It’s always
sad to see a game with great potential somehow miss the mark and end up as
barely average. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon:
Blue Rescue Team unfortunately falls into that category in my book: it’s a
game that could have been awesome, had it not been hampered and dragged down by
a slew of issues too glaring to be ignored.
But first,
let’s expose the genesis of that game. The Mystery
Dungeon series, known as Fushigi No
Dungeon in Japan where it originated,
is indeed an interesting one. Created by Chunsoft in 1993, it’s a series of
roguelike games based on the exploration of randomly generated dungeons and
featuring a tweaked turn-based battle system, in which enemies make a move
every time the player makes one. Nothing too original here, but the series
distinguishes itself from other roguelikes by pairing this dungeon crawling
with characters from well-known RPG franchises that virtually have nothing to
do with the roguelike genre, thus creating interesting cross-overs featuring
familiar characters thrown in unfamiliar settings. So far, the series has been
meddling with Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and of course Pokemon. (There is also
a sub-series featuring an original character called Shiren the Wanderer, which I will cover in a future post.)
Blue Rescue Team is the very first game of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon sub-series. It
was developed by Chunsoft and published by Nintendo in 2005(jp) and 2006(na,
aus, eu) for the Nintendo DS. A companion game called Red Rescue Team was released for the Gameboy Advance at the same
time, and ironically, it managed to garner better reviews than the DS version,
despite being on an older system. That’s not to say that the DS version was panned:
it was actually rather well received, both by critics and players. So much so,
in fact, that it spawned three sequels, turning thus into a full-blown series
that lasted the lifetime of the DS and continued to the next generation of
handhelds by making the jump to the 3ds with its latest installment, Gates to Infinity.
When I
picked up that game, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. I expected a
simple and straightforward dungeon crawler with a bit of cutesy thanks to the
Pokemon factor. I have never played a Pokemon game in my whole life, but I knew
the basics of the series’ gameplay enough to anticipate interesting battle mechanics
based on clever elemental combinations. At any rate, I expected a mellow and
easygoing game, lounging somewhere at the relaxed end of the dungeon crawler
spectrum.
What I got
instead was a half-hearted attempt at roguelike dungeon crawling that oozed laziness through every pixel and thus ended up as a complete underachievement.
Like I said, this game could have been great, had the right amount of gusto and
passion been put into its development; instead, it’s barely average, and here’s
why.
The Good
First,
let’s dive into the gameplay. It’s quite competent, and turns out to be the
best-handled part of the game. Blue
Rescue Team features the tweaked turn-based battle system present in all Mystery Dungeon games, in which enemies
make a move every time you make one. Fights take place directly on the field,
on a grid similar to a chess board. You have the choice between four different
moves during battles, and items can also be used. New moves can be learned
during the course of the game as you level up, or purchased in a dedicated
store for a consequent amount of money. The interesting elemental combinations
I expected were present, but their underlying mechanics were absolutely not
explained in any way during the game, which was a real downside for a beginner
like me. I guess Blue Rescue Team was
primarily aimed at hardcore Pokemon fans who played the classical games and
already knew everything about elemental combinations; but still, it would have
been nice to include a small tutorial for the beginners who came here primarily
for the dungeon crawling side. We were probably not a huge crew, granted, but
that would have been lovely. Instead of that, the player unsavvy in all things
Pokemon is left grasping at straws and more often than not ends up using moves
randomly, which is slightly frustrating.
Of course,
as you might expect from a Pokemon spin-off, there is a recruiting side to the
game: hostile Pokemons may suddenly turn over a new leaf and decide to join you
and do good deeds by your side instead of wandering aimlessly through dark
caves. But recruitment is not an easy affair: those nasty Pokemons you meet are
not exactly in a hurry to join your team, and it takes a good number of fights
to recruit any of them, especially knowing that the prerequisite condition to
have a Pokemon joining your team is to have the last blow of the fight fired by
the very Pokemon you control. There are 386 Pokemons available for recruitment
in Blue Rescue Team, and my head is
whirling just thinking of how long it might take to get them all. Talk about hardcore
completion.
The story
feels mainly like an excuse for the dungeon crawling, which is perfectly fine.
You are a human who wakes up one day in the Pokemon world, transformed into a
Pokemon, and set off to investigate the whole matter, along with a sticky
partner who somehow trusted you at first sight and decided to follow you to the
end of the world. Oh, well. Classical RPG fare, shall we say. Being a Pokemon
novice, I wanted to go with Pikachu, since this is the only Pokemon I know; but
you don’t get to choose the Pokemon you play as in that game. Instead, you fill
in a quiz with seemingly random questions and the game chooses for you. I thus
ended up with Eevee, a cute little fox-like creature, and Pikachu as my partner
in crime.
Menus are
globally well designed, even though the way they operate is sometimes slightly
puzzling. There is a pleasant variety of items to use during your dungeon
crawling, and you are definitely encouraged to spend them rather than shelve
them, since you can always get more at the village shops. The game doesn’t
punish you too severely when you get stranded into a game over: instead of
restarting from level 1 like in the Shiren the Wanderer sub-series, you warp
back to the Pokemon village with half of your items and money gone, but all
your experience intact, and can tackle the dungeon again after refurbishing. The
dungeon crawling includes a hunger factor, designed to keep you on your toes:
as you walk around and fight, your Pokemon will get hungrier, up to the point
where you will have to feed them apples and jellies to replenish them. I have
to admit that this gameplay element rubbed me the wrong way: I saw it as a
hidden encouragement to clear dungeons as fast as possible, which clashed with
my own habit of exploring floors to the fullest and leaving no stone unturned.
Oh, well. This was a minor annoyance, not a deal-breaker, especially since I
didn’t really feel like exploring dungeons to the fullest in that game to start
with. But more on that latter.
Let’s face
it, the gameplay is very repetitive. Your set of four moves gets old really
fast, and renewing them involves some grinding, either to level up and get to
the point where you can learn new moves or to get the money to buy them. The
game, as a whole, is quite grindy: everything requires a healthy amount of
grinding, from leveling up to recruiting allies, and that induces a lot of
repetitiveness. Still, when all is said and done, the gameplay manages to be
satisfactory. Everything works smoothly and is well implemented, and with the
right amount of grinding, there is a lot of depth to be found in Blue Rescue Team.
The Bad
Things
start growing stale when one pores over other aspects of the game. Like, say,
the dungeon design: laziness is strong with this one, o yes indeed. Dungeons in
Blue Rescue Team are randomly
generated, which virtually eliminates any cleverness in the design to start
with. But this is a staple of dungeon crawling, after all: it’s a genre that
celebrates repetition and strives not on clever level design, but rather on the
slightly obsessive process of clearing one similar-looking floor after the
other and emerging alive from the whole ordeal. Still, even in dungeon
crawlers, there is good repetitive level design, and there is bad repetitive
level design; and the level design in Blue
Rescue Team clearly falls into the last category.
It’s a bad level
design primarily because it lacks variety. It only features two basic layout
elements: corridors of various lengths and square rooms of various sizes.
Nothing else. No round shapes, no curvy lanes, just a pile of square rooms
connected by narrow alleyways. This level design makes dungeons look likes
mazes, which is absolutely not coherent with the setting of the whole game to
start with: here is a game that is supposedly taking place in a natural
environment, with forests, mountains, canyons and so on, and yet features
dungeons looking like underground mazes or castle floors. This is very
unsatisfying, and even more so as you progress through the game and discover
that this uninspired level design repeats itself in every single dungeon, with
only color palette swaps to mark the difference between one dungeon and the
next. This kills the pleasure and excitement of discovering a new dungeon and
leaves you with very little incentive to go on and progress through the game,
as far as level design is concerned. Not only that, but this level design can
also elicit a feeling of claustrophobia if you happen to be prone to it. I swear
that every time I played Blue Rescue Team, I started feeling ill at ease and
stressed after spending some time in a dungeon—which is quite unfortunate,
since there is nothing to do in that game but trudge through dungeons.
The Ugly
Here comes
the deal-breaker, the last straw that made me throw up my hands in frustration and
shove my Blue Rescue Team cartridge
back in its box. The graphics, ladies and gentlemen. The graphics in that game
are the ultimate display of laziness from the developers, and a supreme insult
to the DS capabilities. These graphics are not bad per se, mind you. Bad graphics are graphics that hinder the
gameplay or try to pierce your retina with their massive pixels, and that is
not the case in Blue Rescue Team. The
problem here is that the graphics are over-simplistic, and absolutely not on
par with what the DS can produce. This stems mostly from the fact that the game
was designed for both the DS and the Gameboy Advance, with the last used as the
reference point: instead of creating two distinct versions adapted to their
respective systems, Chunsoft played it lazy by downgrading everything to
Gameboy Advance level and creating only one game, released under two different
names with a few minor tweaks between the two versions. This is seriously
disappointing, especially knowing what the DS was capable of, even in these
early stages of its lifetime: the very same year saw the release of Children of Mana, an action-based
dungeon crawler with splendid and luscious graphics that could make Blue Rescue Team crawl away in shame.
I said that
these graphics were the deal-breaker for me, but it’s a tad more complex than
that. I started gaming in the late 80’s, and as an 8-bit era veteran, I never
considered simple graphics to be an issue or a deterrent of any sort when
gaming is concerned; it takes much more than primitive graphics to make me give
up on a game. But Blue Rescue Team is
not just any game: it’s a dungeon crawler. And now is the time to introduce my
personal theorem regarding dungeon crawlers, which goes as such: if you
consider the three main elements that are gameplay, level design and graphics,
I can gladly tolerate high repetitiveness and general mediocrity in two of
these fields if the third manages to be top-class. Thus, I can stomach boring
level design and shitty graphics if the gameplay is great, or endure repetitive
gameplay and crappy level design if they come along with beautiful graphics,
and so on—you get the idea. And unfortunately, Blue Rescue Team fails to fulfill that theorem. The gameplay is
decent, granted, but still not good enough to compensate for the uninspired
level design and horribly bland graphics. I called the graphics a deal-breaker
because they are the most visible and potent failure, but it’s really the lack
of greatness in any of the three aforementioned fields that ruined the game in
my eyes and made me give up on it after only a couple of hours, much to my
dismay.
So here I
am, left with an unfinished game and a lot of frustrations. Dungeon crawlers
are painfully scarce in the West, and here was the promise of not only one game
belonging to the genre, but a full series: this seemed like a dream come true!
Alas, that dream was not meant to be, and that beautiful promise turned sour,
due to an obvious lack of commitment and dedication on the developers’ part. This game feels like a missed opportunity, a
shadow of what it could have been, and this is SO disappointing. I’m just
relieved that I didn’t buy the full series on a whim, or the disappointment
would have been ever more massive: from what I know, the formula was left
unchanged in the subsequent DS releases, with Chunsoft not bothering to improve
the graphics or the level design even though they were now working on the DS
only. Oh, well.
Still, as Aragorn
beautifully states in The Two Towers,
“there is always hope”. I stumbled lately on screen captures from the latest
installment of the series, Gates to
Infinity, and was transfixed by their sheer eye-candy quality. This alone would
make that game fulfill my dungeon crawler theorem, which means that I could enjoy
it! I thus decided to give it a try in the near future and see if the series
can redeem itself in my eyes. As for now, thanks for reading, and be my guest
anytime!
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