Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX - Review

Nothing makes you feel older than being reminded how many generations of gaming have passed before a game gets a remake. Even though it was over a decade ago, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team games bridged between the final years of the Gameboy Advance and the rise of the Nintendo DS. Red Rescue Team was for the GBA and the DS got Blue. While the mainline Pokemon games still have the two different versions every generation, the remake of the original Rescue Team combines them into a DX package. The most notable upgrade with the remake is the lovely new visuals. The question is, does the rest of the game receive the same upgrade?

Rescue Team starts off the same way, from the original game and every one after that. You are a human who has awoken to find themselves turned into a Pokemon. How this happened remains a mystery for sometime, but now you can speak to other Pokemon! Quickly befriending another Pokemon (that you get to choose), you become a Rescue Team. Natural disasters are on the rise and other Pokémon have been acting aggressively. As you do more rescue jobs the closer you get to uncovering why you’re in your predicament, and play your role in a much bigger story. 

After answering some personality-based questions, the game picks a Pokemon that best suits your answers. But you can now actually choose what you want from the larger pool of selectable Pokemon if you’re not happy with the game's decision. If you played the original then you know what to expect already. If you’re new to this quite-old game then you get to enjoy it all fresh. For me it was one of the more enjoyable elements to the game, it is wholesome and charming and too cute for its own good. I had actually forgotten after all this time that the first game in the series actually contains three gen worth of pokemon, even back then it was nearly 400 pokemon! If you’re more familiar with the more recent generations then this will be a blast from the past. Even with the amount of Pokemon available it still feels overwhelming at the thought of trying to get them all to join your Rescue Team.  

While it isn’t directly in the title, Rescue Team DX is a combination of the two original Red and Blue versions, one on the Gameboy Advance (Red) and the other on the Nintendo DS (Blue). Technical capabilities and the single screen VS dual screen differences aside, the most notable difference was each version having different exclusive Pokemon. This DX version isn’t impacted by being spread across two different platforms, the main change is that all the original pokemon are included in the one game. In fact there’s even more content then before! Since the original game the Pokemon world has seen the addition of Mega Evolutions, these forms are now included in this game too. Most of the newer content appears after the credits roll, which in a way is a shame that you don’t get to see it until you’re 20+ hours into the game. Although it does help with the much tougher jobs, because the games difficulty is steep after that point and if you want to see the whole story out you need all the help you can get.

Now for the actual game. If you’re familiar with Mystery Dungeon games then you know exactly what to expect, the core game is generally the same. If it’s your first Mystery Dungeon game then pull up a seat. In Rescue Team’s case it is a top down turn based game, only it’s not turn based in the same way Pokémon is. Each movement or action you take is a turn, in that turn other team members will move and so will enemies. Enemies cannot attack until you’ve used your turn, which gives you a great chance to pick out a move or item to help. Each location has several floors where each one is randomly generated. If you have a job on that floor, it highlights that there’s a Pokémon in need or item to find. 

Your Pokémon has four different moves, which is very similar to the mainline games. The moves have different properties including whether it’s ranged or an up close attack or if it’s a stat buff. To get the best chance in each different location/dungeon, you’ll want to try and have your team with a type advantage or at least moves that are. Although honestly I found I could just hit the A button, selecting a random viable attack and I never struggled until post-story. 

There is also a newly added auto-mode. You can hit the L button and it will send your Pokémon on autopilot through the dungeon, hunting for items and job objectives before seeking out the stairs to the next floor. If you’re near an enemy Pokémon, you drop out of auto and have to take control until the coast is clear. Some people may think this function lets the game play for you, robbing the player of the experience. I was thankful it was there, the dungeons can drag on especially when grinding for experience, items and Pokémon. It helps bypass the worst of it.

If your team of three gets wiped out (and it will), you have the option of accepting defeat and forfeiting everything you held in your inventory and your money, or sending in a rescue team to rescue the rescue team. You can either send another team from your collection of pokemon to revive your fallen comrades, or you can reach out to the Rescue Team community for someone to join in and save you. It’s a cool feature and helps add to that friendly community feel the whole game promotes, that strangers out there are just helping each other out. 

Now while the main part of the Pokemon game is collecting them all, in Rescue Team it works a little differently given there’s no Pokeballs and you’re a Pokemon yourself. Through your rescue jobs when you defeat the pokemon roaming around, there is a chance that they might get back up and ask to join your party. While the party is usually made of three, you can recruit a few more, an extra one even if you bring a tag along with you for a specific job. Even just one or two extra members on your team can quickly turn it into a powerhouse, wiping out everything in your wake. Once the job is done you’ll get the opportunity to have them join your camp/rescue team, as long as you have the right camp/habitat built for them. To get the right camps you need to purchase them from a Wigglytuff in the town square. Some of them cost a lot of money so it will take a lot of jobs to unlock all the areas.    

Here is where I struggled with Rescue Team. It has oodles of charm and cuteness, but delving through the floors is a chore. From the first hour until 20-25 hours, nothing truly changes in the dungeons. Sure it’s different pokemon and there are paths that can only be accessed by certain types, but it feels interchangeable with any other dungeon. With limited carrying capacity you can understandably only take so many items into the dungeons with you, but when carrying several of the same item they don’t stack. The lengthier dungeons require so many essential items to carry but nowhere near enough space to hold them . When you do have access to the storage, the method of storing or withdrawing items is drawn out and unintuitive to the point it feels like an unpleasant chore. 

Looking at the delightful watercolour style Pokémon it’s hard not to get sucked into its charm. Visuals have come a long way since the GBA. I would love to see another Nintendo game with an art style like this. The little character portraits that appear during dialogue might not look as nice, but they are true to the original and add some much needed expression to conversations. 

For every rightmove Rescue Dungeon makes, there’s just as many wrong moves that work against it. While there is the beautiful art style and charming and surprisingly emotional story, there’s also the mindless grind and outdated storage system. For the quality of life improvements that did make it into the remake such as the Dojo, there’s the wildly uneven pace of the story. It wouldn’t be hard to write off Rescue Dungeon as too easy, the Dojo does make it easy to level up your team quickly and the auto setting means you don’t even have to do anything until it's time to fight. While at the same time both the Dojo and auto mode alleviate a lot of tedious grinding and samish dungeons. 

With this love-hate relationship with the game, what tipped the scale more in favour of enjoying the game was the earnestness of the story. For any earlier frustrations, the last third makes up for it. Although I wish Pokemon evolutions weren’t gated off until post story.

Given it’s been a very long time since I played the original game I can’t speak to all of the smaller new features that are either brand new or included from more recent Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. There’s some streamlining that helps keep the game from being a bigger slog than it would’ve been. Yet it manages to leave out the management side of things outside of jobs. I’m still very thankful to the addition of the auto-mode. While it does take some of the actual ‘playing it’ out of the game, it also helps speed up some of the more tedious parts of the dungeons.

Even writing this review I was still very torn on how I feel about Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. It truly is an emotional roller coaster. At the end of the ride I can appreciate it for its touching story, the beautiful visuals and fine mystery dungeoning. It doesn’t hide that Mystery Dungeon games can be pretty samey, and this remake doesn’t streamline all the past mechanics. Overall I enjoyed it more than I disliked it. There’s a decent game with lots of Pokémon and a lot of cuteness crammed into the Switch.

Review code provided by Nintendo