Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team turned the series' established formula on its head: the player transforms into a Pokémon and wakes up in an unfamiliar forest with no memory of their human form. Together with a partner chosen at the start via a short personality quiz, they form a rescue team that helps other Pokémon trapped in dangerous underground dungeons, gradually uncovering their own past and the cause of their transformation along the way.

Instead of the turn-based battles of the Ruby and Sapphire editions, the game offers a top-down view and procedurally generated floors in the style of classic roguelike titles – every entry into a dungeon means differently arranged corridors, items, and enemies, so the same map never repeats itself in quite the same way. The player controls a team of up to four Pokémon at once, gathering food and potions to stave off hunger and exhaustion, and as the floors progress, the difficulty rises along with the risk of losing all the loot gathered underground if the expedition isn't brought to a successful end.

The game was released alongside the Blue Rescue Team version for Nintendo DS, developed by Chunsoft, a studio experienced in the genre of randomly generated dungeon crawlers dating back to its computer roguelike titles. For the Game Boy Advance library, it was one of the last major Pokémon titles and also marked the start of a long-running, beloved spin-off series that has received numerous further entries across various platforms in the years since.

Why play it: Because it offers a fresh take on the world of Pokémon through roguelike dungeons that never play out the same way twice.