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Nintendo’s loveable Pokemon make another appearance on the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, this isn’t a true sequel in the proper Pokemon franchise. While diehard Pokemon fans won’t be convinced to leave this game on store shelves, everyone else should just wait for Game Freaks to whip up a new sequel.
In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, you play as a human who has been transformed into a Pokemon and tasked with defending a continent overran by wild Pokemon. It’s up to you to help these wild Pokemon escape from the dungeons that they’re trapped in. The game assigns you the Pokemon you play as through a brief questionnaire at the beginning of the game. As this Pokemon, you’ll explore a number of randomly generated dungeons and fight enemies in a weird mix of turn-based and real-time fighting. The game places you in direct control of one your own Pokemon although you can have up to three others in your party. As you progress through the games and continue going through these dungeons, your Pokemon will gain experience and attacks. It’s all fairly basic and has little in common with Pokemon games developed by Game Freak.
As expected, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon doesn’t follow all of the traditional Pokemon rules. For one, the much loved Pokeballs are not in the game since you’re technically a Pokemon and can’t capture other Pokemon. After defeating a wild Pokemon in battle they may offer to help you out at which point you can add them to your party. Your Pokemon by getting to a certain level, like they did in previous games, or by purchasing TM items. Strangely, although your Pokemon will continue gaining attacks and experience, they won’t evolve until after you finish the main game.
And while traditional Pokemon games had other stuff going on besides dungeon hacking, Mystery Dungeon focuses exclusive on this. It gets repetitive quite fast—which is normal for the genre—but the game takes repetitiveness to the point of tiring you out during the 20 hours or so it takes to complete. The story is actually worthwhile, which is the only reason diehard Pokemon fans will have to play through the game.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is available on both the Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance. Both feature the same storyline and nearly the same content, although they do have some exclusive Pokemon that other version does not have. The game doesn’t make particularly good use of the Nintendo DS’ dual screens, but having key information always available does come in handy.
Blue Rescue Team does include two somewhat interesting unique features, though. One is the unknown dungeon mode, in which your DS goes into a low power state, looks for other Blue Rescue Team owners also in the mode, and has your Pokemon ‘visit’ their game and get rare items. The other is the dojo mode which lets you import Pokemon from the GBA version to fight with on the DS version. Of course, the linking up commonly found in other Pokemon games is also found here. You can connect two DS games via the wireless connectivity, two GBA games via the link cable and a DS and GBA game on one DS unit.
Although Pokemon Blue Rescue Team is being released nearly two years into the DS’s lifetime, the game’s graphics resemble a first-generation Gameboy Advance game. The environments aren’t particularly detailed and are actually quite repetitive. It’s pretty cool to see many Pokemon moving around the creen, but the character models aren’t very detailed nor are they exquisitely animated. Pokemon games have never been on the forefront of graphics technology, but we expect better in the future.
The audio presentation is equally lackluster. The sound effects are low quality with graining cries coming from the Pokemon. The background music is a bit catchy but ultimately ends up being too repetitive.
Only the most diehard Pokemon fans should ever consider picking this game up. The gameplay isn’t especially interesting, the game makes poor use of the Nintendo DS hardware, and the presentation is seriously outdated. Everyone else should wait for the next proper entry in the Pokemon series. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 18, 2006
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