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Video Game / Mystery Dungeon

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The Mystery Dungeon (Fushigi no Dungeon in Japan) series is a long-running series of Roguelite Dungeon Crawler games originally created and developed by Spike Chunsoft.

Although the exact specifics of gameplay change between each iteration of the series, each game shares common elements. Players control a character (and potentially a small team of AI-controlled companions) as they traverse a randomly-generated, trap-laden, multi-floor dungeon. Traversal and combat are turn-based, with both players and enemies moving at the same time across gridded floors and taking turns when encountering each other. Items randomly scattered around the dungeon can be picked up and used to help or hinder your progress. Continuing is Painful is in effect, as being knocked out or otherwise being unable to continue in any way results in the player being kicked out of the dungeon, losing many of their items and potentially their money in the process while having to restart the dungeon from the beginning. Between dungeon dives, players are able to interact with a Hub City, where they can adjust their party, pick up essentials, store items for safekeeping, and change inventory in accordance with their next destination. The franchise is infamous for its Nintendo Hard difficulty and occasionally Luck-Based Mission nature, as dungeons become increasingly punishing and resources afforded to the player become increasingly scarce.

The series has a long history of Licensed Games in collaboration with a variety of other video games, often being spinoffs of other popular franchises with the "Mystery Dungeon" name in the title. Many of the themed games take elements of their source material and interpret them into the Mystery Dungeon formula, creating unique experiences with each new game despite sharing the same core elements. Unfortunately, due to the series' niche popularity outside of its home country, quite a number of Mystery Dungeon titles are rendered No Export for You.

    Mystery Dungeon Games 
Games released internationally will be bolded.
Original Mystery Dungeon games
  • Shiren the Wanderer: Chunsoft's first original video game series and the only Mystery Dungeon games to not be based on an existing property. The series follows the titular Shiren, a Rōnin who goes on a variety of adventures in a fantasy version of Feudal Japan.
    • Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer - Released December 1, 1995 for the Super Famicom. Ported to iOS and Android in March 2019.
      • Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer - A Video Game Remake of Shiren the Wanderer, released on December 14, 2006 in Japan and March 2008 internationally for the Nintendo DS.
    • BS Shiren the Wanderer: Save Surala - Broadcast via Satellaview from May 1996.
    • Shiren the Wanderer GB: Moonlit-Village Monster - Released November 22, 1996 for the Game Boy. Ported to PC and Android.
    • Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle! - Released September 27, 2000 for the Nintendo 64.
    • Shiren the Wanderer GB2: Magic Castle of the Desert - Released July 29, 2001 for the Game Boy Color. Received a Video Game Remake for the Nintendo DS on November 13, 2008.
    • Shiren the Wanderer Gaiden: Asuka the Swordswoman - Released February 7, 2002 for the Dreamcast. Ported to PC in December 2002.
    • Shiren the Wanderer (2008)note  - Released June 5, 2008 in Japan and February 9, 2010 internationally for the Nintendo Wii. Ported to the PlayStation Portable on January 28, 2010 in Japan.
    • Shiren the Wanderer 4: The Eye of God and the Devil's Navel - Released February 25, 2010 for the Nintendo DS. Ported to the PlayStation Portable on October 18, 2012.
    • Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate - Released December 9, 2010 for the Nintendo DS. An Updated Re-release was ported to PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch, PC, and iOS/Android, with the Vita and Switch/PC versions released internationally.
    • Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island - Released January 25th, 2024 in Asia and February 27th 2024 in NA/EU for the Nintendo Switch.

Licensed Mystery Dungeon games

  • Dragon Quest: The original progenitor of the Mystery Dungeon series, the first Mystery Dungeon game was developed as a spinoff of Chunsoft's own Dragon Quest series starring Torneko, the merchant from Dragon Quest IV. The Torneko games established most of the core mechanics for the rest of the franchise, although the game sports a unique mechanic in the ability to upgrade Torneko's shop using money.
    • Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon - Released September 19, 1993 for the Super Famicom.
    • World of Dragon Warrior: Torneko: The Last Hope - Released September 15, 1999 in Japan and November 15, 2000 internationally for the PlayStation. Ported to Game Boy Advance on December 20, 2001 in Japan.
    • Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko's Great Adventure 3: Mystery Dungeon - Released October 31, 2002 for the PlayStation 2. Ported to Game Boy Advance on June 24, 2004.
    • Dragon Quest: Young Yangus and the Mysterious Dungeon - Released April 20, 2006 for PlayStation 2.
    • Dragon Quest Mystery Dungeon MOBILE - Released August 7, 2006 for mobile devices.
    • Dragon Quest More Mystery Dungeon MOBILE - Released September 14, 2009 for mobile devices.
  • Final Fantasy: The Final Fantasy-themed Mystery Dungeon games are part of a spinoff series of Chocobo games, which star the titular Mascot Mook of the franchise. Item Crafting is a key mechanic, with Chocobo having the ability to combine gear to make better gear. Starting with Fables, the Final Fantasy Job System is featured as a core mechanic.
    • Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon - Released December 23, 1997 for the PlayStation. Ported to the WonderSwan in 1999.
    • Chocobo's Dungeon 2note  - Released December 23, 1998 in Japan and November 30, 1999 internationally for the PlayStation.
    • Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeonnote  - Released December 13, 2007 in Japan and in 2008 internationally for the Nintendo Wii. Ported to the Nintendo DS on October 30, 2008 in Japan.
      • Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon EVERY BUDDY! - An Updated Re-release of Fables, released March 20, 2019 for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
  • The Tower of Druaga: This iteration incorporates mechanics from The Tower of Druaga, such as Equipment-Based Progression and hidden treasure chests. Many game elements are unique to this installment, such as 3D terrain and fixed levels, making it an obscure black sheep in the series.
  • Gundam:
    • Mobile Suit Gundam: Mystery Dungeon - Released April 19, 2004 for mobile phones.
  • TwinBee:
    • TwinBee Dungeon - Released May 13, 2004 for mobile phones.
  • Pokémon: The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series is by far the most popular iteration of the Mystery Dungeon franchise, and likely the first games many will think of when discussing the series. This version of the Mystery Dungeon games features many Pokémon-themed elements, such recruiting hundreds of potential party members via Defeat Equals Friendship and Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors combat.
  • One Way Heroics: This version of Mystery Dungeon incorporates the Advancing Wall of Doom from its source material as a major gameplay mechanic, forcing the player to continuously move right through the dungeon.
    • Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics - Released July 30, 2015 in Japan and in 2016 for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
  • Etrian Odyssey: Incorporates Character Customization and Job System from the Etrian Odyssey games. The notorious "F.O.E." mechanic also makes an appearance, where the player must Hold the Line against "D.O.E."s to protect the Hub City.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon - Released 2015 for the Nintendo 3DS.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon 2 - Released August 31, 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.

Tropes common to the Mystery Dungeon series:

  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • There is often a button command to rapidly pass turns while standing in place, which can be useful in the event that you need to recover HP or wait for something to happen without being forced to run in circles aimlessly.
    • More modern games offer a Suspend Save feature as a way to pause progress in the middle of a dungeon, allowing you to pick up the game later without having to start over.
  • Blackout Basement:
    • Shiren 4 and 5 feature an In-Universe Game Clock where dungeons can become enshrouded in darkness at nightfall. One of the most notable effects of this "feature" is that during night, your field of vision is reduced entirely to a single square around you, making it very easy to get jumped by the astronomically-tougher foes. This was removed in Shiren 6.
    • In The Nightmare of Druaga, the glow coming off Gil's body is actually Ishtar's Protection. The more you can see, the easier it is to map the area, but as you search the dungeon Ishtar's Protection weakens until it fades completely, severely limiting field of vision. The only way to restore it is to sacrifice items in your inventory to Ishtar, which replenishes her Protection based on the quantity and quality of the items offered.
    • Quite a number of late-game and post-game dungeons in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon have this feature. If you're standing in a room you can see everything in the room you're in, but in corridors you can only see one tile around you.
  • Booby Trap: A universal staple of Mystery Dungeon dungeons. Some traps are visible, most are not, and only some traps are harmful. There's also a chance that a trap will turn out to be a Fake Trap and not do anything.
  • Brutal Bonus Level:
    • If you didn't think the games were hard enough, there's quite a few "special" dungeons unlocked in the post-game that are even more difficult than the rest of the game. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is the most notorious, including many extremely luck-based dungeons such as Purity Forest and Wish Tower, while the Chocobo games have their own "special rule" dungeons that impose similar restrictions.
    • In The Nightmare of Druaga, going back to a dungeon you've previously cleared will give you the option to "Break down the door" instead of using a Key on the floor exit. Doing so transports Gil to a bonus dungeon with significantly more powerful enemies that do not drop Experience, but has a better chance of rewarding rare items.
  • Continuing is Painful:
    • Being defeated in a Mystery Dungeon game is incredibly demoralizing. You lose a huge chunk of your inventory, which can include multiple valuable and/or powerful items, and you will lose most, if not all of the money you were carrying. Some games offer ways to protect some of your valuables, such as in-town storage, Ishtar's Shrines in The Nightmare of Druaga, or the rescue system in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and the Nintendo DS remakes of the Shiren games.
    • Played with in games that feature a No-Gear Level Brutal Bonus Level. You can't bring anything in, but since you start with no items anyway, being KO'd simply takes away whatever you got from the dungeon, meaning no long-term detriment.
  • Dungeon Shop: Almost every game has a shop found in the middle of the dungeon where you can use the money you've picked up to buy various items and consumables. Just make sure you have enough money for whatever you want to pick up, unless you have a death wish.
  • Escape Battle Technique: The Escape Scroll/Orb/spell/etc. One of the only surefire ways to leave a dungeon safely, allowing you to keep everything you've acquired. Carrying a means of getting out is an extremely important way to retain progress even if you cannot complete the dungeon in the (common) event that a situation suddenly takes a turn for the worse.
  • Equipment-Based Progression:
    • In games where the Roguelite elements are more pronounced, the player can improve their character long-term by making or obtaining better equipment. Shiren the Wanderer, The Nightmare of Druaga, and the Chocobo games prominently revolve around using equipment.
    • Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team have Hidden Machines just like the main Pokémon games, which are required to enter certain dungeons via either having a Pokémon that knows the move or carrying the HM as an inventory item. This mechanic was removed permanently starting from Explorers, and did not return for Rescue Team DX.
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: The Chocobo games, Pokémon games, Etrian games, and One Way Heroics offer customizable player names.
  • Level Drain:
    • In many games, leaving the dungeon resets your level back to Level 1. This makes leveling up mainly a temporary means of character improvement while putting more emphasis on your equipment and items.
    • Quite a number of items can manually decrease levels, either for the player or any unfortunate victims that you happen to use them on. Bitter Herb from Shiren and Doom Seed from Pokémon are just two examples.
    • One Way Heroics uses your Level as a form of currency. You can pay Levels in certain places to gain stronger forms of power, such as increasing Critical Rate, Combo chance, or Weight limit. Your Fairy Companion may also offer you the ability to save your game at the expense of 5 levels.
  • Level-Up Fill-Up: Some games heal you to full HP upon leveling up, allowing you to conserve healing items. More common in the games which reset your level after each run, but also features in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.
  • Limited Loadout: No Mystery Dungeon game will ever let you carry as many things as you want. In most cases there's a hard cap on how many items you can bring at once, and attempting to add more than you can carry will force you to drop something. One Way Heroics has a Weight stat that determines the total weight of objects on your person; it's possible to exceed this stat by holding more items, but doing so causes the player to become overburdened, significantly restricting their abilities.
  • Marathon Level: 99-floor dungeons. Good luck.
  • Oddball in the Series: The One Way Heroics installment is distinct for not actually taking place in a dungeon whatsoever, and thus eschewing some traditional Mystery Dungeon mechanics such as standard map generation and progression while still retaining the standard Mystery Dungeon gameplay. For this reason it is named "Mystery Chronicle" instead of "Dungeon".
  • Password Save: In most handheld installments such as the Shiren the Wanderer remakes and DS games and the Pokémon games, you can generate passwords in the event of a defeat and send them to other players as a rescue request. The player receiving the password can then embark on an expedition to revive your party in their game, and if successful, they will receive a password to send back to you so you can pick up where you left off.
  • Post-End Game Content: The series tends to pride itself on having vast post-games where a large quantity of new dungeons, items and features are released to the player. In many cases the bulk of the game is actually in the post-game, with the main story merely serving as a primer for the more difficult content.
  • Rare Candy: Some consumable items directly raise your level. The Cheery Grass, Joy, and Joy Seed (Shiren, Torneko, and Pokémon respectively) increase the user's Level by 1, for starters. A few extremely rare items can give multiple levels at once, or at least have a chance to do so.
  • Randomly Generated Levels: Most dungeons are randomly generated. In most standard fare Mystery Dungeon games, they are generally assembled by linking randomly chosen pre-made rooms together via hallways. Some games, such as One Way Heroics, utilize significantly different generation styles. The Nightmare of Druaga distinctly has no randomly generated floors for the entire main story; they only appear in optional content and the post-game.
  • Regenerating Health: You will recover HP every few turns you're not in combat as long as your Belly stat isn't 0. If your Belly reaches 0, you will take damage every few turns instead.
  • Roguelite: Some games incorporate such elements, such as being forced to Level 1 at the start of each dungeon and removing items from your inventory. Not every game does this, but games that don't sometimes have Brutal Bonus Level dungeons which impose this restriction.
  • Save Scumming:
    • Actively averted in many titles, as limited saving or auto-saving is used as a preventative measure to stop the player from trying to save their lost items or money in the event of a defeat. Attempting to do so will be treated as a loss anyway.
    • Unlike most Mystery Dungeon games, you can do this (to an extent) in The Nightmare of Druaga. The game just really doesn't like it when you do.
  • Shoplift and Die: Steal from Dungeon Shops at your own peril. Doing so spawns either the most powerful enemy in t he game or endless amounts of extremely powerful and dangerous enemies that always know your location and will chase you relentlessly until you either escape by moving to the next floor, or keel over. No Fair Cheating also kicks in to prevent the player from using items or techniques such as Escape Scrolls/Escape Orbs to easily run off with pilfered goods. Unfortunately, doing this is the only way to recruit Kecleon in most of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games and acquire Thief's Memory in Final Fantasy Fables, meaning that you will have to do it at some point if you want 100% Completion.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: There are at bare minimum three different categories of items which are nearly universal to all Mystery Dungeon games (with a few exceptions), with only the names and some functionalities changing between titles.
    • Food: "Bread", "Onigiri", "Apples", "Greens", etc. These are items specifically meant to replenish your Hunger/Belly stat, which will cause you to start losing HP if it reaches 0. Eating them when already full will slightly increase the maximum value of the stat, and the largest ones will fill you up completely and increase the maximum.
    • Edible Consumable: "Herbs", "Grass", "Seeds", "Potions", etc. These are items that have effects when ingested, which can produce positive or negative effects, typically on whoever ingests it — which, in the case of negative effects, you can force enemies to do by throwing it at them. They usually slightly increase the hunger stat, which might save you in a pinch, but their main purpose is their magical effect — though sometimes the magical effect is to do something with hunger.
    • Magical Consumable: "Scrolls", "Wonder Orbs", "Spell Books", etc. These are magical items that have powerful, wide-ranging effects and can affect either the user, enemies, or even entire floors. They typically don't do anything when thrown except maybe a little bit of damage, but there are occasional exceptions.
  • Timed Mission: Taking too much time on a floor will cause the game to notify you about imminent danger. If you spend even more time on the floor after that without moving on, the game will eventually throw you out of the dungeon via a "strong wind" or something of the kind, which has the same effect as a Total Party Kill.
  • Video Game 3D Leap: Torneko's Great Adventure 3 introduced the first Mystery Dungeon game with 3D graphics for gameplay.
  • We Cannot Go On Without You: If the lead character bites it, the whole expedition is a bust. Very few games avert this, most notably Rescue Team DX where losing your current Pokémon will cause the next one in the party to take over, as long as it was one of the three Pokémon that was in your party at the start of the dungeon.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly:
    • One of the other key mechanics of the series is the Bellynote  stat. Starting at 100, Belly slowly ticks down as you move and fight through the dungeon. You have Regenerating Health while you have at least 1 Belly, but as soon as it hits 0 you will start losing HP until you are KO'd or restore it. Belly can be restored by eating food items; all food-based consumables will restore some Belly, but there are always items specifically made to recover large quantities of Belly, such as Apples, Bread or Gyshal Greens. Maximum Belly can also be temporarily increased in certain ways, while Shiny Pokémon start with 200 Belly. The Nightmare of Druaga substituted this mechanic for Ishtar's Protection, which is mechanically similar but affects visibility rather than health recovery.
    • A Brutal Bonus Level in Chocobo's Dungeon 2 takes this to the extreme by forcing the player to always have 0 Belly, essentially putting them on a timer.

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