I was looking up Nintendo DS games and saw this game in the RPG section, so I ‘acquired’ the GBA version and started playing it.
The basic story is that you’re an ordinary kid who’s gone to sleep, and you wake up in a brand new world as a pokemon. The type of Pokemon is determined by a personality quiz at the start. You can also choose your gender but it doesn’t affect the game, really.
So, of course, I used a guide so that my main character is a mudkip.
Unfortunately the dumb emulator erased all my beginning screenshots, so ….
You can also choose a partner pokemon. He’s the one who’ll do most of the talking in the game, to tell you what to do next to advance the story. There are about 8 different pokemon to choose from. Recalling Pikachu’s usefulness in the original Pokemon games, he was the obvious choice.
By the way, your character is pretty much a silent protagonist, although you’ll get some internal monologue revealing his thoughts.
You start off having to save a baby Caterpie lost in the woods somewhere. Afterwards, pikachu decides that since saving the kid was fun, you and he should form a rescue team!
The most logical choice.
It’s a mystery dungeon -type game (obviously). If you’ve never played a game of this genre, well, you really can’t go wrong with Pokemon’s take on it as your first experience. I’ve played through Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon, the Final Fantasy version on PSX, and it was rather difficult. So far the difficulty for Pokemon’s version has been rather easy, although Pikachu has been doing most of the work.
Every time you enter a dungeon, the floor plan is randomized. The floor is tiled, and only one character can be on one tile at a time. For every move you take, whether it be a step from one tile to the next, or use of a skill or item, the enemies around you also make one move, and so do your partymates. So, enemies’ll run after you if you run away from them, meaning you have to kill every monster you run into, and also they’ll piss you off by running away themselves when they’re almost dead.
The enemy has to be right next to you to hit you (diagonals count for this), and for you to hit them with melee attacks.
You also have to be facing the enemy to hurt them (fortunately changing directions does not take up a move). If you’ve got rocks, you can throw them at enemies who are farther away (and I recommend doing this often because the rocks HURT).
Mudkip has the cutest running animation.
Items, enemies, partymates, and staircases are noted on the map, which always overlays your screen. Party AI is kind of stupid — pikachu seems to randomly decide which skill he’s going to use.
They’ve also done a pretty good job with the pokemons’ properties, using the same element system from the original, which is actually kind of broken, but whatever.
Mudkip in his natural habitat. Mudkip can walk on water, but Pikachu can’t.
As you level up, you’ll learn new moves. Just like in classic pokemon games, you can only have 4 moves in your roster, and you can only use a move a limited amount of times every dungeon (it recovers when you leave). If you run out of moves you can still use a normal melee attack.
I’ve only died twice, fortunately I had a revival seed which autorevives anyone in the party who dies.
There are some soul-searching decisions in this game.
I’m kidding. Although, my kid-cum-mudkip has had a few mysterious dreams so far, hinting at some purpose for his being a mudkip.
Somehow I really got into this story. As ridiculous as it is, they’ve put some effort into it. Natural disasters are becoming more and more frequent in the pokemons’ world, wreaking havoc and causing good pokemon to become wild and dangerous. Thus the need for so many rescue teams.
Boss fight imminent.
And some rescue teams are bad, extorting people for money. You’ll soon get a rival team, Team MEANIES (no joke) who’ll cause problems. The Ekans kinda looks like an earthworm, though, not a snake.
He was actually pretty challenging.
