E3 2009: Hands-on: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 24 June 2009 / 9,539 Views
The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a rather interesting spinoff series. Instead of a typical RPG with randomly occurring turn-based battles, and human trainers issuing orders to Pokemon one at a time, the Mystery Dungeon series has a more active component. The player takes on the role of a trainer that has been transformed into a Pokemon, and forms a team to go into dungeons to complete tasks. Instead of separate turn-based battles where all you do is select your moves, in the Mystery Dungeon games the Pokemon walk around a dungeon (with each tile of movement taking one "turn" invisibly to the player) and attack enemies as they appear on screen by seamlessly selecting commands from the menu without any transition to a separate battle sequence. It's still turn-based but feels much more smooth.
The Explorers versions of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon are the second set of games on the DS - the first being Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team, with a GameBoy Advance version, Red Rescue Team, released at the same time. Earlier this year, Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness were released in the US. This fall will see the US release of Explorers of Sky, bringing some small improvements over Time/Darkness in the traditional Pokemon "third game" formula.
Explorers of Sky will give you five new playable Pokemon (bringing it up to a new total of 19) and add several new Pokemon that you can recruit and fight in the world (over 490 total). Two of the new playable Pokemon are Riolu and Eevee, and both were available for play at the E3 demo. Superficially they don't play any differently from any other Pokemon, but rather have different attacks and stats so strategically can be used slightly differently.
In aesthetic terms, there's nothing really new in Explorers of Sky. You still have the same isometric, two-dimensional viewpoint and move about in the four cardinal directions on a coarse grid throughout randomly-generated dungeon floors that have a rather generic appearance. One of the main complaints from the first Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games was that after a little while, all the dungeons started to look the same but with a different color skin. That's been improved somewhat in the Explorers set of games, with different types of terrain in some of the dungeons, but it will still get a bit repetitive after awhile.
Gameplay generally consists of the player taking jobs in town to go into the dungeons to fetch items, defeat enemies, or rescue other Pokemon. In addition to the missions that advance the storyline, there are lots of extra tasks to complete for more loot and fame, but the objectives all pretty much boil down to the same thing - go into a dungeon and clear enough of it until you reach a certain floor, then defeat a Pokemon and/or find an item. There's also local wireless trading of items with other players who have any Explorers game, and an online rescue system where you can trade passwords with other players to have them rescue you if you get wiped out in a dungeon (or, alternatively, go rescue some other team down on its luck).
Some new storyline episodes have been added to Explorers of Sky in addition to the new Pokemon, but overall there isn't really enough to justify purchasing the full game again if you already own Explorers of Darkness/Time - unless you're one of those Pokemon fanatics who has to catch every Pokemon in every game that's released, in which case you probably don't even need to be reading this preview. With that said, the new episodes and new Pokemon will probably make Explorers of Sky the best of the three versions. If the concept sounds interesting to you, then Explorers of Sky is probably worth waiting for - it should be out in North America sometime this fall.
Check out the E3 2009 trailer:
