Review for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. Game for Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 06/03/2020
Nintendo will take care of kicking off a March poised between relaxation and gore with the remake of the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, which appeared on the old portable consoles, on Nintendo Switch. Expected since January and perhaps much earlier, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX unites in a single title the Red Team and the Blue Team retired. After giving our initial impressions, it is time for the complete opinion on the game since 6 March will be available at the hybrid of the great N.
Having played the demo available on the Eshop we transferred the save without problems and continued our adventure directly where we left it, that is with the meeting shortly thereafter with the first boss of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon!
The rogue-lite monsters
But let's take a few steps back to explain the nature of this remake, which we liked to define during our raids as a rogue-lite in Pokémon sauce. First a nice test aptitude that helps to choose the starter Pokémon among the 16 available. The outcome of the test, whose questions are different each time and reshuffled, does not in any way constrain the choice of your avatar, so it is more an opportunity to connect your personality to a Pokémon and freely choose whether to enter the world later. Pokémon with that or not.
The protagonist is not a Pokémon like the others, but a human who turned into a pocket monster and catapulted without his knowledge into the world of Pokémon, a 100 Acre Wood remade for the occasion by the skilled hands of Spike Chunsoft, who has been working for about a twenty years to the Mystery Dungeon series. The formula, therefore, is the same as the time series that dates back to 1993 and is baptized by throwing himself to the rescue of a tender Caterpie: a procedural dungeon crawler, therefore changing every time, which can be compared to chess and which still continues to be associated with the Pokémon brand today.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX fits into the rogue-like genre, whose most famous feature is the permanent death. Once you have fallen you start from scratch. Playing a game of The Binding of Isaac immediately gives an idea of what kind of game we are talking about - an experience divided into various "rooms" corolled by many failures, which becomes increasingly difficult, but which is followed by great satisfaction with practice. . Rescue Team DX is certainly less punishing than Isaac, but the basic rules are the same. First we called it rogue-lite precisely due to its friendlier nature (on the other hand we are talking about a PEGI 7 against Isaac's PEGI 16): once defeated, however, all the contents of the backpack and the pokécoins that you have in your pocket will be lost. Before you get desperate though, just know that you don't start completely from scratch and the game offers a loophole, which we'll talk about later.
Gotta recruit 'em all!
Inexplicable natural disasters they follow each other in the world of Pokémon and amid the general fright several are born rescue teams, whose mission is to help anyone with a problem. Our protagonist will immediately offer himself as a volunteer for a newborn rescue team formed by himself, a second partner that we will choose from among the 15 remaining Pokémon and in the future with all the Pokémon that will be possible to meet during the adventure - let's talk about a updated and revised number of Pokémon respect the original, including you love them megaevolution and news such as rare skills. These are remake-exclusive abilities that bring passive benefits to all party members, such as restoring PP, and that can be acquired by the Pokémon with jellies.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX thus reappears on Switch with a graphics renewed pastel color very pleasing to the eye and with a round and colorful touch, faithful but at the same time light years away from the original games. The remake also officially marks the passage of the series from 2D to 3D, as happened for the sixth generation of the main Game Freak series and a more modern and captivating layout. The world where Pokémon live is full of all kinds of habitats, from snow-capped mountains to lakes to legendary forests divided into dungeons, where we will spend most of the time. Here you will be able to see what kind of creatures populate a certain dungeon and return later with the intention of recruiting them all.
I dungeon are obviously the heart of the title, maps created at the moment divided into invisible blocks that then justify the turn-based combat. As we said in the trial, each movement or action counts as a turn, so not moving is a possible strategy that can be adopted in the DX Rescue Team. In this remake the limit of Pokémon that make up the team has been doubled, going from 4 to 8 and the map, all to be revealed, will be our main point of reference and dotted with blue dots, i.e. the objects to be added to the inventory. and red dots that indicate enemy Pokémon and their movements. Once a certain proximity is reached, the fight will begin and it will be possible to choose between four attacks, just like in the standard game, in order to get the better of the opponent.
There are different types of attacks such as close range, those that hit up to two blocks away to multiple attacks (like Fury) which can be much more devastating than what regular series players are used to.
In fact, if at the beginning the mechanics may seem more complex than usual because there are numerous, the title comes to the aid of the player by providing an exhaustive list of keywords in the settings, without forgetting also the Dojo Makuhita south of the Pokémon Square, slightly retouched to learn the basics of gameplay and leveling up our team faster for important missions. Once you get in tune with the game the gameplay can get pretty fast repetitive, which is why it is advisable to take a test ride with the demo and see for yourself if this style of play is right for you.
The place where most of the mundane and non-worldly life in the Pokémon world is concentrated is called Pokémon Square and is also our point of reference for TM, depositing money, objects and other characters that deserve a little more space, namely Gulpin and Wigglytuff. The poison-type Pokémon not only fulfills the functions of the classic reminder and forget-moves, but above all it can combine (and break down) two or more moves so that the Pokémon always does them in quick succession and automatically. Wigglytuff, on the other hand, is a key character because he is the manager of Friend Areas of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, which are practically the fields where the Pokémon we will recruit can stop. The first to have this honor will be a Magnemite, which can be joined by the hundreds of Pokémon present in the title.
In order for a Pokémon to join the rescue team, you must first have the corresponding Friend Area in which the creature lives, while the rest is entrusted to the RNG - an element of luck, which we were able to experience on our skin when it appeared on the screen. a Pokémon shiny (or chromatic), typology absent in the classics. Buying as many Friend Areas as possible will soon become essential to enrich our team with new elements. If we do not have the corresponding habitat it will happen that the Pokémon will not join the team, but leaving some money in exchange for the good experience. After all it is not a goodbye, but just a goodbye.
The legend of Ninetales
The game time is marked for the most part by the secondary missions, which consist of random trips to the dungeons to save a certain Pokémon in one of the various floors of the level to be accepted in the special bulletin board in the Pelipper Post Office. At the end of the mission our rescue team will receive various prizes, including above all a rank advancement in order to reach the gold one where the team of Alakazam, Tyranitar and Charizard sits, Pokémon seen from the bottom up by all the monsters who they will soon become familiar faces.
Obviously, not all the rescue teams come out with the hole and here comes one led by an evil Gengar who will do everything to prevent our advance: natural disasters such as rifts and climate changes perceived in a strong way by some Pokémon are engaged the famous legend of Ninetales, with which our Pokémon (human) will have to deal, fighting against the gossips of the specter.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX offers a amazing plot by the standards of the franchise, and signals the change of tone and the precise turn towards the horizontal plot with an increase in difficulty, proposing a decent level of challenge depending on the team and above all the longevity of the dungeon in question, which will sometimes put a it strains our patience going well beyond the dozen floors (and that's an understatement). To help in the search of the stairs and optimize the experience, an automatic mode comes into play that sees the Pokémon go autonomously towards the exit without any press of a button, only to stop when approached by an opponent. Among the many opponents the boss, often legendary Pokémon enmeshed by calamities, as well as strong and rare Pokémon reported in a dungeon, such as Dragonite or Metagross.
Bailouts… and ghosts
All Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is governed by a system of automatic saving which saves progress at any time, so it is possible to stop and resume the adventure at any point, but there is also the downside: the definitive loss of objects and pokécoins in case of defeat, without the possibility of recovery ... but it will be like this? Here is the loophole we talked about at the beginning of the review: that of sending another rescue team into the dungeon and saving the fallen. You will have unlimited possibilities to reach the dungeon floor where the main team stopped and, if successful, have it restart from that point. In case of surrender, you will lose all the objects and you will have to start from the first floor of the level.
This help system, which is obviously the basis of Spike Chunsoft's IP starting from the title, is also expressed through the online functionality that we unfortunately could not try for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that you can ask and receive help from other players via the internet or password and that if you do not have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription you can choose between one long list of offline help requests by NPC. The longevity of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is guaranteed, in short, and this also by virtue of a talked about definitive dungeon in which you start at level 5 from the first floor. We would like to express with the same certainty that Spike Chunsoft and Nintendo will be able to support the title over the months through official travel distributed via Special Mission, password to be entered to unlock a specific shipment.
The biggest problem of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX that should be mentioned in addition to the natural repetitiveness, is given by the tricks due to the Joy-Con drift, in simple terms the character acting alone. In a turn-based game like Rescue Team DX it is obvious how vital it is to weigh every single movement and how frustrating it is to see the move "stolen" by Joy-Con drift. It has happened to us many times both during the actual gameplay and important choices such as heal a Pokémon or recruit a new member of the team that this phantom problem put a spoke in the wheel, with quite ruinous consequences in the middle of a dungeon. To date, the only sure way to settle the age-old issue of Joy-Con drift is to send the offending controller to Nintendo support, or try to recalibrate it. The results, we anticipate, are often fruitless.
Beyond the limit of Joy-Con drift, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX offers all fans both on TV and in portable mode a revisited and potentially endless experience. In this cel-shaded remake of Red Team and Blue Team, the player sees himself as a human in the form of a Pokémon that will soon surround itself with allies, forming a rescue team. Nostalgic from the first note, Rescue Team DX has been adapted to modern times not only by increasing the limit of the team, but by embellishing the fairy tale and varied world of Pokémon with mega-evolutions, shiny, attacks and updated abilities. It will not be easy, in fact, to forget very soon the wise Whiscash, the mystic Xatu and the many characters that populate the mountains and forests of this new land. The chances of Spike Chunsoft's rogue-like being monotonous are there, but it's the perfect opportunity to see Pokémon from another point of view and indulge in a few manly tears.
► Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a RPG-Adventure game developed and published by Nintendo for Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 06/03/2020
