Pah! Who'd ever want to be a Pokémon, eh?! If the inability to construct a vaguely comprehendible sentence doesn't get you down, the fact that your living accommodation comprises of a two-inch-square red and white ball most certainly will. I can only imagine Snorlax's osteopath bills. And as for the food, you'd better hope you like colourful fruity blocks and poisonous berries. Lovely! Not to mention that every time you want to show that special Poké-pal your Pokéballs you'll be whisked off to a mentally-challenged, elderly couple of Pokémon breeders. How's that for invasion of privacy?! Indeed, the Poké-lifestyle isn't all fame and glory and, fortunately, unlike the starring role of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team, the good people of AceGamez haven't been turned into Pokémon. Otherwise you'd be reading this in Poké-tongue - and you'd probably never visit the site ever again, what with all the obsessive self-referencing going on. But I digress - let's move to the matter at hand: does Pokémon Mystery Dungeon follow suit to the series' high standards? Or is it all a load of old Pokéballs?

And before you ask, yes, that really is the second time I've punned on Pokéballs. Y'see, like the exhaustive use of Poké-puns here, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is equally as repetitive and just as embarrassing. Having regurgitated code from ChunSoft's existing Mysterious Dungeon series (known as Fushigi no Dungeon in the Land of the Rising Sun), it's fair to say that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon plays much the same as its similarly licensed forerunners, only this time doused in a thick, syrupy layer of 'cute' that the Pokémon licence would inevitably ensure. RPG stylings? Check! Turn-based fisticuffs? Check! Vaguely fun gameplay? Hell no! Unfortunately it seems that Nintendo have confused 'old' with 'classic'. And whilst the Mysterious Dungeon may have once sipped fine wines and organised file-o-faxes with the likes of Final Fantasy, in this day and age - where gamerpoints are all the rage, ten face buttons are the norm and bullet time effects are nigh-on inescapable - the Mysterious Dungeon formula has certainly began to show cracks. Caveties, even. In fact, Mysterious Dungeon is the David Hasselhoff of games - it thinks it still 'has it', but fails miserably. Adults will laugh. Little kids will cry.

The story? Nonsensical at worst and convoluted at its very best, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon tells of a hapless human dragged into the world of Pokémon - where repetition and painstaking tedium is the order of the day. But it seems there's trouble a-brewin' in the Poké-kingdom - trouble that just so happens to intervene with everyday Pokémon activities, like questioning your sexuality, saying your name a good thousand-odd times and eating the aforementioned fruit lumps and poisonous berries. Natural disasters have played their evil hand in the world of Pokémon of late, leaving the likes of Rattata and Pidgey trapped within the eighteen randomly generated, grid-based dungeons. And - you guessed it! - as the titular Rescue Team suggests, it's up to you to save the day by forming a Pokémon rescue team and undertaking any SOS requests that litter your hideout's post box! Hurrah! Meanwhile, you can also watch hilariously scripted flashbacks as to the lead character's past and how he/she ended up in such a sombre scenario. The developer probably thinks these scenes will keep you engaged, but they don't.

In good old, traditional RPG stylings, the tale and general Poké-talk is told with snazzy character avatars and text boxes on the DS's bottom screen, with the top screen freed up to display an absolutely pointless overworld that you can't explore. Wahey! Touch screen support is somewhat of a throwaway addition too - double tapping in the desired direction sends your Pokémon scuttling off where you want it to go, but good Lord is it complicated and you'll no doubt chuck your stylus, heading straight to the d-pad and a good old thwack of the A and B buttons for simplicity's sake. So then, just to clarify, the top screen is unnecessary, you won't want to use the stylus and you'll only be using two of the face buttons. "What ho!" you shout, jumping from your seat in a tizzy "Why! That sounds like the Game Boy Advance!" That's right dear readers! This is because Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon was indeed developed with the aging Advance in mind, and consequently the DS version is about as original as scouring the city for kebab shops after a night out on the town - and then waking up next to your best friend (who obviously looked ever so alluring holding that meat-stick under the moonlight) in the morning. Ouch.

Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon is a bit like that. You're not quite sure how to feel when confronted with graphics that scream "Long live 1992!" and you're certainly not sure how to act when the terribly grainy audio belts out the same ONE TUNE over and over again. In fact, a brain-hammering hangover would have been preferable to what's on offer in the presentation department. You might not have minded if the aesthetics were in close comparison to Pokémon Emerald, but Pokémon Mystery Dungeon looks as ropey as a Game Boy Colour game on occasions - with some pretty duff animations and repeated textures that make you want to switch off the DS shouting "Pokémon Diamond and Pearl will still rock! This is a stop-gap after all, right?! Right?!"

Then there's the aforementioned cavities, those little 'quirks' and faults that a downright shoddy execution will inevitably unearth. To detail the sheer level of tedium that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon so casually deals out, here's how fifteen minutes of the game plays out: Cue repetitive music right... about ...now! Check post box for SOS mail telling of Rattata's unfortunate circumstance. Wonder how Rattata managed to post that letter from within the thirty-floor dungeon he is trapped in. Enter randomly generated dungeon with identikit texture tiles throughout. Realise that randomly generated terrain doesn't work at all and hop into an exit point that's been plonked slap bang next to the entry point. Level up. Realise that it's only gone and made things even easier. Find poisonous berry. Eat poisonous berry. Go up another ten floors. Kill approximately ten thousand other trapped Rattatas in order to save the Rattata in question (because that makes absolute sense! What with being a rescue team and all...) Realise that you have to eliminate foes without your CPU controlled partner because he's wandered off alone. Do so for approximately fifteen hours until the torture device's end credits roll. And that's it.

Forget any preconceptions of the abbreviation RPG, for it now stands for Rubbish Pokémon Game. Rubbish because for all the lengths taken to secure the Pokémon licence, ChunSoft's efforts to emulate it have been half-hearted to say the least. It just doesn't feel like Pokémon. "Oh, well! It's Pokémon! Who's not going to buy it?" belt ChunSoft money men before skipping off to a three hour lunch break while singing Abba's Money Money Money and leaving a trail of Natwest cards and dollar bills in their wake. Okay, so that may be an exaggeration - but many of the aspects that you've come to expect from Pokémon over the years are either absent or incorrect. That 'Gotta Catch Ém All' bit? Yeah - it's not here and neither is the usual evolution system. Nope, it seems you've got to endure the mind-numbing monotony that is the main story mode before you can start collecting and evolving the lovable 380-odd critters. But even then it's just luck of the draw whether the Pokémon you've beaten to a pulp wants to join your rescue team (as you obviously do after being head butted a good 212 or so times...) However, despite the fact that you can adventure with a party of four Pokémon (erm, we think it's supposed to be six Mr ChunSoft) you can only take one CPU controlled Pokémon into battle with you at any one time. Which is just excellent! (Yes, I'm being sarcastic!)

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon will become the new best friend of the nerdy, beard-stroking WoW fanatics who natter on about stats like they're going out of fashion in the next ten seconds. It's full of them - stats I mean, not nerdy beard-stroking stat-lovers - and, yes, that means they're either a) tedious or b) stupid. And yes, 'stupid' really is the best adjective to describe them. [Is he still talking about the stats? Ed]. Examples include the Belly Meter - a device that kills off your Pokémon mid-dungeon if he gets too hungry, and unless you consume cranberries like you're extraordinarily constipated, you'll be fainting like teenage girls at a Panic! at the Disco concert. That makes absolute sense, obviously. Another includes Ground, which checks the ground (see what they did there?) for items. That's stupid too, especially since you'd have instantly collected the item upon standing on it. Lovely! (Yes, I'm still being sarcastic!)

You can also wander into the absolutely throwaway town in order to do a lot of, well... nothing. Feeling rich? Why not store your cash in the Felicity Bank? Quite why you'd want to do this is unknown, since it does, as I mentioned earlier, absolutely nothing. But what the hey! It's here! Just like all the other irrelevant shops to break up the tedium of dungeon searching. Then there's Kangaskhan Storage, a shop that allows you to store collected items so that you'll "never lose them if you die" which - in light of the easier-than-your-drunken-kebbab-holding-friend difficulty level - won't happen. Ever. However, ChunSoft have graced you with a few worthwhile shops to spend that garnered cash. For instance you can visit Kecleon Wares to purchase items like elixirs, apples and - you guessed it! - poisonous berries! You also have a whole host of TMs and other stat-related goodies to pamper your Pikachu with. Which is a rather nice addition (Actually, I'm not being sarcastic this time! Honestly!)

As hardened Pokémanicas will know, since the days of the Red and Blue cart duo, Pokémon has, first an foremost, always been about connectivity, and whist it seems less important in this iteration - what with each version containing the same Pokémon - there are more than enough to keep you entertained. So you can rescue your friend via the magic of a wireless connection between two systems - admittedly with a card each - but this works phenomenally well. It would have been nice to have some kind of team based rescue with eight systems, but what's on offer here will certainly keep you grinning and cackling wildly like wild Meowth over a freshly-caught Goldeen. Heck, there's even the chance to trade items and Rescue Mail between the handhelds via the thin air! Bet that'll scare your grandparents! Low on the kind of battery juice needed for multi-card play? Then why not trade mail using the by ye olde (but still pretty novel) password system that triggers each mission with a code you can share with a pal? These additions are indeed worthwhile, but it really doesn't make up for the decidedly mediocre offering here and certainly doesn't generate the same kind of charm that you've come to expect from past Pokémon entries.

Reading through this review, you may think that I hate Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Team Rescue. However, while the gameplay mechanics are indeed a tad monotonous and, at times, a little primitive, it isn't a bad game. It's just a bad Pokémon game. It doesn't live up to the series' high standards and it just doesn't feel like Pokémon. You can't quite help but feel that everybody's favourite franchise has been exploited by the dastardly moneymen of this world. This is simply ChunSoft's decidedly mundane Mysterious Dungeon, albeit wearing a snazzy pair of Pokéball earrings in order to make a quick buck. It's been somewhat of a weak showing for the Pokémon franchise in terms of the DS's catalogue - what with the likes of Dash and Trouzie falling to melt our cynical hearts. Finger's crossed then for the true Poké-sequels that are Diamond and Pearl will cure your Pokémon blues. Just don't expect to find that cure here.

Reviewed by Ricky Lee Staines for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).