YMMV / Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • The protagonist shows no desire to be turned back into a human aside from one optional line early in the game. There's no worrying about the life they left behind. Though some dialogue implies or states that they don't remember anything about being a human besides their name, which could explain that.
  • None of the townsfolk freak out or even seem distressed after Xatu’s announcement that a huge asteroid is about crash into Earth, potentially ending the world, and still remain optimistic and go about their business. Though somewhat downplayed as some of them do show genuine concern, and this could be explained by them being trusting enough towards the hero and partner that they will take care of it.
  • Like the protagonist, Gengar also doesn't seem to care about no longer being human or his life before, even though he actually remembers said life. Any angst he does have is about Gardevoir and her fate.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Mewtwo. Despite the fact that the cutscene before unlocking its dungeon makes it look like the most powerful Pokémon of all, it's only Level 40 and comes after 98 floors of powerful foes like Tyranitar, Alakazam and every form of starter. You should have no problems beating it quickly, especially given the massive amount of levels you're going to gain on the way to it. DX actually averts it, since Western Cave is now 20 floors instead of 99, but Mewtwo Mega Evolves to make up for this, and now has over 1,800 HP per phase.
  • Ditto with Lugia, who comes at the end of Silver Trench, a 99 floor dungeon filled with powerful enemies that can snipe the party repeatedly and tons of traps. Add in unavoidable monster houses every few dozen floors as the cherry on top and you have a truly grueling level. Lugia meanwhile only has a weak Gust attack to deal damage, and while it does have a lot of hit points, it's also weak to plenty of common types. It's telling that even a level as draining as the above hardly stops a sufficiently leveled team steamrolling over it.
• Breather Level: In addition to hosting the game's Breather Episode, Uproar Forest also doubles as this, being sandwiched between the resource limiting fugitive arc, which also included That One Boss in the form of Articuno; and the lengthy and difficult Magma Cavern which culminates in the fight against Groudon. By comparison, Uproar Forest is a moderate length dungeon where most of the Pokémon are very easy to fend off, and ends with a Zero-Effort Boss fight against a laughably weak trio of Mankey. The only thing that provides any real difficulty is the fact that this is the dungeon that introduces Monster Houses, and even then, they aren't that bad just yet due to the aforementioned point about the Pokémon being easy to take care of.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Magnemite automatically joins your team early on, and will hold its own throughout the entire game's main storyline, with its electric typing being good against almost all of the bosses, and being capable of learning powerful STAB moves in Thunder and Thunderbolt, coupled with a Game-Breaker in Metal Sound, and a solid utility move in Thunder Wave. Sure, you can go out of your way to recruit a Mon to replace it, but with the limited team slots in the main storyline, it's almost easier just to use Magnemite the entire time.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • The player character and the partner. All subsequent games would end up carrying this as a tradition.
  • Gengar/Gardevoir. For bonus points, these two species can breed in the main series.
• Franchise Original Sin: The series has been trying to move away from the concept of using basic attacks after Explorers; Gates and Super changed them to always do 5 damage regardless of the player's stats, making them all but useless against anything except for Shedinja. DX, however, is the first game to not have normal attacks for the leader whatsoever, resulting in cries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! from fans.
• Fridge Horror: At one point in the story, the main character and his/her friend are driven out of Pokemon Square because of Gengar tricking everyone into thinking that the main character is the human from the Ninetales legend who abandoned Gardevoir under the impression that he/she'll destroy the world. This is pretty sad in itself, but after you complete the game and save Medicham from Wish Cave, it's revealed that Gengar is the real human from the Ninetales legend. Basically, Gengar tried to make the main characters his scapegoats and make them take the fall for his crime!
• Fridge Logic: Your first mission as an official rescue team involves rescuing some Magnemite who got stuck in a cave, and the reason they came to you is because Caterpie told them about you. Except Caterpie doesn't know where you live, nor even what your team name is. This is fixed in Rescue Team DX, as Butterfree asks for your team's name and Caterpie repeats it.
  • Not to mention that one of the Magnemite could enter the cave and easily complete the trio. Unless it has to happen three at a time, they could easily fix their incompleteness problem.
• Game-Breaker:
  • From Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team:
    • Due to lacking the gender mechanic that the main series games have and the tweaks this game made to Status Effects, Attract's infatuation effect disables anything without the Oblivious ability for 5-6 turns. This includes bosses. Any potentially hard encounter is made trivial by hitting a boss (who tend to fight you alone) with Attract since you always go first and can shut them down before they can take you out. The above made Skitty almost unstoppable in this game—not only can it learn it via level up, but it also has Cute Charm for an ability! This makes it more useful than it is in the main series! Attract is also a fairly common TM, making it easy for other Pokemon to do exactly the same. The remake partially fixes this by applying the changes to the Infatuation status from Gates to Infinity onwards, in that the affected Pokémon only has a 50% chance of doing nothing (instead of being completely disabled).
    • The Magnemite that automatically joins your team early in the story starts with Metal Sound, a move that lowers Special Defense by 3 stages. This drastically increases the damage output of your special moves, to the point that even a foe like Groudon can quickly fall to repeated Electric-type attacks^note though this is averted in DX as type immunities will straight-up No-Sell attacks instead of taking Scratch Damage. Magnemite can be worth bringing to boss fights even when severely underleveled. DX nerfs this by having you wait until Level 25, but makes up for it by giving that same Magnemite a powerful ranged attack in Signal Beam; not quite as Game Breaking as before, but still far from useless to have around during missions.
    • Castform, of all things, can be a powerhouse if you're lucky enough to obtain one. It is recruited at level 50 in a dungeon where you're expected to be around level 30 to 40, and if it knows Weather Ball and Rain Dance (or if you brought a Rain Dance user yourself), it can defeat the boss of its home dungeon in just two or three hits.
    • The stat system is a big one. If you know how to, you can make a very powerful Pokemon before you tackle any postgame dungeons, making everything but the Lv. 1 dungeons a piece of cake (outside of certain moves like Screech).
    • A glitch in the original Blue Rescue Team with Quicksaving allows you to manipulate the game's Random Number Generator which determines the layout and content of the floors. As you might expect, this opens up RNG abuse potential so brokenly reliable that many speedrunners have utilized them in their 100% speedruns. This allows you to do things like quickly grinding gold or farm otherwise extremely rare items such as Ginsengs, Joy Seeds, or vitamins. It also allows for easy recruiting or gold farming. Naturally, this was all fixed in the remake.
    • The easiest way to abuse this is to go to Frosty Forest, quicksave by the stairs on 2F, then make your way to 4F. You will always spawn right next to a Kecleon Shop if you did this correctly. You then drop any item(s) to sell like you normally would (Gold Ribbons work best), but BEFORE actually talking to the Kecleon — do a quicksave and then reload it. The game will glitch out and the Kecleon will continuously sell that same Gold Ribbon for 2000 poke each time you talk to him. You can keep doing this until you've reached the cap of 99,999 poke, then you can simply buy back the Gold Ribbon for 3000 poke and clear the level as normal (or simply use an Escape Orb). Save, deposit the poke, then lather, rinse, and repeat until you have your desired amount of cash stockpiled.
    • Another trick allows you to easily farm Lightning Field for Ginseng. By following the steps in the video using any Mon with Teleport and a Mobile Scarf, you can easily get 14 Ginsengs in a single run. What's more is that after farming, you can then use another quicksave trick to rig the RNG to always give the maximum +3 boost from the Ginsengs you eat. Now consider using this trick to boost one of the gamebreaker moves like the mentioned Heatwave or Bulletseed, and you can easily destroy the rest of the postgame content.
    • Wonder Mail generation. By using online tools, you can create valid Wonder Mail passwords with any condition and any reward that you want, essentially turning the system into a cheat code input. Broken Base abound as players debate the validity of using a Wonder Mail generator to break the game, as it is perfectly legal and within the bounds of the game's systems without hacking or taking advantage of a bug or glitch, but to many it is a rather blatant exploit of the game's systems that breaks the spirit of the game in the first place.
  • From Rescue Team DX:
    • The remake introduces Helper Orbs. Using them calls a rescue team consisting of three fully evolved forms of the Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn starters. They can be used in boss fights, and they are an absolute Godsend. Not only do the Pokemon called from Helper Orbs help you in fights, while their attacks don't do a whole lot of damage, bosses can easily turn their attention onto them while the player and partner can attack the boss without worrying about getting hurt or wasting Reviver Seeds.
    • There is a Rare Quality that is as mundane as incredibly powerful: Narrow Focus. It doesn't sound really amazing by itself, as it "just" gives all moves used from a corridor perfect accuracy, but in the post-game, it goes beyond Boring, but Practical when you notice it affects moves that are supposed to be balanced by their poor accuracy, including those that hit multiple times, pierce through the Pokémon they hit, have an insane range or KO the target in one hit; Narrow Focus makes missing with these inaccurate moves a thing of the past. Purity Forest or Joyous Tower runs can be made significantly easier if you send a Pokémon with Narrow Focus and a powerful, yet inaccurate move in their starting movepool, like Politoed and its access to Hydro Pump or Perish Song (which can trivialize Monster Houses in an unbelievable way, although you don't get experience as a result). While more limited in scope, Rapid Bull's-Eye, another powerful Rare Quality centered around perfect accuracy applying only to multi-hit moves^note even moves that hit twice thanks to Swift Swim or Chlorophyll, also counts as it has great potential to completely ruin bosses given that the attack power of said moves are scaled up (hitting for tremendous damage even before stat buffs), supplemented by the fact that some starter Pokemon (Skitty, Cubone, and Meowth) and some early-game mons come packaged with multi-hit moves.
    • Steamroll is another Rare Quality that is borderline broken. Every move does at least neutral damage, basically telling Elemental Absorption abilities (like Flash Fire and Volt Absorb) and Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors to go to hell. This is a good perk in the early game when you don't have much beyond your STAB move, gets better in the late game as you can spam Bonemerang or Razor Leaf against the legendary birds, and becomes a true Game-Breaker in the post-game when you can absolutely destroy Monster Houses with Heat Wave or Discharge.
    • Squad Up does one over the aformentioned two by being non-dependent on the Random Number God; It's always the first Rare Quality the Player gets when they first eat a Gummi. The basic gist of it is that it makes Pokémon more likely to join you the more Pokémon you have recruited, including temporary recruits from dungeons that are following you at the time. In theory, this was likely to encourage new players to quickly grow their rescue team. In practice, it trivializes boss fights by letting you bring a team of up to eight Pokémon with you to wail on them (you can normally only bring three to start with, not counting escorts). Bonus points if they have Boring, but Practical Rare Qualities like Food Finder (find Tiny Apples on every floor) or Notorious Healing (HP regeneration is sped up) to make getting to that boss a bit easier. In addition, any Pokémon that don't join your team when the missions are done give you a few hundred Poké, making this a good money-farming Quality as well. It loses usefulness in the post-game, as suddenly you have to worry about keeping them alive lest an enemy knock them out and get the Awakened status to wreck the rest of you; but even then it's Difficult, but Awesome at worst as it still makes the post-game bosses much easier to deal with.
    • Small Stomach is a Rare Quality that fills your belly completely regardless of what you eat. This includes berries, seeds and even the Grimy Food. It makes worrying about Hunger in dungeons with no real food in it such as the 99 floor Silver Trench a whole lot easier to deal with, especially when paired with Food Finder.
    • A Shedinja with the Rare Quality Notorious Fasting is, by far, the best Pokémon in the game to farm items with. In the main series, Shedinja is limited by the fact it's a One-Hit-Point Wonder, but in DX, the stat system has no limitations whatsoever for it - while it does have low base stats, it can still be capped to 500 HP and 255 in all other stats, making it just as bulky and powerful as any other Pokémon, and with Wonder Guard to get a very high amount of immunities. It also has the ability to move through walls (at the cost of 5 Belly per turn), thanks to its Ghost typing, and while this can cause Shedinja to lose health quickly with an empty Belly, Notorious Fasting prevents it from losing HP when not in a wall. Furthermore, it can learn Leech Life (which it has STAB on) and Giga Drain, so even if you are losing too much HP from looking for the stairs, it can recover that HP very quickly (and, thanks to Wonder Guard, the enemy might not be able to hit back). It's entirely possible and viable to bring a single Notorious Fasting Shedinja, with only a very small amount of Oran Berries, Elixirs, and Reviver Seeds, to dungeons like the Buried Relic, and get through all floors with little effort.
• Goddamned Bats: Ledyba in DX. They always spawn in groups of four and they can come with pretty much every annoying move you can think of: Safeguard, Reflect and Light Screen to make every enemy in the room more resilient, Comet Punch for multi-hit damage, Silver Wind for room-wide damage, and Supersonic to confuse you. The only reason they are not Demonic Spiders is that they always spawn asleep, allowing you to sneak on them... but if they are accidentally woken up, you're all into an annoying battle.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the original GBA/DS versions of the game, allowing a recruitable boss (such as most legendary Pokémon) to consume a Reviver Seed during the boss battle will cause them to retain their artificially-bloated HP stat even when recruited, instead of reverting to their species' usual HP value. This allows you to acquire nigh-unkillable monstrosities such as Lugia with 800 HP or Deoxys with 950 HP, without needing to feed them a crapload of stat boosters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Check the main page.
• Narm: Team Meanies is very difficult to take seriously because of their name and how upfront they are about wanting to Take Over the World...by doing rescue missions, mind you.
• Nightmare Fuel: Can be found here.
• Older Than They Think: Recruitable shiny Pokémon were in the Japan-exclusive Adventure Squad games before being reintroduced in DX.
• Padding: The entire chestnuts subplot. Besides being the part where you redecorate the team base, it has no importance in the overarching story and might bring the game to a complete halt if you're not lucky with Chestnut spawns. It's especially glaring considering that this takes place almost immediately before the endgame, even if it is intended to be a breather from the fugitive arc. The developers of the remake seem to have noticed the problem, as Uproar Forest was reduced from ten floors to only four floors (including the boss floor) in DX.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The fact that way too many bosses throughout the main story are Flying-type, five to be precise (Skarmory, Zapdos, Moltres, Articuno, Rayquaza); compared to only three who aren't (Team Meanies, the Mankey gang from Uproar Forest, Groudon), the second of which is a Zero-Effort Boss anyway. This unfairly punishes players who got Cubone, Machop or a Grass-type starter (the former a bit less due to only being compromised offensively and not defensively outside of the part Ice-type Articuno), and can make boss fights feel repetitive to an extent.
  • The DX remake now includes an autosave feature, so you don't have to rely on manual saves. This sounds great... until you learn that the game also autosaves in the middle of dungeons, and even during boss fights. Things aren't going your way so you decide to close the game from the home menu and regroup back where you could prepare? Too bad, you'll just reload in the middle of when you were getting slaughtered. This doesn't combo well with the money and item loss when you die.
• Signature Series Arc: The fugitive arc is the most iconic plotline in the whole game due to its Tear Jerker moments, marking the point at which the story gets a lot more serious, introducing fan favorite Absol near the end of the arc and being set off by the introduction of the first major piece of lore in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, the Ninetales legend.
• Tear Dryer: At the end of the main story, the Player Disappears into Light so they can go back to the human world. They share a heartfelt goodbye with the Partner, and after the credits, we see the Partner sitting in front of their base as the townsfolk just stand there wistfully. Then the Player comes back and everyone gathers around them, overjoyed.
• That One Boss:
  • Woe betide any who brings a team of Grass types to Moltres without a lot of Reviver Seeds (and/or some over-leveling, which first-timers aren't likely to have done done). Some have even Rage Quit because of most of this boss's attacks are OHKOs to Grass types. It's even worse in the remake, as this will likely be the first boss to force you to try to save-scum, only for you to learn the hard way that DX's autosave system means that it saved during the fight; leaving you with no way out except to lose, be rescued by another player, and pray to Arceus that those three tiny reviver seeds it gives you are enough to save you.
  • Articuno is the first boss Pokémon to wield a move that strikes your whole party (Powder Snow) — be prepared to lose a few Reviver Seeds here, especially if one-or-more of your team is Grass- or Ground-type.
  • Even if it lacks relatively hard-hitting moves, Rayquaza is still a pain simply because of its excellent typing and stats; it can take forever to wear it down. DX is even worse when Rayquaza Mega Evolves to Mega Rayquaza, it's gonna tear you to pieces and wastes your Reviver Seeds. The upside is that once beaten, you'll get Rayquaza automatically unlike the Original where it's a small chance of recruitment.
• That One Level:
  • Magma Cavern stands out among the main story dungeons. It's much longer than any prior dungeon and is full of Pokemon with Magnitude, which hits the entire room. Woe betide you if you or your partner (or BOTH if you came in with a Pikachu/fire starter team) are weak to it.
  • Sky Tower is also a force to be reckoned with. Full of nothing but powerful Pokemon, and ghost types who go through walls while your character cannot.
  • Teammates cannot be brought into Purity Forest. Upon entry, the team leader will be reduced to level 1, returning to its original level after exiting the dungeon. IQ will also be reset to the initial skills until the player exits the dungeon. Any items or Poké carried prior to entry will be permanently lost. Wild Pokémon cannot be recruited in this dungeon, and facing progressively harder enemies (reaching even 30 at the last floors)
  • Pitfall Valley, AKA Masquerain and Aerodactyl Hell. The first half of the dungeon is rather manageable, but then Masquerain begin to spawn and it goes nothing but downhill. Masquerain love to spam Silver Wind, a move that targets the entire room. If that wasn't bad enough, Silver Wind has a chance to raise all their stats, which not only boosts the damage that their Silver Winds deal, but it gives them more attacking turns. If you have no way to damage them from a distance first, you may not even be able to approach them. As for Aerodactyl, which start spawning a few floors later, they love to spam Agility and Supersonic, rendering you incapable of hitting them reliably while they can attack up to four times due to all of their speed boosts. Adding icing on the cake, they have the Pressure ability, so your PP drains extremely quickly unless you whittle them away with weak regular attacks, leaving you open to a Supersonic. Even if you bring a Persim Band to counteract confusion, the Agility spam will bring headaches, too. Due to the fact that Aerodactyl eventually becomes the only Pokémon that spawns during the final stretch, Pitfall Valley quickly becomes tedious and frustrating.
  • For the DX remake, Mt. Faraway. Instead of 40 rooms, it is now 60. You’ll have to deal with a lot of tough Pokémon in there such as several fully evolved starters, as well as bad weather conditions such as hail and sandstorms, sometimes even for multiple floors in a row, which result in your teammates often being at a massive risk of fainting. Be prepared to have a lot of Reviver Seeds and Oran Berries on you.
  • Similarly, Meteor Cave in the DX remake. As opposed to beating one Deoxys per floor, you have to fight your way through a bunch of mirages until you find the real one to unlock the stairs, and they have the Pressure ability, which will drain your PP faster than you can blink^note although, most of the time, the real Deoxys you need to defeat is usually right next to the stairs. And worse yet, you can't throw Iron Spikes and the like at them. And then you face the real deal, who summons a swarm of mirages that respawn infinitely. They use moves like Calm Mind, Light Screen and even Recover for the main one. And lastly, should you wipe, you can't be rescued, so if you have any highly valuable items, you very well could end up kissing them goodbye. This will leave you for a miserable time if you're not well prepared for it. Or don't have a lot of Nullify Orbs handy.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some of the new features in the DX remake weren't exactly well-received.
  • The change from Friend Areas to “Rescue Team Camps”. Instead of being a pocket area where you can explore and watch teammates frolic about, they are simply just backdrops with stationary Pokémon sprites. Needless to say, it disappointed fans who found Friend Areas the most unique aspect of the game and were looking forward to “remastered versions” of them.
  • Some fans were also annoyed by the removal of the generic typeless attack, meaning you will now just use Struggle (which is not only weak but damages you when you use it) if you run out of PP on all your moves like in the mainline series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Poor Absol. He's introduced with the promise of a very interesting story character akin to Grovyle from the sequel, watching over the hero and partner while they are fugitives before swooping in to save them from Articuno. After that? He never again says a single thing that isn't generic teammate dialogue, and effectively vanishes from the plot (except for in DX).
  • When you reach Mt. Freeze, you are treated to a checkpoint in the middle of the dungeon, which is a tell that there's going to be a boss ahead. The Hero and Partner are absolutely dreading seeing Alakazam in the future, for that they are a powerful team. What happens when you reach the end? A cutscene merely SHOWING the fight between your team and Team ACT before Ninetales intervenes. It's the same in the remake, but at least there the cutscene shows an actual fight rather than just smacking the sprites together.
  • Your partner in the post-game in the originals. After your partner brings up the ability to change team leaders and tells you you can put together new teams for dungeon crawling, your partner basically is demoted into being a friend recruit for the rest of the game outside a couple of scripted post-game events. Your partner also doesn't get significant backstory at all other than forming a rescue team to start the plot of the main game. The DX remake has your partner follow you around still, but it still has no mention of a backstory.
  • Magnemite is the first to join your team and activates the ability to add new Pokémon to your ranks. After that, like Absol and your partner above, he becomes just another recruit. And since you can't bring him with you when you and your partner go on the run, he's going to be extremely underleveled by the time you're able to go on missions with him again.
  • With the exception of Gengar, Team Meanies barely does anything. Aside from hijacking the Metapod rescue mission and a world domination plot that goes nowhere, Medicham and Ekans stand on the sidelines while Gengar does actual evil like accusing the player of being the cursed human and telling everyone to give up on rescuing Team ACT. After that, they're pushed even further into the background before disappearing altogether, never even learning the truth about their leader.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Snubbull isn't revealed to be male until after he evolves. He's pink and his species has a higher percentage rate of being female than male.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • DX looks like a Winnie the Pooh-like moving picture book and it is as charming as it is beautiful.
  • Also in DX, the appearances of the Legendary Birds have them arrive in a massive swirling pillar related to their element, which makes them even more awesome to fight than the original.
  • The legendary beasts and Ho-oh also get some beautiful introductions in DX. The camera pulls back to show off the area you fight them in, and Ho-oh even descends from a rainbow when it shows up. The beasts powering up the Clear wing also looks great, with a closeup of the wing to show the new effects each beast gave it.

---