Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness

This is yet another game in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. Like its predecessors, Explorers of Darkness is the counterpart to Explorers of Time. The game has experienced some revisions from Red/Blue Rescue Team. The overall plot still follows the same of the previous installments in the series. The player still loses his/her memory and finds himself/herself stuck in the form of a Pokemon (The species that you'll become depends on the results of a personality quiz the player takes). For this game, you can be any of the Kanto, Johto, or Sinnoh starters along with Pikachu, Meowth, Skitty, and Munchlax. Another Pokemon, referred to as the player's partner, is met (The player can choose who s/he wants to be his/her partner). The two join forces to create an explorer team and run around through randomly generated dungeons to complete tasks (whether it be to find lost items, save other Pokemon, guide others as travel guides, or capture outlaws). Along the way, new Pokemon will be added to the team after gaining their respect in battle. The more specific plot deals with the players trying to stop the destruction of time by preventing the loss of Time Gears, gears that have the magical ability to keep time in check in the Pokemon realm. As the player advances through the game, more details will of course be revealed and the player will slowly realize who s/he is and why s/he lost his/her memories.

When it comes to gameplay, the game, like many other dungeon-oriented games, is very unforgiving. If either the player or partner dies while in a dungeon, then both the player and partner are sent back to the beginning of the dungeon and will lose all of their items and money. The only way to prevent loss is to store your items and money in storage, where it will be permanently kept safe. That way, the only things you lose will be the items newly acquired. Still very annoying, particularly if you chance upon a valuable item while traversing around in the dungeons. Unfortunately, everything in this game requires money. Good TMs are rare to come by in the game and are very expensive. Oh, you found a chest on your travels? That's awesome! Must be something valuable inside. Oh, there's no way for you to unlock it? Oh, there is a way to unlock the chest but I must pay 150 coins to Xatu? Oh, most of the items received from chests can only be used with certain Pokemon? This just sucks. Overall, I'm not a major fan of this game since I'm not quite seeing a plot here. All you do is basically run around in the dungeons completing tasks. The battle system is very confusing as you can't control what attacks you want the other Pokemon on your team to use. My Wooper, for example, seems to only use Mud Sport even though it knows Water Gun. Perhaps the only things to like about this game (Just because it's Pokemon related doesn't mean that it's a good game. Oh, the horror!) are the music and the cute graphics. The expressions of all the Pokemon, even the bad guys, are all very cute and exaggerated. Perhaps the most amusing character in the game is the Guildmaster Wigglytuff, who likes only Perfect Apples and is otherwise very eccentric most of the time.