Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Review

Ever dream of one day becoming a Pokemon? Enjoy being one instead of being the human in charged of them.? Well that question may be answered in this DS game that Chunsoft has put together. But how well together you may ask? Well we’re going to find out what makes this Pokemon game so unique, unlike the other Pokemon games.



First things first, you don’t automatically pick a Pokemon for you to be and start with that, oh no it doesn’t work like that. The game starts with a questionnaire, and after you’ve answer them, you get to automatically be that Pokemon that the game assigns you to be. You might end up to be a treeko, or maybe even pikachu, whatever it is though you get to be that Pokemon. After you have your questions all filled up and have you be the Pokemon then you get to choose a partner to be your friend. You can have any Pokemon that the game sends down from its choices. Soon after that you are ready to start your adventure, adventure full of treacherous enemies, perilous lands, and missions all over the place with trust and betrayal to accompany the storyline.
You wake up in the middle of nowhere with a strange Pokemon ( The Pokemon you chose to be your friend in the questionnaire ) waking you up and checking if you’re all right. The thing is you’re surprised that you see a Pokemon talking and doing basic human stuff. But then your friend tells you that you’re a Pokemon too. Only thing is yourself were never a Pokemon, that you were a human before and change to a Pokemon and somehow waking up in an unknown land being that Pokemon. Well your friend takes you with it to see what was going on with you becoming a Pokemon and other obstacles that are in the way like the recent disaster that’s been erupting in the land, and the disappearances of so many Pokemon that you find on your missions. As you get further and further in the game you see more things that are a mystery and how they all become correlated with one another.



With your friend so eager to start rescuing the missing Pokemon after saving one in the beginning story, both of you decide to start a Pokemon rescue team. You get to even name your team that’s stationed next to a busy village that has a lot of things to offer. It ranges from banks to store your money, a shop where you can buy certain items and objects with you, to a dojo where you can train. Lots of things to do here. On the far right of the village, there’s a post office where the missions are at. You get to see what is going on in the job list to see what jobs are available for rescuing. Of course there are rewards to them like items and your team ranking goes up with that. But this is only when nothing is pretty much going on in terms of the storyline progressing. When an event happens and you need to go do a designated spot then it will open and you must go there. An event just comes out of nowhere after a few jobs are done.Now the gameplay of the story mostly takes place in the areas where you do your rescues instead of the village. The areas are split up by floors, either going up 2F, 3F, or descending like B3F, B4F. When you’re looking for someone, most likely they’ll be wandering all about in a floor.

Well you start somewhere in the world and you look around to find what looks like stairs to get access to the next floor of the dungeon. Crawling in these dungeons are Pokemon that are against you and attack you when you see them. This game is a turned based RPG, but a battle stage doesn’t pop up when you encounter them like in the main series. The battle takes place in the dungeon actually, the floors are made up of squares per se, invisible squares that you walk on, square by square. Up, down, left, right or diagonally. Each step you take per square is one turn . So if you take a step, then your enemies will follow you as well by step. Take another step and they take another step into your direction. As the draw closer to you then they will start attacking and you take turns attacking them. Most likely they’re weak compare to you and your partner who you take along with you, but beware as there might be many of them at a time.


You can control the game with the buttons or the touchpad. Both are an option , control yourself by either the touch pad or touching the touch screen to a spot and they will follow it. One button is either for opening the menu where your items, and your attacks are stored and another is for a normal quick attack on your foes, but all this are still done with the touch screen, any way you want it’s there.

Since this game is also available on the GBA, the graphics for the DS has been toned down with it as it looks the same to its GBA twin game. Your Pokemon is a sprite that walks around Into a town that looks also GBA-ish. Not really a winner in the graphics department , but it’s still colorful and great that the area around matches its surroundings.

Music, also plays for each dungeon you come across with. Story of the game is well written and a tear-jerker at some parts for those that are sensitive. And there are lots of interactivity with this and the GBA version of the game. Main story can take up to 20 hours to complete and then there’s the extras as in getting an even higher team rescue ranking, or just get some new Pokemon teammates to get, train them and they’ll fight for you wherever land you go. Also as you go out into the wild fighting all them monsters and collecting all them items, beware not to lose your HP, as you lose in a dungeon then all your items that you’ve brought with you gets lost as well and you will never get to retrieve them again unless, there’s always turning off the system while quick saving in a floor. Also you may have notice that one floor looks exactly the same in another floor that you’ve previously went through, but only it’s at a different floor. If you’re a fan of Pokemon that maybe you should try out this game if you are willing to try out a new kind and style of game that has all things Pokemon but then again, if you’re not really into the mystery dungeon concept that this review has just stated, then it’s best to skip this game and try out the main series of the franchise.

Gameplay : 7 / 10
Graphics: 6 / 10
Story: 9 / 10
Sound/Music: 7/ 10
Replay Value: 8/ 10

Final Tally:

7.5 / 10

Pokemon dungeon a 7.5 ?! Your bias ! I give it a 5-6 at most. game was boring felt very repetitive.

There are to many pokemon and references to pokemon in this game...

El Duderino wrote:There are to many pokemon and references to pokemon in this game...

That's cause it is a pokemon game?

Brawl4life wrote:Pokemon dungeon a 7.5 ?! Your bias ! I give it a 5-6 at most. game was boring felt very repetitive.

So says the person who hates singleplayer games.

I´m just saying the mystery and dungeon aspects of the game are underdeveloped...

^ it's a pokemon game, Pokemon has to overwhelm the "mystery and dungeon" part.