When the original pair of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games were released in 2006, they were received as the ugly Duckletts of Pokemon spin-offs. Now, almost 15 years later, it is clear how wrong we were to write off Spike Chunsoft's ambitious take on the titanic series: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX for Switch is wondrous to play and, in a way, boasts a substantially more resonant fable than most other recent Pokemon games.
You
wake up one morning and everything seems pretty ordinary, at least
until you realize that you're not a human anymore. Instead, you've
magically and mysteriously metamorphosed into a Pokemon--which exact
species is determined by a fun little personality quiz you take at the
beginning of the game. Before long you make a new best friend, who is
also a Pokemon, and you decide to form a rescue team together. Why? To
save foolish Pokemon who have ventured into dangerous dungeons stricken
by environmental disasters, even though they're totally aware of said
environmental disasters. Over the course of the game, you embark on
arduous odysseys to the many dungeons scattered sporadically across the
world of Pokemon, each of which contains several 'mons in desperate need
of help and lots of others who are a bit aggravated by the daily
earthquakes.
What's
important about Mystery Dungeon carving itself out a new home on Switch
is that DX isn't just some sort of lazy rehash. Perhaps the most
striking thing about this reworked spin-off, at least at first, is its
revised color palette. It's pretty different to the old Mystery Dungeon
games, sporting a warm painterly style to replace the originals' GBA-era
pixel art. The revamped rescue base you get about halfway through the
game is especially gorgeous, while the relentlessly upbeat soundtrack is
capable of both intensifying the charming tone of the art and flipping
even the tensest moments on their head. This is an essential part of the
game's overall appeal, as it goes hand in hand with the fact that
Mystery Dungeon is ultimately about overcoming adversity with a smile on
your face. One second it seems as if you're on the verge of the
inevitable apocalypse, the next you're bobbing along, beaming for no
reason, ready to hurtle headlong into a procedurally generated dungeon
to save some 'mons and make some money.
As you might
expect, dungeon-crawling is the game's core component. The stylish art
design extends to the dungeons, which range from molten caverns buried
deep beneath the earth's crust to airborne towers suspended high above
the clouds. But on top of that, their mechanical design works well in
moment-to-moment gameplay. Area traversal in dungeons is tile-based,
which might seem a little rudimentary at first but complements Mystery
Dungeon's combat system, the core building block for some of the game's
most impressive elements.
Each Pokemon can learn up to
four moves, just like in the mainline series. How these moves function
is determined by the tile-based map layouts--for example, Water Pulse
covers four tiles, whereas Aqua Tail can only connect with enemies who
are directly adjacent to you. Moves like Brick Break don't work around
corners, but ranged moves like Water Gun and Razor Leaf do--it's unclear
whether they bend around them or simply go over them, but a lot of
moves that would logically require your opponent to be within arm's
length fail unless those conditions are met, which is just one fold to
the overall strategy.
You've got to be extra careful
with your battle tactics--the juxtaposition of tile-based movements with
turn-based combat means that simply walking constitutes an entire turn.
It's like a board game, where you can either move one space, use an
item, or launch an attack. And, given that you can have between three
and eight members on your squad at any given time, you're constantly
monitoring turns and tiles for a variety of Pokemon simultaneously. It
has the potential to be complex if you want it to be, but because you
have multiple lives, it never gets so difficult that you'll find
yourself stuck in a rut. As a result, combat is both intuitive and
engrossing, and the tile-based component adds a nice bit of nuance to
the familiar four-move, elemental effectiveness formula we've grown to
know and love over the years.
There is one downside to
combat, though: There are still no health bars in Mystery Dungeon. In
general, most enemies in a given dungeon will have roughly the same
health, so if you pay attention to how much damage you deal, it's pretty
easy to estimate your opponents' HP and plan your moves and item use
accordingly. Boss battles are a different beast--there is no way to know
how much of their massive HP bar has been depleted. This results in a
lot of expensive item wasting and moments where you go, "One more hit
and Rayquaza's finished," after which Rayquaza takes a Thunderbolt on
the chin and Hyper Beams you back to the last checkpoint.
You
lose all your money and items when you faint, so it can be pretty
annoying to repeat a boss fight with even fewer resources, but every
major dungeon has a checkpoint just a couple of levels shy of the boss
fight. What's more, it seems the boss' HP doesn't regenerate--when I
went back into Rayquaza after it sent us packing, myself (Squirtle),
Geralt (Bulbasaur), and Absol (Absol, he's too cool for nicknames)
managed to take it down in just a few hits. The short boss runs and lack
of health regeneration does, in a sense, make up for the lack of a
health bar because it removes almost all elements of stress that could
potentially stem from that.
There have been several
other new quality-of-life improvements made to combat--for example,
certain Pokemon now possess "rare qualities," which can really help you
out while you're dungeon-crawling. Sales Pitch allows you to make extra
money from the miserly Kecleon, who hunts for free items in dungeons and
then sells them at stupidly inflated prices, whereas Squad Up means
that the more Pokemon you currently have in your posse, the more likely
defeated foes are to join the crew. Also--and this is particularly
handy--simply pressing A automatically selects the best move to use
against your opponent at any given time, which means you'll never have
to spend too long trying to figure out the optimal move if you don't
want to.
One of the things that was most heavily
criticized about the original Mystery Dungeon was how long and
repetitive dungeons were. They can still be a tad annoying at
times in the remake, but they're substantially less time-consuming than
before, and they genuinely feel as if they're worth exploring. On
several occasions I was lucky enough to spawn directly next to the
stairs to the following floor, but every single time I eschewed quick
progression for a thorough exploration of my current surroundings.
"Maybe I'll find a few Oran Berries that could come in handy during the
boss fight," I would muse to myself. "Or perhaps an All Dodge Orb that
will ensure Groudon's Lava Plume goes in the completely wrong
direction."
The
average dungeon-completion times complement the story's pacing. At the
beginning, you can storm the likes of Tiny Woods and Thunderwave Cave in
under four minutes--but by the time you reach the late game, you're
talking 34 floors, most of which are affected by weather conditions like
Hail or Sandstorm, and a grueling fight against a boss to top it all
off. Naturally, this dungeon takes quite a bit longer, but that's to be
expected--as you approach the endgame, things get tougher and, by
extension, far more tense and gripping. It's also worth noting that the
Pokemon you encounter in each dungeon seem to be substantially more
varied than before, with fan favourites like Houndoom and Scyther
appearing fairly early on. If there's anything capable of diluting the
slight tedium of the original Mystery Dungeon, it's allowing you to
recruit some of the cooler 'mons earlier.
The story
itself is unchanged, but it's far better than I remember. I was
concerned nostalgia would make or break my experience with Mystery
Dungeon DX (I was 10 when I played the originals), but I was pleasantly
surprised to find it has one of the most emotionally resonant Pokemon
stories in years--and that's largely because the Pokemon are
anthropomorphized. They have personalities, ambitions, quirks, and
dreams. Tyranitar isn't just the monster you keep in your squad to
unleash devastating Earthquakes, he's a goofy celebrity who makes
terrible jokes and genuinely wishes the best for you. Charizard is a
lovable idiot. Alakazam is the bee's knees, the cool kid on the block,
the Pokemon who carries his spoons around with him even when he's just
popping over to Pokemon Square to chat with his mates. And whomever you
choose as your buddy Pokemon... let's just say I might have told my
brother I had something in my eye when he came down to grab a glass of
water at 2 AM. Giving Pokemon proper, three-dimensional personalities
changes the lens you view them through for the better, and, as a result,
playing through Mystery Dungeon will inevitably have a positive impact
on how I relate to the Pokemon series as a whole.
Whether
or not you're an old-school Mystery Dungeon aficionado or a total
newcomer to the long-derelict spin-off series doesn't necessarily
matter: Mystery Dungeon on Switch improves upon the originals with some
valuable quality-of-life tweaks, making it a worthwhile play regardless
of your familiarity with the series. It features a distinct combat
system that provides an intriguing alternative to the mainline Pokemon
formula with tile-based strategizing, humanizes the Pokemon you've
fallen in love with over the years, tells a riveting and emotional story
that will make you view the franchise in a totally different light, and
does so with a stylish suite of visuals and music.
