Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team

"This doesn't feel like Pokemon."

We've all heard of Pokemon. Surely, you've played at least one Pokemon game or watched one episode in your life. It's a famous series, and this game doesn't do justice to it. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is, basically, a dungeon crawler. Randomly generated maps, which you walk through, in search of your objective, be it saving a pokemon from other evil pokemon, delivering an object or something of the sort.

The game looks, for a GBA game, mediocre, at most. The scenery is sorta nice, and there are a few details, but most of the time, you'll be inside a dungeon, with no features that stand out, it's just the same thing, no variation. The portraits, when a key pokemon is talking, look like something fit for a GBC game. You never get to hear any pokemon voices here; not even the battle cries you heard on the previous games. The general noises are better just turned off.

For the storyline, you were a boy (or a girl), who, one day, simply woke up as a pokemon. Another pokemon spots you, and talks to you for a while, when a Butterfree comes and asks for help. When you save her, you learn that the nature around them has been acting weirdly for some time. Evidently, you are pitted in the task to figure out what's wrong, and solve it, while trying to figure out why you're a pokemon, and how to become a human again.

As for gameplay, it's basically a turn-based game. You take a mission, go into the according dungeon, climb until the floor in which the mission can be solved and solve it. Then you gain rewards and such. Items can be thrown, eaten, held by your pokemon and partners. Moves are used by going into the menu and using them from there, or setting them, so that you can skip going into the menu all the time. If you've played a dungeon crawler before, it'll be familiar to you. There's hunger, and you have to eat things so you don't faint.

It's very repetitive. You take missions, right? Well, they're all the same. Either you have to take something to someone, or warp someone out of the dungeon, or escort someone to someone else. The storyline missions might have a boss or two involved, but in essence, it's all the same. It doesn't feel like Pokemon, because it's too generic. It doesn't matter if you're up against a Rattata or a Charizard; they both take a few hits to go down.

There is, however, post-game bonuses. For example, after you beat the game, you can actually evolve your pokemon. Although, since you already beat the game, you mastered the game with a weaker pokemon than the evolved form, so evolving won't solve the replayability.

It's definitely not worth buying, renting is the max I'd recommend. A very mediocre game, opposite of what you'd expect from a Pokemon game. The idea simply didn't work. It had potential, but wasn't executed properly.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/25/06