But what's this?

A new Pokémon game!

But what's this?

It's a game where I am a Pokémon? A game where I must use my new found monster status to rescue other Pokémon?

How ridiculous.

But how intriguing.

Let's do it. Let's play some Mystery Dungeon!

But what's this?

"Sketch the curves r = 2a cos theta and r = a(1 + cos theta) on the same diagram. Hence find the area enclosed between the curves."

Maths homework. Ugh. Be back in twenty minutes.

...

I'm back! Time to Nintendo DS some Pokémon!

But what's this?

RED Rescue Team? For the GAME BOY?

I don't know why I bother sometimes.

Time to be serious though. What can you expect in the near future from these new Pokémon RPGs?

Well in my opinion, a lot. The game starts by asking you some interesting questions - the answers of which you give are used to choose the character you will play the game as - Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Pikachu, Chikorita, Cyndaquil, Totodile, Treecko, Torchic, Mudkip, Cubone, Machop, Psyduck, Meowth, Eevee or Skitty. No Typhlosion? Ah well, I thought, Cyndaquil will do.

So imagine my disgust when I became a MUDKIP. With any luck you won't face this psychological setback at the beginning of your game. You'll read the guide on picking your character I'll post sometime in the next 24 hours and be happy.

Funnily enough, the Mystery Dungeon games focus on finding your way around dungeons. Throughout the game you find yourself trying to work your way through dungeons of varying difficulty. Throughout you can find wild opponents to battle with, items to use, money to spend... the usual. You'll be joined in this by various partners in your rescue team by loads of different Pokémon throughout the game - you get to choose your first partner, and naturally I picked Cyndaquil.

The game starts with you realising you've turned into a Pokémon before you and your partner run into a Butterfree who's in floods of tears after her baby Caterpie fell through a crack in the ground. Being the wonderful person you are, you agree to go and try to find baby Caterpie. Here you experience your first dungeon - the idea simply being to find the stairs to the next level until you reach your goal. Along the way you literally bump into wild Pokémon, and battle them by simply pressing "A" to Tackle. Excitingly, your partner will help you in these battles, but one must take special care in making sure neither you nor said partner runs out of HP. You level up as per the original games, and can choose other attacks to use from the Menu Screen as you learn them. Also excitingly, is that you automatically recover HP just by walking around. Lovely stuff. Further excitingly, you have a appetite which must be filled by eating food which is found on the floor of dungeons and all over the place (there's a lot of reasons why eating food off the floor is wrong, but that's just attention to detail, we don't need to go there). If your hunger gets too much, your HP will start to DEcrease whilst you're walking around, rather than increase. Exciting stuff, eh?

As soon as baby Caterpie has been found, Butterfree is delighted and gives you a few berries as a reward, before you decide to setup a proper Rescue Team. The aim of the game from then on is to go on all sorts of lovely missions and try to recruit all 386 Pokémon to join you.

So what do I think of this game? I think it could be nice little breath of fresh air to the series, given the emphasis is more on "survival" as such rather than "catching them all". I can imagine that unless you're really into this sort of thing however, that it soon might get a bit tedious and repetitive, although they've cleverly made it so that the dungeons are randomly generated, thus no two games are ever the same. The graphics are all nicely arranged and look nice anyway, and the sound doesn't make me want to kill anything just yet.

Okay, so it's not going to be a patch on D/P when they come out, but until they do this is a nice little way to pass the time. I recommend you go and pawn all of your possessions to enable you to go and buy it.

Page written by Typhlosion.

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