Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon: Blue


I just got Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon – Blue and I’m really enjoying it. Sure there are flaws to it but man its nice to play a different take on the whole Pokémon gameplay and universe.

 

Gameplay

You start as a Pokémon, or a human turned into one, who has to find a way to turn back. You get a few psychology type questions at the start which seem to determine which Pokémon you will play as, I got Mudkip! Then you get to choose and name your buddy, well doh Pikachu obviously.

The game then sets you up as a group of Pokémon who go around saving other Pokémon (hence the whole rescue squad thing). Each rescue comes as a mission and you can have several missions on the go at once. Its a bit like an offline MMO the whole dungeon, grinding, taking missions thing. The nice part is that becuase you can take on a bunch of missions at once you don’t have to keep re-entering dungeons all the time (you do have to rinse and repeat them when new ones missions appear but at least you can complete all the ones you have in one fell swoop).

 

MMO without the whole online thing

So its pretty much an MMO in concept but it is obviously offline. So does that mean all the grinding without the grouping? Well no and yes. No you get to take up to 4 (at the moment anyway) members of your Rescue team with you. They follow you around the dungeon and attack, buff and defend you as required.

 

The good, the frustrating and the ugly

The good is that the feeling of completing the missions, recruiting new Pokémon to your team and exploring the world is really fun and enthralling.

 

The frustrating is that the AI team mates are not up to the best, they follow you around but sometimes don’t seem to attack or often constantly buff themselves. I have often found them attacking a bad guy off screen (which means they freeze in place) and I carry on moving which means they are now stuck there attacking or being attacked and I can’t get back to help them. The main reason for this is the pseudo turn based movement, each move you make takes a turn, which predominantly you don’t notice as you move in real time, but when you get attacked (or a team mate does) you then notice the turn based side of things. This means that each step you take during combat moves you away from any team mates who are fighting, to compound this you then take one turn for each step back to them. 

 

The ugly is that the world looks beautiful and really nicely drawn but the dungeons (which you will be seeing a lot of) are very repetitive and boring. This is in part due to the fact that the dungeons are randomly generated and so the graphics need to be generic. But to be honest I would rather see the same dungeon again and again but have it better thought out and look nicer than be random, ugly and boring.

 

Conclusion

I think this is a fun game and  a great Poke-diversion until the real think comes out (Diamond and Pearl are out now in Japan) and with a little polish the concept could be awesome (particularly if you could go online and team up with mates).

 

-Nic

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