It's been a long time since I last played a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game, in fact way back to the first pair. I owned Blue Rescue Team, and I remember enjoying it. The story was interesting, though I didn't get very far; the game came out during a rough time in my life, so I didn't spend a lot of time playing video games. Even so, the premise is hard to forget: It's a Rogue-like, but with Pokémon! And also you're a human who has inexplicably turned into a Pokémon. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a remake of those first two games, Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team, and from what I can tell so far, it's pretty faithful to the source material.

This game starts off in exactly the same way as the original on which it was based: You wake up in the Pokémon world, discover you're the selected Pokémon when your chosen partner finds you, and start your journey. A mother Butterfree runs into the two of you, terrified about her child, a Caterpie that has fallen into a newly-opened fissure in the ground and is now surrounded by hostile Pokémon. The two of you rescue it, and thus start your Rescue Team: A group of Pokémon that take it upon themselves to rescue others in trouble.

Truth be told, I'd wanted to play other Mystery Dungeon games, but the timing was never good for me. So, now that this game is out, I look forward to attempting to play through it again, with updated graphics. These graphics, incidentally, are pretty nice, designed to look and feel like a children's picture book; on the opening menu even, you can hold the minus button to "Admire Illustration", to get all the menu items off the screen so you can see the illustration being used as a backdrop. It's a nice touch! It means Nintendo recognizes aesthetics are an important part of this experience, if they want to make it feel new and fresh.

That having been said, I'm a touch disappointed that there doesn't appear to be any new material, at least not thus far in my playthrough. I've gotten to a point where, without giving away too much, a Diglett gets kidnapped by a Skarmory; this is still quite early in the game, and there's plenty of the old material to still work through. It was my biggest complaint with the Secret of Mana remake Square Enix released two years ago, that, while it was nice they'd updated the graphics, they brought essentially nothing new to the table, that it played exactly like the original and might as well have been just a straight port. I don't know; we'll see.

As of right now, I can say the game is every bit as charming and intriguing as I remember the original being, so it does have that going for it. Alas, since Blue Rescue Team was a DS release, and DS games can still be played on 3DS systems, aside from the admittedly-wonderful graphical update, I'm not seeing a huge draw to playing this over the original on still-current hardware.