Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Darkness/Time represent the latest incarnations of the fifteen year old mystery dungeon series, which has once again been given the Pokemon treatment and offers a few enhancements over last year’s Blue/Red rescue team games. Players of the previous games will see a lot of the same core gameplay here and can safely skip these next two paragraphs, for the rest of you, you’ll find that a lot happens when you mix two games in a bucket and stir, so please read on.

The Mystery dungeon series is based around the original ‘Rogue’ in which you simply went down the floors of a dungeon and battle monsters in search of treasure, you’ve likely heard of ‘Roguelikes’, a title given to these spinoff games that enhance on the original idea in so-many ways but stay true to the core elements. One of the biggest characteristics of Rogue is the difficulty, and although not as brutal as traditional Roguelikes, you’ll be failing a lot while trying to play through Darkness/Time and then you’ll be failing some more. Since the dungeons you enter are generated at random each time you visit, you can’t take advantage of prior knowledge to reach the end and sometimes the layouts will seem just darn right unfair when you encounter another of the Rouge features, the ‘Monster House’. Throughout most of the game it’ll be just you and a partner, and you’ll likely be facing just one or two enemies at a time, but the random ‘Monster House’ will throw a large amount of monsters in the room with you, giving you little chance of survival, such is the burden of the dungeoneer. If you believe you can get through the difficulty you’ll find that the game behind it all has a lot to offer, outside of the dungeons you have a storyline, people to talk to, items to buy and a lot of things that make RPGs what they are. Your millage on the series greatly hinges on your love for both Pokemon and/or Roguelikes, but the most interesting moments can be seeing how your Pokemon behave in these new situations and environments.

Most of the core Pokemon rules are here, you’ll level up with experiences, eventually get the ability to evolve, learn new moves with your levels (up to 4 as usual), hold items, use PP, TMs and try to build a selection of all available Pokemon. All these rules are merged so well with the Rogue rules, it’s like they were meant to be together, but just as the Pokemon rules are unfamiliar to a Rogue fan, some of the additional rules here may take a little getting used to for the Pokemen and Pokegirls. A few of the new things you’ll find are; Having to keep your belly full on long dungeon trips, only four Pokemon in a team at once, throwing items and a whole lot else, such as the crazy shops in the middle of dangerous dungeons. You’ll also find tweaks to the way that your moves behave, some weaker moves have a lot more punch in the right situations and can really turn the tide however having a powerful move that you can use only 5 times may not always be the best choice when faced with 20 floors of danger. These moves can also be ‘linked’ allowing you to use two moves in a single turn, giving you a quick one, two punch effect such as lowering your attackers defense before delivering a quick slap to the face.

The new features in Darkness/Time won’t turn any heads and it definitely won’t win over any new fans, however the changes do improve over the previous games and are well worth mentioning. As you’d expect you now have access to the full roster of Pokemon, that’s a staggering 490 for those of you keeping score, up from the 386 from the last adventure. All should be obtainable if you have access to the alternate game (time - darkness) but before you ask, no you cannot in any way transfer these across to Diamond/Pearl to boost your legendary collection, sorry! Of course you’ll have a new story to follow and dungeons to visit, but I’ll go into that a little more later. The last major feature is wi-fi support, which isn’t all that surprising since many DS games have taken this routes recently (Diamond/Pearl included), the most surprising part of this is the email support, yes email. Just like the previous games, when you inevitably fall in a dungeon you can request help from another player, this was achieved before by posting a lengthy code up on a forum and hoping someone would rescue you, now you can simply post it out through wi-fi for the world to see or send it to friends (using friend codes) at which point your request will trigger an email to be sent to their address. What this means is you could register your Wii number and be alerted with a blue light, or my personal favorite is to have it sent to a cell phone where you’ll receive your friend’s urgent plea for help while you’re doing totally mundane day to day life, it’s all about synergy.

One thing I wasn’t expecting to stand out was the storyline, Pokemon games have always featured a story that was purely functional and never anything that was stand-out memorable. The biggest surprise here was that the storyline ended up having a lot more going on than I first gave it credit for, it starts off very much like the previous games but ends up with a few surprises and a great ending, it surely won’t win any awards, however it’ll have you fighting through the dungeons to see what would happen next. The characters you meet are varied and all the townsfolk will be talking about what’s going on with dialog changing often, the most interesting character you’ll meet is your guildmaster Wigglytuff. This Pokemon must of evolved with a bad moonstone and you’ll be constantly wondering if his random singing and shouting of “Yoom-Ta!” is just a facade and if there’s actually a mastermind behind those glazed eyes, either way the sheer insanity of this Pink balloon puts him in the same line as Minsc and HK47 in my book.

Explorers of Time/Darkness isn’t without faults, many non-persistent gamers will undoubtedly get frustrated with the challenging difficulty, people who are easily disturbed by completely unfair odds may quickly find themselves dropping the game early before finishing. Another minor shortcoming is the menu system, epically related to the wi-fi which isn’t very user friendly and streamlined, options aren’t in obvious places and you may find yourself repeatedly disconnecting and re-connecting from wi-fi in order to get a few simple tasks done. That said, the wi-fi does work, but having the options integrated into the actual gameplay rather than in a bunch of menus could of been a better route to take. It’s also surprising not to see any kind of Pokedex included, although this does make sense since you aren’t a trainer who has been given the task of cataloging every Pokemon, but it does make life hard if you are trying to add all the Pokemon to your team.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time/Darkness isn’t for everyone, in fact it isn’t for most people, it focuses on it’s audience and doesn’t add much to last years adventure. Fans of this genre will find there’s a lot of gaming to be had here with 20 chapters that will take a long time to get through, followed by several extra missions that’ll keep you playing after the main game is completed and take your patience to a new level. With so many hours of gameplay and plenty to do, I give Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time/Darknes 4 flaming monkey heads out of 5.