Pokemon Mystery Dungeon-Blue Rescue Team: Decent gameplay, bad everything else

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!