"Against all odds, you must run. Run. Run...and survive. You must run till you uncover the truth."

The original Blue Rescue Team game (never had Red Rescue Team) is one that I have very fond memories of. I have some strong childhood memories of my many times playing it, from bawling my head off during the ending to more personal amusing moments such as how I had a bad habit of erasing my save file thinking I could beat the game by myself after having just had one of my older brothers beat the game for me (I would inevitably ask one of them to beat it for me again). I still have a save file from around 2012 or so when I beat the game with an Action Replay to make all my Pokémon Level 100 and have all items in the storage. When I heard this game was getting a remake in 2020, I was cautiously optimistic. I was not really a fan of the art style at the time and I just felt like nothing could replace the original for me. For a long time, I kinda just forgot this remake even happened until I got it as a Christmas present in 2022. After having finally played this game I hadn't beaten since I was a preteen, I came out just a little disappointed. It isn't the deep emotional rollercoaster I remember it as, although it was still a tearjerker at times from me. It isn't anywhere near as difficult as I remember it being, although I imagine a large part of that is probably because of either remake differences or because I am an adult playing this game. Nonetheless, I did still enjoy my time with this one and I would recommend it to anyone. Its just a bit unfortunate to have my rose-tinted nostalgia goggles taken off like this.

I'll start with the story, since its always what stood out in my mind whenever I think of any of the Mystery Dungeon games. I used to think this was really gripping, deep, and immersive as a kid, but I can see beyond the childlike amazement now and I see a story that has a lot of heart to it but doesn't have much substance. As far as I can tell, Rescue Team DX's story is exactly the same as the games its remaking, since I don't recall a single plot point here not being present in the original. Basically, the big hook of this one (and pretty much all the other Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games) is that you're a human who got transformed into a Pokémon and you're trying to figure out why. From the very beginning, you stumble upon your soon-to-be best friend, who's the partner you choose at the beginning of the game. I like goofy names in games, so I named my character Dude and my partner Bro. I'm just going to use those names here so I'm not constantly saying "the partner" or "you". Dude and Bro go into their first dungeon - Tiny Woods - to save a Butterfree's child and they inevitably succeed. From here, they decide to form a Rescue Team (hence the name of the game), which is...well, a team of Pokémon that make it their job to rescue those unfortunate souls that got lost in dungeons. I am very unfunny and uncreative, so I named mine Team Gigachads. As a newly formed team, the only members are Dude and Bro, although it gets bigger later. From here, the story mostly consists of a good amount of rescue missions with their own motivations behind it, like how you go to Silent Chasm to save a Jumpluff because another greedy Rescue Team got persuaded into doing it and nearly died trying. Sometimes you also just go through dungeons for your own sake, like how Dude goes to Great Canyon to talk to the mystical Xatu in hopes of seeing if Xatu knows why he became a Pokémon. You also have these dream sequences where, slowly but surely, Dude starts to piece together why he was placed into the world of Pokémon. In my opinion, the story doesn't really start getting interesting until the part where Gengar - the leader of Team Meanies (yea that's genuinely what they're called) that has a bone to pick with you - finds out you're a human through spying on your conversation with Xatu. He immediately tries to sabotage the goodwill you've been building up with the townsfolk and other Rescue Teams. Dude has been telling them that he's a human since he first got here, but they either never take him seriously or don't know what a human even is. Alakazam's team - the big team that everyone loves but was never given an official name - are the only ones with suspicions about Dude being evil, with Alakazam specifically being the one to suspect it. Gengar takes advantage of everyone's lack of knowledge about humans to spin a narrative that the reason why all the natural disasters happening in the world lately (you get hints of this through conversation with the legendaries you fight since they talk about the balance of the specific part of the world they govern being out of wack) is tied to Dude becoming a Pokémon. There's a legend that a Ninetales tried to curse a human for pulling its tail, but a Gardevoir with a deep bond protected that human, and the human selfishly ran away. This tale is used as "evidence" by Gengar to convince others to join the mob. They kinda just immediately believe him, even the big hotshot Rescue Team that Dude and Bro admire so much. Said Rescue Team breaks the news by threatening to kill you if you don't turn back, and even then they are going to send a bunch of the best Rescue Teams to hunt you down tomorrow so you better start running real fast. I remember something like this was genuinely really shocking to see in a Pokémon game for me as a kid and you start to really care for the characters after seeing how far these two little unevolved Pokémon have to push themselves to escape the elite Rescue Teams that want them dead. In my opinion, its the real emotional core of the game, and it does last a good while. For a while, you're just going through a bunch of dungeons with the goal of getting as far away from your pursuers as you can. It only ends once Gengar gets proven wrong, I thought it was a little anticlimactic that you're kinda just accepted back at the drop of a hat but Gengar being chased out of town was pretty satisfying. There's a decent chunk of the game still left, where you go to take down a group of Mankey to help Wobbuffet and Wynaut, Groudon to save Alakazam's team, and finally Rayquaza once you find out that there's a huge meteor that will destroy the world if you can't convince Rayquaza to stop it. As it turns out, Dude was not the human in the Ninetales legend, but instead he was sent to the Pokémon world with the specific goal of saving it from disaster. This leads to the pretty touching ending, where, when the day's finally saved, Dude disappears to return back to the human world, making Bro and the townsfolk break down into tears. I honestly felt this would have been more impactful if they actually committed to it, but Dude soon returns because he wished hard enough. Congrats, you're in the post game; enjoy the good chunk of extra content after the main story. This whole story took a long time to summarize, but, despite how text heavy this game is and how it seems cool on paper, the execution felt a bit off to me. I appreciate what it was going for but I don't think it leans enough into it, if that makes sense.

Gameplay's next to bat. I have to agree with the consensus here that it is pretty basic, but it is fun and feels very different from mainline Pokémon games despite having all the same creatures and a lot of the same moves (though there's also a lot that are different from the main series). The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games are turn-based grid-based dungeon crawlers where you explore a bunch of floors with randomly generated layouts to find goodies or fight enemies. There's also some invisible traps that can bamboozle you. The goal is to find the stairs on each floor to keep going up until you reach the top floor. Of course, the top floor is different for each dungeon: for example, Tiny Woods ends at 4F and Sky Tower ends at 33F. Either the dungeon just ends entirely once you reach the top floor or you have a boss to fight. There's also requests that you take where you must fill certain criteria in the dungeons, which is almost always going to be finding a special Pokémon on a specific floor. You're either rescuing it, giving it a specific item, or having a Pokémon you've been escorting throughout the whole dungeon reunite with it. This sort of ties into one of the main complaints I've seen about these games; you're going to need to go through the same dungeons at least once since you need to grind for levels to catch up with the harder dungeons or to stock up on important items (although I found this game was very generous with items if you're doing a decent amount of requests), especially if you're trying to have a varied team that isn't just you and your partner. I didn't mind it, though; the fact that you also often have requests to do while you're in that dungeon makes it feel like you're at least accomplishing something rather than just going through the same thing again. Sometimes a dungeon you're revisiting will temporarily become full of loot and boost any gains from finding money, which was pretty satisfying to go through whenever it happened. The dungeons aren't super difficult, but I did die to the last dungeon once and once to the penultimate dungeon. Something relatively frustrating is that your experience can be completely different based at least partly on luck because of the way the floors are generated. Sometimes you come across a Monster House, which is when a whole cavalcade of Pokémon come out of nowhere and you're pretty much guaranteed to die at least once in my experience. Sometimes a Pokémon has a move that can shoot you from across the map or smack an entire room with massive damage (like how Bubble travels a long way and Earthquake destroys anything unfortunate enough to be in the same room), which can leave you feeling rather helpless if you don't also have one of those kinds of moves. Multi-hit moves are absolutely broken in this game and can easily melt you or your enemies if so much as two hits are achieved. Each hit of a multi-hit move does pretty much the same damage as a regular attack and I don't know who decided this was okay. I guess it's supposed to be balanced by the accuracy rate, but I found that, more often than not, you'll get at least two hits from the multi-hit moves, and its not that much of a problem when the game gives you items to raise your stats which includes accuracy of specific moves. Its ridiculous, but at least you can also take advantage of this too. It was hilarious seeing how Rock Blast is a move I never use in the main series games, but, as soon as I had it on my Geodude, I made the Rayquaza fight a complete joke. Another odd quirk about the Mystery Dungeon combat in comparison to mainline is that type coverage really isn't that important. It's always smart to have moves that are Super Effective just in case and there are types that are immune to the moves of another type, but, for some reason, moves that are not very effective can still hit like a truck. Also helps that moves get upgraded to hit harder the more you use them, and, if they're upgraded enough, you have the chance to attack twice in the same turn without using up any extra PP. This makes multi-hit attacks even more insane because you could potentially hit a Pokémon four times - which is already crazy enough - and then smack them around FOUR MORE TIMES for absolutely massive damage.

As a remake, I think this was pretty much a direct improvement over the original as far as quality of life and mechanics goes. There are some very nice QoL changes, like how you can now swap over control to any Pokémon in your party from the very beginning whereas it used to be that you could only control the main character until you beat the game (unfortunately this came at the cost of no longer letting you use any Pokémon to wander around town with but that was such a minor thing anyway). When you first start the game, you do a personality quiz that determines what Pokémon you get; it used to be mandatory that you accept whichever Pokémon you got from the quiz, but this remake lets you pick who you want if you're not satisfied with the quiz result, which was a great change imo. Personally I just stuck with what the quiz gave me, I feel that was really charming in the original but there's nothing wrong with giving people more options and I'll always commend that. It also removes the gender restrictions that were in place in the original, so boys can now pick Skitty and girls can pick Machop for example. A very specific nuisance that got fixed is how, if you wanted to go to Sky Tower again after beating the game, you needed to have the Fly TM in the original. This got removed in the remake and for good reason. I wouldn't be surprised if this also happened to the dungeons that you needed the Dive TM to enter in the original games, but those are in the post game and I only just beat the main story so I can't confirm for sure. Unfortunately, I do feel the changes in presentation resulted in a loss of personality from the original. Maybe its just my rose tinted glasses still being there but I think the sprites were just more expressive and charming. The Friend Areas (the places the Pokémon you recruit into your team go to) are also just a bunch of menus now when they used to be full-on...well, areas. You could walk around the areas - which I often did just to admire the neat DS sprite visuals - and each Pokémon had a certain spot they would often hang out at. Was just a cool touch that got removed. On the plus side, I found myself really loving the watercolor-like art style and I'd be happy to see more games that look like this.

Overall, I think playing through this game again has sort of ruined that childhood magic its always had for me, but I'm also glad I did it so I could form a more concrete opinion. Its still a lot of fun imo and had plenty of heart to it. If you're into dungeon crawlers and Pokémon, I would definitely recommend this one to you. It gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.