Pokémon made its splash into the world a decade ago on the original Game Boy and never once has bothered to look back. The simple premise of the necessity of “Gotta catch ‘em all” was something people just couldn’t resist, kids in particular. Hundreds of hours could be lost playing the role of a Pokémon trainer working to become a Pokémon master by catching and training all the critters in the game. In all these years the gameplay method while very slightly altered never took a departure from the basic design, but that has changed with this new adventure. Gone is the role of the Pokémon trainer, as is gone the standard static screen one on one combat situation in the classic RPG style. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon throws the game into an entirely different type of world and basic gameplay element. Now you become a human that’s been transformed into a Pokémon, and you can understand their language too. In this role as a converted human you will work with other Pokémon to solve issues within dungeons that play out in a top down view with many more options at your disposal to do. Does this format really work for the Pokémon world of gaming, or is it something that may end up just being a bit too different?

Facts and Features:

• For the first time ever, the player is a Pokémon, speaking and interacting with other characters in a world populated only by Pokémon.
  
  
• A deep, involving and dramatic story brings the player into a world of Pokémon not seen or experienced before.
  
  
• Strategic battles enhance the adventure.
  
  
• Randomly generated dungeons make every mission unique.
  

Cutesy Pokémon?
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team from the moment you hit the opening sequence you can tell will be a different style of game right from the start. As you begin your adventure for the first time, the game presents itself to you with a series of interesting questions. These questions amount to a personality test and depending on your answers to the test, you will end up having your human to Pokémon transformation character decided for you. If you’re the more calm type you could end up with a Mudkip, but if you’re a hardier individual you will end up with the fiery Charmander. Whatever your role may end up being you will be allowed to pick a partner to work with for the rest of the adventure, and whichever you do grab no team in particular with the game can put you at a full disadvantage.

From an aesthetic point of view the game is pretty well visualized and the audio package is decent as well. Visually what you can expect from the game is a full 2D presentation as everything is sprite and static image based. Every last Pokémon in the game is animated within the game and even goes down to some decent small details such as mouths opening or a flame slightly moving on a Pokémon’s body. The central town, various Pokémon staging areas, and the rest are fairly well drawn and have a depth much like what Zelda on the Game Boy Advance has. Beyond that though what is left are some basic drawn imagery, limited sparsely drawn tile graphics for the randomly generated dungeons, and little else. That in itself is the problem with the visuals of the game though; they’re nothing beyond what you could grab from a Game Boy Advance game. The same sadly can be said of the audio package in the game as well. There are some various basic chirpy sound effects in place for the Pokémon, the usual beeps in a menu, and the various upbeat light hearted moderately sampled music scores found in past Pokémon handheld adventures. Basically nothing about the audio and visuals at all stand out about the game in any way beyond what a Game Boy Advance title can do, but there is a reason for that: the companion Red Team version on that system. It is apparent that when this game was created, the Red version of the game was uplifted and ported to the Blue copy on the Nintendo DS. As a result of this, a minimalist approach was taken to keep both copies nearly identical in every way which is fine if you have the Red version of the game, but something more could have been done for Blue.


New formula. We dig it.

Poké-play!
Audio and visuals aside the true merit of a role playing like game of this nature comes from the style of gameplay that it allows the gamer to experience. In this game the typical style of gameplay found within the Pokémon titles has been somewhat thrown out and replaced by a pretty inventive and fun system creating an interesting meld of style. While you can still choose to catch all those Pokémon and level them up, the larger focus of the game now is more about being tactical in your turn based movements in the randomly created dungeon maps. At the base level, all your adventures have at least one plus your partner on the map, but you could be with up to two more in your party. Depending on how you approach an enemy in the game you can surround them with your various partners for a fairly nasty beating during a turn cycle. Not only can one control their own tactics but also set up a style of tactics and which of their current moves can be used by the AI controlled partners, which also thankfully have some semi-decent AI.