games: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness

Ah Pokemon, brain breakingly adorable to some, bile boilingly annoying to others. But whatever your take, you’ve got to admit there have been a few pretty solid games from the Poke-franchise which with its mass appeal and urgent collective drive is any business man’s wet dream. So here we have the latest offering on DS, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Darkness. Let’s take a look and see where this fits in with the rest of the Pokemon world.

Now instead of playing as a trainer, you play as a human who finds himself washed up on a beach, transformed into a Pokemon.

You help out another Pokemon against a pair of Poke-bullies and before you know it, the pair of you have formed an exploration team and joined Wigglytuff’s guild where you train, eat, sleep and receive missions, while you unravel the greater mysteries of why you have been transformed and what’s going on with all the bad Pokemon and dungeons.

The missions, generally fetch quests or targetting particular baddies, are based around ‘mystery dungeons’ which are randomly generated each time you enter. So even if you repeat a dungeon it will be different each time. You need to work your way through finding the stairway on each level ‘til you get to the very top or bottom where you will face the dungeon objective.

Throughout the game, you will need to battle an array of bad Pokemon but will find a number of handy items to help you do so. You automatically create a map of the level as you move through, and while proper saves only occur at the guild, there is a quick save feature so you can save in the dungeon too - very handy on a portable title.

In general the play is pretty fun throughout. You have a nice variety of items and moves which keep the turn based combat entertaining, and in typical Pokemon style you will need to work out which attacks work against different Pokemon. You can also tweak the tactics your buddy will follow as well as feed him gummies to boost his IQ, so the teamwork aspect is pretty good too.

But the learning curve isn’t particularly steady and you will frequently get your ass handed to you unexpectedly, but with the added annoyance of the fact that if one of you faints, the dungeon will spit you out keeping all of your money and some of your items. This is frustrating and perhaps a little unforgiving in a game whose greatest target audience is probably children.

You can however place money in a bank in Treasure Town before you enter the dungeon, but you will probably want to take most of your items with you rather than putting them into cold storage. Other useful things in the town are a market where you can buy and sell items and a shop where you can link moves together. It could have been better organized though as you have to walk through several screens to get to the furthest, and arguably most useful shop, the market.

The graphics are ok, although far from cutting edge, and the style of the whole thing is typically charming and cutesy in a slightly sickly and twee, but inoffensive and undeniably Pokemon kind of way. By now you should know whether you’ll find this amusing or if it will make you want to hurl you DS under a bus.

As well as the inspirational dialogue, there are also cute touches like a little personality test at the start which chooses which Pokemon you get turned into. I didn’t mind the cutesyness so much - you’ve got to take Pokemon for what it is, but I did laugh out loud at the complete perspicuity of the narrative explanation for the game mechanic: ‘there has also been a mass outbreak of mystery dungeons’.

Now the main point of consternation over this title, is how necessary it is. It is a dual release with sister title ‘Explorers of Time’, which is arguably very similar, and it also hasn’t changed very much from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red from about a year ago.

You do get a new plot and the latest Pokemon in here, but no real game developments, and as the collection element of the core Pokemon games isn’t present it’s arguable how much of a difference these changes make to all but the most hardcore fans. One rather nice development is to the wi-fi system as you can now use it to send out a rescue SOS to a friend’s email or Wii message board, but that’s about it.

So in conclusion, this isn’t a bad game for dungeon crawlers of all ages, but if you’ve played through any of the others and aren’t a massive Pokemon collector you might get a bit frustrated at the repetition. 3 stars.

For the best of the rest:

Game Spot:
Lovers of all things Pokémon are bound to be disappointed by Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, as are those looking for a role-playing game to play on their preferred Nintendo handheld. For starters, it isn’t even a true Pokémon game. Nintendo and ChunSoft have simply taken a dungeon hack that ChunSoft has produced for numerous other publishers in the past and integrated the Pokémon franchise’s characters and a few of its key concepts into it. The real kicker, though, is that ChunSoft’s game wasn’t that good to begin with, and the injection of Pokémon elements hasn’t done a thing to change that.

IGN:
As Creatures, Game Freak, and Nintendo work to bring us the true evolution of the Pokemon RPG franchise, Nintendo from time to time commissions other developers to create spin-off Pokemon experiences to keep the series chugging along. Some, like Pokemon Pinball and Pokemon Colosseum, are successful. Some, such as Pokemon Dash…not so much. The latest spin-off could end up becoming the Pokemon creatures’ final bow on the Game Boy Advance: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Most Pokemon spin-offs stray as far away from the expected RPG adventure of the key game in the franchise, but Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is the exception to the rule: it’s not the RPG, but it’s still of that genre. It’s a much different take on the theme, too, but with its repetitive and slightly clunky design Pokemon Mystery Dungeon just can’t quite match the true RPG’s standards. It’s not all that bad, though, just prepare for a lot of the same ol’ stuff very early on in the quest.

Game Pro:
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness starts you similarly to the way Blue/Red Rescue Team, the original Pokemon dungeon crawler, did two years ago-you’re an amnesiac, somehow turned pocket monster. Rather than wallow in self-pity, you decide to make yourself useful–this time by joining an exploration team, although you’ll still go on your fair share of rescue missions for the guild