This is a game I played a TON when it first came out nearly 20 years ago. I must’ve put well over 100 hours into PMD: Red Rescue Team back when I was a kid, and then dozens more hours into the sequel on DS, but I haven’t really thought about it since. However, with my recent urge to play a bunch of old Mystery Dungeon stuff, and the desire of several of my partners to play through this particular game for the first time as well, I thought there was no better time than to track down a copy for cheap and revisit this part of my childhood. It took me about 16 hours to play through the main story of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The story of the first PMD is the story of you, but as a Pokemon! You start the game by taking a little personality quiz, and depending on the results, that’s what determines the Pokemon species of your main character, but you get to choose what Pokemon your main buddy will be. You wake up after a strange dream in this new Pokemon world being found by the buddy you picked at the start. Confused by your new surroundings, you barely have time to think before the two of you are off to save a Pokemon in distress. You do such a good job that the two of you decide to start your own Pokemon rescue team. Such is how your quest begins to both save the world and hopefully find the reason as to your suddenly becoming a Pokemon as well. It’s not the most in-depth story in the world, and it’s a narrative that would be significantly overshadowed by its sequel, but it’s still a fun little story that gives a perfectly good justification for the action at hand. A perfectly good justification when it isn’t getting in the way of the mechanics, that is.

The mechanics of the game are a Mystery Dungeon setup for the most part. You have procedurally generated dungeons to go through in a rogue-like turn-based style where your enemies move whenever you do. Just like later PMD games, the main focus here isn’t just dungeon crawling. Your goals in the dungeons are fulfilling requests that you accept before going into the dungeons, and those can be anything from finding a lost Pokemon in distress on a particular floor all the way to safely escorting a super weak Pokemon to a deep, dark floor of a big dungeon. The mission structure is a really good way to give the traditional Mystery Dungeon formula more longevity, even if the actual ranking up as a rescue team doesn’t often have that much to do with the story.

The story itself is more around getting through dungeons and often beating bosses at the end, but that’s where problems start to surface. On a more positive side compared to some earlier, less forgiving Mystery Dungeon titles, you no longer really have equipment to nurse and upgrade. While you do have ribbons to equip, they don’t get upgraded, and instead you just gain both levels and new moves just like you do in normal Pokemon. Those moves have power points just like they do in normal Pokemon, granted, so you can’t go throwing them around with reckless abandon, but it’s a very clever way to incorporate Pokemon mechanics into this tried-and-true rogue-like formula. You can even recruit new Pokemon as you go into your rescue team up to a team of four, giving you even more options to work with! That said, just because it’s clever doesn’t mean it’s actually good, and the cracks in this system are most obvious when interacting with story missions.

Whoever wrote this story and designed its boss encounters seems to have done so without much actual care for how they’d be impacted by Pokemon’s base mechanics of type advantage. Almost all of the Pokemon you can have selected for you at the start via the quiz (as well as basically all possible iterations of your buddy) are one of the three starter Pokemon from the first three generations of Pokemon. This means you’re almost certainly going to be a fire, grass, or water type, and you also can’t actually evolve until the post-game, so no double typing for you until you’ve beaten the main story.

This wouldn’t be a huge problem save for how limiting that is when put against the type disadvantages you’ll so often encounter along the story, and that’s really brutal given that either you or your buddy going down in a dungeon generally results in a game over (in stark contrast to something like the Chocobo’s Dungeon games where your buddy dying mid-dungeon wasn’t a fail state). For example, your first three major boss fights are against the legendary birds from Kanto, so those are an electric/flying, fire/flying, and ice/flying type. If you’re an unlucky sod who got a grass type for their main character or their buddy (as grass is weak to flying, ice, and fire), you’re going to have a really miserable time surviving through those boss fights (especially because you’re actually not allowed to have extra buddies along with you for several of them for plot reasons). This combined with how crushingly foolish the allied AI is compared to earlier Mystery Dungeon games makes a lot of the game a really frustrating climb against a mountain of RNG, and your only paths forward are more grinding for moves and levels and hoping you get luckier next time. The core idea may be very clever, but the execution is really unpolished, and it makes for an experience that often felt needlessly frustrating whether by the designer’s malice or incompetence in scenario design.

The aesthetics, at least, are very good. The graphics are delightful, with all of the main story’s characters having all sorts of expressive and fun character portraits as they talk, and the battle graphics being really good representations of the Pokemon they’re adapting as well. The music is also very good, and I cannot describe in words how hard the dormant, school-age neurons in my brain began to jolt upon hearing the game’s main theme upon boot up. While the mechanics may be a bit unpolished, they were absolutely spot on with the presentation, and it’s no wonder they didn’t feel the need to mess with them much for the DS entries to follow.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This certainly isn’t a bad game, but it’s one that’s aged very roughly even compared to some older Mystery Dungeon games. The Mystery Dungeon dev team is very clearly still inexperienced with how to actually adapt Pokemon’s systems to a gameplay loop that plays nice with the rogue-like gameplay loop, and unless you’re willing to put up with that frustration and grinding, this is a game you’re likely to find a very hard time scrounging up the will to finish it. That said, if you’re a big Pokemon fan or a big rogue-like fan, this is still a game checking out, as there’s a lot to enjoy here if you don’t mind praying to the RNG gods every once in a while to help see you through to the end of a particularly tough boss fight.