Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a Nintendo Switch remake of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team where you explore randomly generated dungeons and rescue Pokemon.  You are a human who has been transformed into a Pokemon somehow, and the game opens with a personality test that chooses which Pokemon you are.  I ended up with a Charmander because the game deemed me as both cautious and meddlesome, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  After that, I was able to choose my teammate, and I ended up picking the Skitty, a pink cat Pokemon.

Apparently, fissures have been opening up all over the place, and Pokemon have been falling in or becoming more aggressive as a result.  Your first rescue involves saving a Caterpie and reuniting it with its Butterfree mother.  As you explore each cave, you find items and money and fight Pokemon using one of four moves.  Battles are turn-based, but quick, so they don’t drag out.  Once you find the stairs, you can proceed to the next level.  As you explore, there is a timer that goes down that represents your belly, and you’ll have to eat food before it runs out, or else you’ll start taking damage every time you move.   Like with any good RPG, defeating enemies allows you to level up, but you can gain experience way faster by defeating enemies in the Dojo, provided you have the necessary tickets.  I also heard that you can eventually get more Pokemon to join your team, which is neat.

I’ll be honest, this game seems a bit repetitive for my liking.  The demo has two dungeons, Tiny Woods and Thunderwave Cave, and there is very little difference between the two.  Whether the job was given to you for plot purposes or from the bulletin board, it seems to matter not, as either way, you just explore each level and defeat enemies until you reach the floor with the Pokemon in need.  The only rescue that differed slightly from the rest was when I needed to bring a certain berry found elsewhere on the floor to the Poochyena that was in trouble.  Honestly, when I heard that I needed to rescue a Diglett from a third dungeon, and the demo ended, I was relieved to be done.

If this is your kind of thing, though, I heard that this remake is generally superior to the original games it’s based on.  The story seems to be the same, but there are plenty of quality of life improvements.  For example, you don’t have to use the Pokemon the personality quiz chooses for you if you don’t want to.  People online also said that, while the main game is short and easy (15-20 hours), the post-game offers more content and more of a challenge (50+ hours).  Though plenty of people admit that the $60 price tag is not really worth it, and the game should really be $30-40.