Pros:
+The story is pretty good, albeit short.
+Each move has its own level, meaning that if you level up flamethrower on one mon, every other mon who gets flamethrower will have the powered up version. It's a great quality of life thing.
+The post game is huge. It's almost like the main story is just a tutorial for the larger, but less narrative-driven post-game.
+Having Pokémon as actual characters is fun.
+The constant rewards you get from completing missions makes it so easy for that "just one more dungeon" feeling.
+The water colour aesthetic is pretty nice.

Cons:
-The power of moves and accuracy only shows up as a bar instead of as numbers in the main game, making it kind of hard to compare.
-You can’t filter Pokémon by rare quality, so if you want to find a specific one, good luck searching through the entire list.
-Shiny Pokémon are locked to “Strong” Pokémon, meaning about 20 in total. It's a pretty weird decision that ruins the surprise of finding random shinies.
-Since you can only control the three main teammates, if any of your recruits gets attacked at the back of the group, you have literally no way to get to them to save them. There's not even a tactics option where you can send a main teammate to stay at the rear of a group for such situations. It's incredibly frustrating to constantly get interrupted every step because your Pidgey at the back is being attacked every turn and you can't do anything about it.
-Moves are unbalanced as fuck. Multi-hit moves and room-wide moves are basically the only viable ones in the endgame. Moves with only one tile are borderline useless, making a large section of the mons useless.
-You can only recruit wild Pokémon if the player kills enemy. So you can deal 199/200 damage, but if your teammate Weedle does that last 1hp you won't get a chance to recruit.
-The item inventory stops expanding after a certain rank (until the very last rank, which is a huge grind). Considering it's the most important rank-up reward, having it be stagnant for like 70% of ranks is annoying.
-If your current party is full, you can't just send recruited mons to camp. You have to choose between letting them go or switching another party member and letting THEM go. This means you can recruit at max 5 mons per dungeon (or 7 if you wanna get rid of 2 of your main teammates). It's basically just forcing extra playtime by making you re-run dungeons multiple times.
-99 floor dungeons. Screw them.
-Dungeons that reset your level to 5. If this was a single dungeon as a one-off challenge it might not be so bad, but there are THREE dungeons like this.
-Can’t feed multiple stat boosting items at once. Have a bunch of gummis or vitamins to give your mon? Gotta do it one by one.
-Dungeons are all basically the same. The themes (of which are limited and reused) never really add any actual gimmicks outside of weather.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro or con:
~It's really repetitive, but kind of addicting at the same time.
~Most of the power-up orbs in the game only last for a single room or floor. Keep in mind that some dungeons have up to 99 floors. Trying to use them as any kind of strategy doesn't really work.
~Controls in a dungeon feel stiff and clunky. But it also has an automode which negates this. The fact that letting the game play itself is a SOLUTION feels like a con to me, but if it makes the game more fun to play then that can't be a bad thing.


Note:
•Alakazam’s team is presented as the best team in the game for the story, but it's only gold rank. For reference that's the 5th rank in the game, out of a total of 12. It's kind of embarrassing to see them get so much praise for being a rank that I managed to get to in the main story alone, let alone the 6 (apparently unattainable by anyone) ranks I reached after that.
•Being Pokémon saved this game. Like without the Pokémon coat of paint I think this would be a below-average game.
•I wanted to fully complete this, but gave up on Purity Forest because it's an RNG-filled mess.

Didn't remember much about the original game even though I played it, but this remake is absolutely amazing.

The plot in this is pretty simple and straightforward, unlike its sequel, but this game really shines in its gameplay. They added so much QoL stuff from the laters entries plus some extra additions (like a dojo for Exp farming or the fact you can now see all of the entities onn the map) which, tho some may consider them to be ruining the experience, I thought they were great features in a genre that can easily become extremely infuriating for the dumbest reasons.

I initially thought the artstyle was ugly at first, but as time went on it grew on me and I now think it's on par with the great pixel art of the original games. Unfortunately, I know it's not a high budget game on the Switch, but there was some instances had HUGE lagging issues which extremely weird knowing what type of game this is. I also noticed huge input delays during the whole game so beware if you're allergic to that, and I know some people are.

The music is great too.

So overall I'd highly recommend this game, but still wait for a drop in price. Even though I loved it, $60 is way too much for this game. You can try out the demo version if you want but it didn't capture at all what the game was good at imo.

La verdad es que no había tocado antes ningún Mundo Misterioso, así que cuando salió el remake del primero quise darle una oportunidad. Me pareció cuquísimo, la idea de ser tú un Pokémon en vez de controlarles tú muy original, con una historia muy tierna y en términos de jugabilidad fácil de llevar (con excepción de algunos comandos que no funcionan muy allá), aunque algunos mapas se hacen eternos y complicados si no se va bien equipados. Sin haber jugado el original para comparar, ha sido una experiencia bastante agradable.

When you pick up Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, you get two entirely different packages. The first is a relatively short, ~20 hour story that will make you bawl your eyes out. The second is an absolutely mammoth 60-to-80 hour postgame that serves as a relaxing backdrop to that thing you're binge watching this month.

Rescue Team DX sets itself apart from other PMD games with a thoughtfully constructed ecosystem of quality-of-life updates. It would have been simple to update Rescue Team's mechanics to the newest game's standards and call it a day; instead, they took the opportunity to rethink some of the series' oldest mechanics, and even introduce entire systems of features that completely change the way you approach gameplay.

This entry was designed from the ground-up to be accessible to newcomers. That said, the series can still be a little intimidating for people used to normal Pokémon mechanics. This is no fault of the game itself; it's more about the preconceptions people have from the main series, and once you just get playing, it all clicks.

Here's the main piece of advice I'd give to newcomers: focus less on type variety, and more on move utility. Multi-hit moves and ranged moves are really good; the game itself provides great info blocks to tell you the range and mechanics of each move. Moves that can hit from 4 tiles away, moves that hit nearby Pokémon, and moves that hit every enemy in a room are really strong. Type matchups don't matter too much, and can be mitigated even further by rare qualities.

Rare qualities are an excellent system. When you get a really synergistic quality on a main team member, it's genuinely exciting! It makes me go out of my way for high-reward dungeons so I can find all the DX Gummis I can. And it helps make individual playthroughs feel distinct & personal, which is a quality I absolutely love in a gameplay mechanic.

There is a very small mechanic that I think perfectly captures what I love about this game & series. Whenever there is a piece of hand-drawn art on screen, you can press + to view it in full. They didn't have to do it, but the art is all gorgeous—I particularly love the world map! It feels like it could be the setting for a custom D&D campaign.

When I see a mechanic like that in a game, it makes me think the developers know the emotional impact their game can have on the player. Not everyone is going to notice the little text at the bottom of the screen that says you can do this. But those who do notice get to appreciate that hard work just a little more! There's a lot of love in DX's art, and visual art is an important medium games use to carry their emotional ideas to the player.

The storybook art style can be slightly off-putting at first—the environments in the first cutscene don't do a good job of selling it—but almost immediately upon leaving the tutorial, I fell in love with it. And by the main story's final sequence, the game absolutely nails the presentation. Every cutscene surrounding the final dungeon is gorgeous & communicates the gravity of the situation in an absolutely awe-inspiring manner.

Rescue Team DX has many interesting ideas to communicate to its player—about death, about trust, and about our duties to each other. Under the cutesy surface, the game imparts genuine moral wisdom. A cynic could certainly parse through every story beat and tell you how it's all silly & childish—but an optimist willing to listen will find genuinely beautiful things. It makes me want to be more gentle & understanding with others, to help my friends find identity & purpose in their surroundings. That's an emotion I feel every piece of art should strive for.

This is a series that has a very dear place in my heart. It's definitely an acquired taste, but it's a taste I am deeply glad I acquired. The thoughtful design of DX makes me optimistic about future entries. I really hope they do an Explorers of Sky DX someday—but I want a new entry before then! I think with the elements they introduced in Rescue Team DX, they could forge something even more special next time.

I have to compare this one with the original red and blue because it i not so long ago i picked it up again. Then the remake came out and of course i had to play it.

You can see, that this is a remake. They did not change the story. But they did change the mechanics, which is awesome. I never thought that I would like the fact, that every Pokemon (even not with you) gets XP but heeeeeell yeah this is the way to go. It is so great that you don't have to train every freakin' Pokemon. You can just take it with you. I also like the level-system of he moves, and the gummis are gone, hooorray (mostly)

So yes I enjoyed the new mechanics and I loved the graphics (Dunno why everyone was hating it, The artstyle is soo charming) I only finished the game and did not yet touch the post-game (which is huge) because I was playing it parallel to animal crossing. And then I had to play Pokemon Shield, and now i have to play... aaah whatever, maybe I'll pick it up again to do the post-game maybe not.

Overall, Mystery Dungeon DX is a pleasant remake. However, a lot of complaints and issues with gameplay from the original are still present and unrefined. Despite the improved visuals, it definitely does not feel like a Switch title, and is more in comparison to the original Gameboy Advance title.

With little-to-no new features or improvements from the original titles. If you enjoy dungeon crawlers with hundreds of hours of gameplay, you will like this game. As an avid Pokemon fan, you will more than likely enjoy this game. But if you are neither of these things, I can almost guarantee you will have a boring and tedious experience.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a childhood favourite game of mine. Both the original, the sequel, and Super (not Gates) has all affected me very deeply, but the original has always been something that changed the way I interact with videogames in a lot of ways. It was one of the first games I've experienced with a story, one that I voraciously looked through guides through so I could 100% it, one that made me actually notice videogame music as a thing, and one that resonated with me so deeply it made me cry intermittently for the week after I beat it back in 6th grade.

Because of that, I had a lot of hope for it, and I was very excited to experience an updated version of a game that I enjoyed so much as a child. But at the same time, I was apprehensive and worried, considering The Pokemon Company's track record at the time, and my general apathy towards the franchise. Sword and Shield was a pretty major disappointment, and most of their major works have been phone and gatcha games.

I'm happy to say that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX warranted no such worry (thanks Spike Chunsoft!) and it's a completely updated experience that somehow manages to keep a lot of the core spirit of the original game alive, while at the same time, changing enough that it's worth experiencing all over again.

For anyone who has never played Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, its a spin-off that's a dungeon crawler RPG rather than the turn-based, monster collecting RPG the main series is. While the battles are still turn-based, you can move one tile, attack, or use an item each turn, as can the enemy, so you have to juggle both movement and battles while progressing in dungeons with randomly-generated layouts. It's not a genre that's for everyone, and though it's notably a lot easier than most games of the genre (because, after all, it's still for kids) it's still harder than the main series and can get surprisingly frustrating if you don't know what you're doing.

The gist is you get to a floor, try to find the stairs to get further into the dungeon, gather items and beat other Pokemon along the way. There are, of course, bosses to fight at the end of some dungeons, and progressing through them gets you further and further into the story, which is where Pokemon Mystery Dungeon TRULY outshines the mainline Pokemon games.

Full disclosure, Rescue Team, due to being the first of the Mystery Dungeon games isn't exactly the paragon of story telling. It's heartfelt, and cute, definitely, but if you wanted something really deep along the lines of something like Fata Morgana or DDS this definitely isn't it. Hell, it doesn't even stand up that well to the later entries of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon franchise, and that's to be expected considering it's the first one. If you've never played Rescue Team but played some of the later games, then the story will seem awfully predictable and barebones to you. That being said, presentation does a lot for a game, and PMDX has STELLAR presentation.

The art style of the remake tries to recreate the watercolour painting style of the promo images and the menu art of the original game as opposed to the pixel style of the original DS and GBA versions.

From the shading of the models to the subtle movements of the grass and trees in the environment to the colour palette and even the menu UI, everything is just GORGEOUS. It really does feel like playing a storybook and I think that especially makes the story feel even more magical to me. Yes, of course, a lot of it is nostalgia but it's just such a COMFORTABLE game to play. The soundtrack is of course, magnificent, keeping a lot of the feel of the old tracks while adding some modern embellishments to it for the current console age.

It is just a beautiful game, the art direction is just STELLAR despite not being particularly the best graphics-wise, and it's just way more visually engaging than a certain other Pokemon game. Even though the dungeons are top-down, randomly generated set of tiles, seeing the different designs and effects of each tile in each new dungeon, how they inform the environment you're in with such clarity...it's just a treat to go through.

Along with that, there are animated cutscenes and intros for each boss battle, for major story beats, changes in camera angles and movements that make the original scenes have so much more weight to them. The dynamic entries of Moltres and the other birds are MUCH more climactic now, and it makes the eventual boss fights with them so much more fulfilling as a result.

Of course, just updated visuals might not be enough to justify buying a 14 year old game again but never fear! The gameplay has been updated too! While the basics of it are more or less the same, there are a lot of QoL changes like more access to a variety of items, easier ways to level grind, easier access to special skills/abilities and the ability to change them, team building, more robust movepools provided by the modern generation of Pokemon, and evolutions/mega evolutions that didn't exist in generation 3 when the original came out.

You can rescue yourself in a dungeon if you've fainted so you don't lose all your items and money, instead of JUST relying on friends and strangers to do so, there are auto-walk options where your Pokemon would explore the dungeon by themselves until they get close to an enemy, and there's a lot more clarification in how to go about actually playing this game through the tutorials.

Now some people (especially after playing the demo) might argue that this makes the game too easy. I'm here to tell you, as someone who's played both games and went through the same dungeons, that that statement is utter bullshit.

A lot of people tout the original as being incredibly difficult but I personally don't agree with that statement. I feel like a lot of them project the difficulty to be much higher than it actually was due to not having much skill in playing it (due to them being much younger when the original came out) and due to the perception that being able to recruit 8 Pokemon in PMDX in one dungeon makes boss fights laughably easy (which, it does not considering that a lot of the later ones can and WILL spam AoE moves).

On top of that, the robust movepools for the starters means that the enemies have significantly improved movepools too. It isn't uncommon to be utterly wrecked by some random Magcargo spamming Earth Power or being sniped by a Magby using Flame Burst. Having a Farfetch'd use Brave Bird out of nowhere or having your only reviver seed getting eaten by a Weedle with Bug Bite. Even worse, they keep the mechanics of Gates and Super where if that enemy defeats any of your team members, they WILL get super powered and even mega evolve in some cases, wrecking you even more. The hp pool of basically every enemy, bosses included, has also been increased to high heaven while the damage done with moves has decreased, keeping a ratio more similar to Super where you have to engage with the enemy a few times to defeat it, meaning you do actually have to think about every move you make.

I think they excelled in balancing the game around it's QoL changes and ease of access to strong items and moves. While yes, you get way more reviver seeds and max elixirs, you also will end up using them a lot more. While yes, you get access to super powerful TMs early on, it might not be as strong or effective as a commonly used Tackle in longer dungeons because of it's PP cost and the build up of skills the more you use them. While yes, you have way more orbs and disruption options available to you, you WILL have to use them to get through certain fights and the game actively encourages you to use them strategically instead of just blasting through the game with strong attacking skills like in the original.

All this adds to gameplay that, while very similar to the original, feels completely different to go through. Even the bosses require different strategies and ways to beat them because of added mechanics like lava pools with Groudon and a twister that moves your teammates around if they're in certain spots.

And as always, the post-game dungeons continue to be incredibly difficult compared to the main game, with dungeons that force you to lv 1, dungeons that don't let you bring in items, dungeons with 99 floors and dungeons that do all three, with incredibly rewarding goals to aim for like being able to recruit Legendary Pokemon.

The original rescue team, out of all the Mystery Dungeon games, I think has the BEST postgame, being a series of linked events that require certain conditions to be fulfilled and also about twice as long as the actual main story. There's just so much to DO, so much to aim for. So many new dungeons and new bosses and while the difficulty spike might be a bit much, it's just so SATISFYING to play something that really challenges me. Being able to recruit legendary Pokemon and get a special area for them is just so minor but so much more satisfying to fulfil than seeing legendaries just wander around by sheer luck.

I think really, the only reason I'm not shouting from the roof about how everyone should get this is because...it honestly is not going to mean much to you if you never cared for the original games to begin with. If you like roguelike gameplay then I'd recommend it, definitely, but if you didn't care for the gameplay and the story never resonated with your lonely little 11 year old heart, then it probably won't be worth getting.

It's a nostalgia trip through and through, and definitely worth getting if you LOVE PMD but never played the original for whatever reason and want to experience it. But if the franchise was never for you then I doubt PMDX is gonna change your mind much. That being said, if reading this made you curious about this series and want to get into it, then I HIGHLY recommend it. It's a really fun, emotional and a genuinely heartwarming game that just feels nice to play. It highlights what a remake SHOULD be: a game that takes all the charm of the original and builds on it.

it's definitely an alright mystery dungeon game but it doesn't do anything all that interesting in its like, what, 12 hour runtime? there's like one interesting bit near the middle, and then things start picking up near the end and credits roll like 45 minutes later. gameplay-wise it's totally serviceable and probably technically some of the best the series has offered yet, but it doesn't have much more to offer beyond that. it's definitely an interesting enough play for a few days, but i don't know that i'd call it $60 interesting

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is probably my favorite of the Pokémon spin-off franchises, but that’s much more for the Pokémon end of things than the Mystery Dungeon end of things. I love the concept of a world populated entirely by Pokémon who go on adventures and have their own society of adorable cartoon creatures, and I absolutely love how hard the stories tend to go. Obviously, the first entry’s story doesn’t go quite as hard as future entries like the Explorers games, but it’s still charming and surprisingly emotional in places. That’s ultimately what I play the games for, and it was great to revisit Rescue Team in a brand new package.

I have to admit, I mourn the loss of spritework, especially given how good the originals looked. However, I actually really love how this game looks! The backgrounds and textures give the game a storybook feel, and I think the effort put into giving this game a unique stylized look really puts this above a lot of games that are technically more impressive. Admittedly, I don’t think some of the smaller models look that great, but the bigger models like the legendary Pokémon look fantastic and the cutscenes accompanying their appearances really do sell their majesty.

So now we get to the Mystery Dungeon part, which is where… I am not as thrilled. Don’t get me wrong, I think the game had a lot of interesting work done to it. Things like rare qualities and strong enemies add a lot of variety to the game, although… perhaps not enough for my own tastes. I always find myself falling off of these games pretty hard once the credits start rolling, because the difficulty curve ramps up and I don’t enjoy the actual dungeon diving enough to commit to the postgame.

I tried to get into the postgame, I really did. If you’re into the Mystery Dungeon formula there are some pretty interesting twists brought to familiar fights based on the inclusion of mechanics from more recent generations. Personally, though… I got super frustrated and quit. Ultimately, I wish the stories of these games were attached to a genre I liked more than procedurally generated dungeon diving roguelites, but I’ll also be the first to admit that I would absolutely eat up an Explorers remake in the same style.

admittedly, I was not really much of a big fan of the original Red and Blue Rescue Team (blame the fact that I received it after I got the much higher quality Explorers of Time!) so I resisted buying this game for a year

the art style is incredible and without a doubt one of the best parts of the game after some serviceable 3D from Gates to Infinity and Super Mystery Dungeon. there's a lot of great quality of life content here and is absolutely the Mystery Dungeon game I'd recommend to new players

that being said, there seems to be no new translation, meaning the dialogue is as stiff and unnatural as it was when Red and Blue Rescue Team was released stateside back in 2006 and is particularly jarring when new content is accompanied by better dialogue. the loss of the neutral attack is pretty bad too

I'm a bit divided as to whether or not this game is worth $60. but it's still good fun at the end of the day