Reviews from

in the past


This review contains spoilers

Ah, yes, the funny furry isekai game.

I've had history with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team in the past - by which I mean I played a used GBA cartridge of the original that had already made it through the first half of the game. I then heard about this remake a few years back, bought it day one, put so many hours into the earlygame...and then proceeded to not touch the game again for a few years.

And now that I've finished what I'd previously started, I do appreciate the quality of life improvements (better balance with this game's starter Pokémon, etc.) that this remake offers.

The presentation - putting aside my bias for pixel art - is undoubtably better than the original. I do like the way the game manages to make the 3D models look like hand-drawn images. Though, I do miss the camps being fully explorable...

The gameplay...is the same dungeon-crawler gameplay Spike Chunsoft has executed well for the past two decades by the time of this game's release. I've no idea what else to say about it, other than my observation about how few people are here specifically for the gameplay.

Shelved because I intend to return at a later date to do the postgame quests, but I really enjoyed the main story so far!

Also, the base remodeling story-beat was more of a non-sequitur than I'd remembered it being.

Also also, the protag musta had a pretty shitty life as a human if they willingly allowed the erasure of their previous memories.

Reignited the old love I had for the original Red Rescue team. Sadly I do not have time to grind this game. I'm too "old" now.

Mejora muchísimas cosas respecto al original y encima visualmente es precioso

This review contains spoilers

I absolutely loved this game's story and I got really invested in it. I would love to see more games like this where all of the characters are talking Pokémon. I love the characters, the art style, and the music. I've also always liked games where you get to rescue people and/or animals.

The gameplay is addictive, but I wouldn't really call it fun. The combat is repetitive and annoying, especially when you have a big team of Pokémon going through a corridor and the ones at the back keep getting into fights. The moments I enjoyed most were the dopamine hits of finding a bunch of items and spawning right next to the stairs.

My favorite thing to do in Pokémon games is collect Pokémon, but you don't have many opportunities to utilize the Pokémon you recruit in this game. Your team can only have three Pokémon, and if you want to always keep the protagonist and deuteragonist around, you're only left with one more spot for another Pokémon. This turns to none if you want to include the Absol who joins you during the story. I wish you could send additional teams out on their own rescue missions, like how you can send additional teams of monsters to find treasure in Dragon Quest Treasures.

As much as I enjoyed my time with this game, I lost interest once I reached the post-game. The story is what carried the experience for me, and the post-game has less story and much more dungeon crawling. I'm not interested in grinding, fighting a bunch of legendaries, and doing 99 floor dungeons. I also evolved my main character (Charmander) into a Charizard so I would be stronger, but I really regret it and I miss her cute little face and bandanna.

Charming remake of a good game that had me wishing for just a something little bit more. At least we have a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon title on the Switch I suppose

Normally I don't like to put out stupidly long reviews that are bullshit to read because they take like 10 minutes, but I felt very strongly about this one.

This is at its heart a good game, but that is simply because it remakes something so good. This game is a case of death by a thousand papercuts regarding its problems.

The biggest problem with this game is how cheap it all is. This game was made on a budget of coins found in the dryer and a fart. Is this actually true? I hope it is, otherwise its clear the money was spent on coke and hookers. Sorry for not legitimately looking up the budget like a true soldier of so retro.

The greatest way to describe this game is that it feels like a late-stage 3DS game, and one that feels low-budget even for that system. The animations are cheap or recycled from a 3ds game. Keep in mind the actual 3ds PMD games weren't lookers in the first place.

One thing the game really suffers from though is the story. That is maybe a shallow statement however. The story in the original game serves the game quite well. The problem is how it is presented in this game. I'm sure if you're taking the time to read this you've heard of abstraction in retro video games.

In the original game, the story was fairly barebones, but the nature of it allowed a sort of abstraction. Maybe I'm bold for saying that, I did play the original as a kid, and maybe nostalgia is blinding me. To be honest though, it's the same story. I haven't obviously memorized the script, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was word for word. What makes this game poor is that 3D models are much more literal, and there's nothing for our brain to fill in. We can imagine the sprites showing emotions when they do that little sweatdrop thing. When I see that same sweatdrop thing here, I just think about how cheap it looks. Lots of models just standing around shooting the shit in this game. It feels like a youtube video where a guy fucks around in Gmod giving the characters dialogue. It all feels so fake.

The gameplay is also just worse. Sorry. It just feels like if Super was bad. They decided to base the gameplay off of recruiting a lot of pokemon and getting rare qualities. This just feels stupid. All it does is give you more bodies to sacrifice in the middle of dungeons, making them completely trivial. They had to fundamentally change boss fights, and they made them utter bullshit. Be glad they give shower you with reviver seeds because you will absolutely need them. They wouldn't give you so many unless they knew it was bullshit.

The recruitment gameplay loop really is just poor. It feels like a new take on the system from Super, but that system was fun because it increased the power of your main guys. This system just gives you meatshields that you pray have long range moves and rare qualities. Rare qualities are a dumb system anyways. Once you get a teammate with steamroll you've basically got every tool you need to just steamroll the game in half.

This game keeps the link system and the move exp system. I don't believe these are supposed to co-exist. A system that rewards you for shitting out as many moves as possible and a system that lets you do it. It's just another step to demolishing the game. I played as Meowth and paired screech with fury swipes. The game played itself after this. Bosses HP melted away.

This game also just gives you movesets that are so good right at the very start that you will probably keep most of the moves until the end of the game. Super managed to give you like one decent move from the start to compliment the move exp system, but this game just gives you every tool you need. My partner Cubone started with a move that hits in a 2 tile circle (absurdly strong tool) and ended the game only swapping headbutt for bonemerang (might be the best move I've ever used). It adds to the feeling of the difficulty not even being balanced in the first place.

It all just makes this game play like worse Super. If I'm going to dedicate myself to play a game with a story that falls flat I'm going to play Super, because at least that game has challenging and rewarding gameplay and a story that is good in theory despite the bad execution.

Let me just rapid fire some small nitpicks. I don't like choosing your starter and think having it given to you makes the story better. Some of the songs kinda miss the point just a tad and it took me out of the scenes. Letting starter only pokemon become partners here takes away some of the pokemons unique charm. The graphics look a little blurry. The town doesn't seamlessly load the pelipper post office despite loading the pond and dojo. The removal of deadends from dungeons make the game feel toothless. Being able to see where all the items and enemies are makes the game absurdly easy and should've been an equippable item or rare quality. Giving you effectively three bellies pretty much makes the system pointless and only the longest dungeons will even make you engage with this system once.

Thats a lot of nitpicks. Aren't you glad I didn't make this even longer and stupider by elaborating?

If this game just came out and failed, that would've been fine. My biggest problem though, is that this game will be any new players introduction to the series. Despite what you may believe, the majority of people don't want to use an emulator to play a retro game when they can just go to walmart and buy an overpriced remake for their Splatoon machine. People will end up playing this game, and they'll say "wow, the story wasn't actually deep like all of those people said", and the gameplay is really an acquired taste so they probably won't like it either. When I hear people say they totally fell in love with this game I just get confused. How can you love a game so cheap and so poorly thought through? The worst part is I can't even say this game is awful, because it's a remake of a fundamentally good game, and that means it has fundamentally good elements.

Edit: I forgot to mention they removed the basic attack. This was like my biggest issue with the game so I'm not sure how I forgot to include it. Whenever you almost kill an enemy you just feel like you're wasting PP by using another attack. Just let me chip away at them PLEASE

ESSE é o bom. Sendo uma grande fã da franquia e ficando meio desapontada com as mudanças pequenas que tiveram na gameplay(menu de movimentos, falta de log de exploração), após os jogos de NDS, estava bem receosa que não fosse me agradar. Comprei o jogo sem ver nenhuma review e nem nada sobre e me surpreendi positivamente.
É quase um remake 1:1, com levíssimas mudanças na historia(isso se tiver). As masmorras quase intocadas além das mecânicas novas e itens novos. Bem leve de jogar e divertido, mantém bem a reputação da serie.