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There’s not been a new Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game for four years now. The last one to release was in 2020, a Switch remake of the first game. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a sentimental piece gushing of Explorers of Sky, a game that released fifteen years ago. In that time, there has only been two new games released, and thousands of fans have gone hungry for another gummi.
With Nintendo just relaunching Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Mystery Team on Switch Online, just in time for the Twitter-coined Mystery Dungeon Day, it’s a good time for me to rehash one of the most important things I can do as a games journalist; a plea to The Pokémon Company and Chunsoft for a new mainline entry in the series.
No more spin-offs, remakes, or remasters. A new Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game, please.
I love the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game. It laid the path out for the series, but there’s no denying it’s due contemporary criticism. It’s devoid of any story, real character, and the gameplay only really served to prove out a path for later games. I’m not really that convinced that we needed to see the game rehashed on the Nintendo Switch, especially when it was remade from the ground up as the series’ last official entry.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is probably the game I want to be in my rocket-ship when they launch my corpse into space after I die (at that point, 200 years in the future, it will no longer be ecologically viable to bury people, and we must instead become space debris).
This isn’t an obscure opinion either. Every Pokemon Showcase, or Nintendo Showcase, has been littered with demands for a new game. This is what the fans want, especially after the recent performance of mainline titles which are nothing short of underwhelming.
The fact that there’s even a day dedicated to the series should be enough evidence for Pokémon to take note and give the fans what they want. If worst comes to worst, I’d accept a remake of Explorers of Sky. I know I said no remakes, but if there’s a single game in the history of the Pokémon franchise that’s worth a remake; it’s this one.
The latest Shiren the Wanderer game launched earlier this year. For those who don’t know, Shiren is Spike Chunsoft’s own IP, and it is effectively PMD without the P. With the Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island now out of the way, Spike Chunsoft could focus on a new Pokémon dungeon crawler, but only if The Pokémon Company are committed to actually releasing something worth playing.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team will arrive on Nintendo Switch: Online as of August 8th.
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