

The game explains away its deviations from the usual Pokémon blueprint through its story.

Everything of note, whether it's recruiting additional Pokémon or fighting legendary Pokémon, happens in any of the game's 16 or so dungeons. Whereas a typical Pokémon game has a large overworld with multiple environments populated with hundreds of villagers and Pokémon, this game has only a single small overworld village populated by a few chatty Pokémon and a handful of useful shops. Suffice it to say, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has more in common with a litany of dungeon hacks than it does with any of Nintendo's traditional Pokémon role-playing games. If you don't occasionally eat an apple or a seed, you'll faint and leave the dungeon. Also, like every ChunSoft dungeon hack, this game has a hunger meter. Pokémon become stronger and learn new attacks as they gain experience, various items can be collected and used, and gold can be collected for later spending in the village. You can perform close-up or ranged attacks, throw rocks and iron scraps at enemies from afar, and pick up any items that happen to be sitting around. For the most part, what happens in the dungeons is all of the usual stuff that you'd expect from a dungeon hack. You have direct control over the lead Pokémon's actions, but the CPU controls the other characters. You command a party of as many as four Pokémon. In a nutshell, every time you take a step or perform an action, the enemies in the dungeon also take a step or perform an action. Like those games, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has you exploring randomly generated dungeons and fighting the monsters inside them in a manner that combines real-time movement with some of the nuances of turn-based games. Although most were published only in Japan, a couple have made their way to North America, including Chocobo's Dungeon 2 and Torneko: The Last Hope, both for the Sony PlayStation. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is all about fighting monsters in randomly generated dungeons and bringing back loot.ĬhunSoft has been churning out Mystery Dungeon games for various publishers since the early 1990s. The real kicker, though, is that ChunSoft's game wasn't that good to begin with, and the injection of Pokémon elements hasn't done a thing to change that. Nintendo and ChunSoft have simply taken a dungeon hack that ChunSoft has produced for numerous other publishers in the past and integrated the Pokémon franchise's characters and a few of its key concepts into it.

For starters, it isn't even a true Pokémon game. Lovers of all things Pokémon are bound to be disappointed by Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, as are those looking for a role-playing game to play on their preferred Nintendo handheld.
