Having been raised on the DS version of the same game, finally getting to see Blue Rescue Team’s clumsier GBA sibling is an interesting experience, to say the least. It runs a little slower overall, and the controls may feel a little clunky due to the lack of a Y button until you realize you can double tap R to change direction, but Rescue Team’s core remains perfectly intact. This is the game that introduced me to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, and so I’m obligated to love it.
While many of PMD’s ideas would take a little more time to fully flesh out, there’s an undeniable charm to Rescue Team—amplified, I’m sure, by these wonderful rose-tinted glasses I’m wearing. That being said... yes, this is a very, very flawed game. There is plenty to grow frustrated with, especially around the midpoint of the game. Most bosses will have the spectacular ability to one-shot you whenever they please, so when two of them are fought at a time when you’re cut off from the town and locked to only your core two party members, you’ll find yourself unable to concoct any strategy besides “let’s keep banging our heads against this wall”. There are side dungeons included at that point to serve as a way for you to stock up on items, but their fatal flaw is that they don’t actually include anything helpful—Reviver Seeds only show up in the higher floors of the main dungeons themselves, at which point you’re already on track to fight the boss. And it’s not like any other item will be particularly helpful, as Orbs don’t work in boss fights, and Blast Seeds are weakened. Rescue Team has great potential for item strategy—your inability to simply use items on other party members forces you to get creative with throwing things, and also consider more deeply what items to give your partners for them to work with (whether they’re meant to use the item themselves, throw it at you, or throw it at the enemy). But it all falls apart due to the simple fact that there’s so few items to work with.
Rant aside, Rescue Team’s brutal difficulty prompted me to experiment bringing different team members along for the ride in order to defeat each boss (...speaking now about the bosses where you even can bring other members). I found myself actually thinking about my tactics a lot more than I did throughout the course of any other PMD. Though I wonder if the tactics in question were a little cheese-y... I suppose it’s problematic for the bosses to feel impossible until you resort to spamming String Shot. I stood no chance against the final boss until I learned the power of Attract and prevented it from taking a single turn throughout the entire battle. I appreciate that the game forced me to consider my options, though having the cheese tactics be the only ones that worked for me feels a little unsatisfying.
I’ll refrain from commenting on the narrative, as I already did so for my Rescue Team DX review, but I will at least note that the midway momentum drop is worse here—you’re forced to do a couple more days of standard missions before the story begins to progress again (though this time, I found it to be sort of a nice change of pace? Maybe since I already knew it’d be coming, it didn’t feel quite as jarring).
Red Rescue Team is very identifiably the first entry in the series—that is to say, it doesn’t have much of anything fully figured out yet. It's stupid, but it has enough heart to somehow still be enjoyable. It’s clumsy, it’s unfair, and I can’t help but love it.