungeons, your Pokémon might start running out of uses for their best attacks, so you also need to try and stagger out how you attack the hostile Pokémon you find. You can only decide the attack for the Pokémon you’re directly controlling, your allies free to choose their own actions, although you can set their behavior to favor certain strategies if you’re worried they’ll burn through their good moves or otherwise cause issues.

Even when your allies are doing what you want them to do, they aren’t always smart in how they do it, choosing to often waste their best attacks or move in ways that endanger them. This can be particularly bad in boss battles, where you can do something like use a special stunning item on the boss in the hopes your allies can capitalize only for them to instead start walking around, sometimes even giving up tactical positions for unclear reasons. However, boss fights can also be some of the game’s highlight moments. In a regular dungeon, you’re often walking about until you bump into an enemy Pokémon, the fights fairly swift as it usually takes two or three hits to defeat standard enemies so long as you’re keeping up when it comes to leveling up your Pokémon. Sometimes you might encounter more than one monster at a time and might make use of moves that can hit an entire area or maybe cause a special effect, but a lot of fighting can feel like you’re just bumping into each other until the one with the worse moves and lower health loses. Boss battles are longer and have special moves you need to respond to, often taking place in arenas where you need to move about to avoid spread attacks and dangerous spots. What can make these more entertaining is how your rescue team expands while in the dungeon. When your lead Pokémon defeats an enemy, sometimes they are inspired to join your team. This can be permanent if you invest in some specialized camps back at town, but they’ll at least stick with you for the length of the expedition, allowing your team to go from the starting limit of 3 up to a group of 8 in the span of the dungeon. Traveling with a large posse can be satisfying, especially when it adds texture to the boss fight as you start factoring in if your temporary partners are pulling their weight or might be good sacrifices to buy the rest of the team time.

 

Unfortunately, not every boss battles is built equally, especially ones that crop up in the story. For example, there is a period of the plot where you are reduced down to just your main Pokémon and your buddy, exploring multiple dungeons without access to most of your usual helpful services as well as not just being barred from bringing recruited Pokémon with you, but you can’t even recruit new ones in those dungeons. You won’t get to go back to town where you could usually buy helpful items and train, and while there are special statues that let you access your item storage for the stuff you don’t want to carry in your inventory, this part can be particularly brutal if your two main Pokémon are an ill-fit for the battles ahead. You aren’t given any indication what you’ll be facing so you can’t prepare in advance, my particular set-up of Bulbasaur and Cubone meaning the first boss of this portion was practically impossible through normal means because of its typing, something made worse by the game using an autosave and a singular save file that locks you into this story section. However, there are some particularly rare and helpful items such as the Helper Orb that calls in three very strong backup Pokemon to assist in a fight as well as the All Protect Orb that makes you impervious to damage for three turns, but then if you do have the luck of finding these, they can trivialize boss fights because of the powerful edges they grant. You do lose all items you’re carrying if you’re defeated in a dungeon, but it’s still not that difficult to carry these to the boss if you luck into acquiring one, but luck does feel like an overly powerful factor at times since you can end up in my particular situation where there was no recourse but to hope for a random item drop that shifts a fight from insurmountable to barely a bother.

 

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX does have a rather lovely painterly style that makes its colorful world feel like a storybook, something that fits its rather generic save the world plot but also the youthful story of adventure. Its music also has many excellent tracks, many of the familiar themes relaxing or adventurous but then specific dungeons will shift to strange instrumentation to emphasize their associated elements or to feel deliberately abnormal. However, in the game’s story, you’re often fighting fairly plain battles, running into bosses that can sometimes wall you for the wrong reasons or be trounced with just one good item. There is a nifty feature where, should you fail a dungeon, you can ask for help online, players potentially able to plunge into a dungeon and save your team so you lose none of your items and they get some fairly strong rewards for their act of kindness. Rescuing player teams can be a bit more interesting than the many plain rescues found on the bulletin board, but you do again end up going to the same places that likely lost their edge after your first visit. This does, however, change a bit after you’ve finished the story. The post-game of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX starts by showering you with new dungeons to explore, new features like evolution, and even some corrections to some annoying features like how the very rare alternate colored Pokémon known as shinies won’t join you until you’ve found a post-game item. Suddenly there will be a lot more to do and a lot more variety in dungeons, although they also become tougher and likely necessitate some time investing solely in growing your own strength to tackle them. There is a post-game substory or two worth seeing, but otherwise after the plot is over, these extra dungeons don’t exactly shake up the formula so much as provide some of the breadth that would have been appreciated much earlier. Bosses are more abundant in the post-game but besides being large legendary Pokémon you can actually recruit they don’t have much of a plot to them and getting to the bottom of sometimes 99 floor dungeons means you will have already prepared well enough to remove some of their edge. It is, funnily enough, too much too late instead of the typical too little, the game backloading its variety, stretching it out by expanding dungeon sizes, but not yet finding ways to really enhance the enjoyment of the typical dungeon crawling segments.

THE VERDICT: Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a lovely remake when it comes to how it chose a new art style, upgraded its music, and combined content that was once split across two games. However, it being a remake also lead to a good degree of its structural issues as it seems trapped in its faithful reproduction of the plot and a simplistic battle system. The story has lulls where you are expected to just repeat dungeons that lost their edge quickly, and a particular portion of the plot can be excruciating since it hits with no warning and your partners may not be fit for it. Recruiting a small gang to tackle a dungeon has some satisfying elements to it, and the focus on preparation and rationing your resources to clear a dungeon is an interesting angle, but randomization can also make fights hollow on top of repetitive.

 

And so, I give Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. The issue with this dungeon crawling RPG is mostly a structural one. I did set aside my own unlucky experience where I had the worst possible pair of characters for the part where the story locks you into them with no warning of what’s ahead, because after all, you can instead end up with a pair perfect for it and breeze on through. However, that particular low point wasn’t exactly balanced out by interesting battles elsewhere. The fundamentals are sound, it’s mostly a game about managing your resources so your Pokémon are fighting fit, well equipped, and have what they need to make it through a dungeon without starving, running out of moves, or dying. Recruiting can be a fun process, corralling a little group that makes you feel more powerful as you break the 3 Pokémon limit satisfying and feeling rather important for certain dungeons and bosses. However, the main adventure, which likely will last you around 20 hours, doesn’t present too much of interest. Treating certain standard Pokémon like Xatu or Ninetales like they are mysterious characters is a fun touch and your buddy is a likeable part of the basic plot, but managing your rescue team isn’t often entertaining because it relies on repetition of a system that only really finds its footing when you are feeling the resource strain. Randomization can overly impact this as well, not so much in throwing too much danger at you, but almost the opposite. It can be a brief surge of excitement to encounter a “Mystery House” which is a room filled with Pokémon ready to attack you, but then when you come to a tough boss and just throw out an orb you stumbled into to almost win the fight through that alone, it feels like the balance isn’t quite there. Reaching the bottom of a huge dungeon where other players likely won’t want to rescue you is too risky to try and play fair, and while bosses do have some unique attacks, they’re not making up for the typical combat you’ll likely grow tired of because of the need to train up so often through less interesting dungeon dives.

 

I have played other Pokémon Mystery Dungeon titles that were handled better than Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, although this remake funnily enough means I can issue the paradoxical statement that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon gets better after this and that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon got worse with this entry. Carrying over specific moments from the original 2005 video games faithfully preserved their weaker parts and the design choices here would be iterated upon in other Mystery Dungeon games, as well as there being stronger stories to motivate you to keep playing. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX fixes mostly the egregious issues with the originals but it doesn’t add in elements that could alleviate tedium like more early dungeon options. Most of the game will be more of an unexciting haze of similar battles, the moments of unexpected energetic conflict and payoff to your resource management not really soothing the growing disinterest that arises during most of your dungeon excursions.