As is probably very apparent, I am a #gamer and enjoy #games. I spoke about this to some extent in my post about an amazing Super Mario song, but I spent a lot of time as a kid playing Nintendo games, a feat that made me really good at solving puzzles and thinking outside the box, while simultaneously depriving me of any social skills. And while a lot of games hold a soft spot in me, the one that I want to talk about is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team.
(warning: lots of story spoilers ahead for the game, so stop if you don’t want to know what happens in a game that was released 15 years ago.)
Red Rescue Team is the first installment in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon franchise, which was released for the Gameboy. It was released alongside Blue Rescue team, which was for the Nintendo DS, but I didn’t have a DS at the time and I loved my teal Gameboy so I played Red. The game follows a human who is transformed into a Pokemon and meets a friend who wants to form a rescue team together, to help save and help Pokemon stuck in dungeons that you explore. I was turned into a Mudkip, and my partner was an Eevee, but this changes based on a quiz you take at the beginning of the game.
After becoming a rescue team, you meet Team Nasty (this is a kids game, remember), a rescue team that is always up to no good and is run by Gengar, a sinister ghost Pokemon. Gengar finds out you were originally a human, and tries to tie you into a legend about a human who was turned into a Pokemon. The human in the legend was cursed by a Pokemon called Ninetales because he abandoned his partner Pokemon called Gardevoir. Because a lot of strange natural disasters have been happening during this time, everyone believes Gengar, so you are banished along with Eevee, and are trying to clear your name while also running into more natural disasters.
After a long and dangerous journey, you meet Ninetales, who proclaims that you are not the Pokemon in the legend. You do find out, though, that you were turned into a Pokemon to help save the world from a meteor that is fast approaching, which is causing all of the natural disasters. When your mission is completed, you will be turned back into a human and leave everyone, including your friend. You don’t tell Eevee this, and so both of you go to meet a legendary Pokemon to help you destroy the meteor. In the wake of the meteor’s destruction, you die, and as you are laying in this nothing, Gengar comes and begins dragging you to darkness. But he “gets lost”, and abandons you, only to come back and take you back to the physical world. You come to, and Eevee is there to congratulate you on a successful mission. It is at this point that you begin to disappear, since your purpose is complete, and after a heartfelt goodbye with Eevee, you disappear. But through love, you are able to come back to the Pokemon world and continue living out your rescue team with Eeevee. This is the end of the main story.
Regardless of your knowledge of Pokemon, the story pulls at strings because you, the player, know that your time in the Pokemon World has a time limit. Yet you decide not to tell anyone because you know it would devastate Eevee, who followed you when you were banished from your community, and walked across the world with you to help you clear your name. The last dungeon of the story then feels so much more important than the others, because yes you are saving the world, but it is also the last time you will be with Eevee. And even though this game didn’t have revolutionary graphics, watching yourself slowly disappear as Eevee cries wondering why you can’t stay, is just freaking sad.
But I don’t love this game just because it is sad, I love this game because of the second chances it gives. The obvious one is the second chance it gives to the player; a second chance to continue being a part of this team, and to continue being the partner that Eevee needs. But after the main story, there is a final chapter to the saga.
Team Nasty comes to you one day and tells you that Gengar is, acting different. He has stopped hanging out with them, and is generally just being weird. Gengar then approaches you, as rude as ever, and forces you to escort him to the place where Ninetales lives for an unknown reason. You do, and when you meet Ninetales, Gengar tells her that he is the Pokemon from the legend who abandoned Gardevoir. Ninetales knows this, and sends him to a dungeon where he can break the curse. He goes, and when arriving at the end, he breaks his evil and nasty persona and breaks down, asking for Gardevoir to be returned, and that he has learned his lesson. And she does, but she has no memory of Gengar, as a human or as a Pokemon. But Gengar is okay with this. He “introduces” himself to her, and they walk away together. This ends the last story.
Throughout this whole game, you are fighting against natural disasters, your own imminent departure, but also this complete jerk of a Pokemon who wants nothing but to see you gone. And at first, it really does feel like Team Nasty is similar to Team Rocket, a group that is just evil, that you have to destroy in order to restore peace. But you never destroy Team Nasty, and through this Gengar begins to have a change of heart, even if he doesn’t reveal it. I don’t want to go in depth of everything Gengar does in secret, because this post is already going to be too long as is, but when he pulls you of the nothing, he is doing something he doesn’t need to do, and is doing it because he knows the pain Eevee would feel if you never came back. If you “abandoned” Eevee. And through that, he knows the pain Gardevoir felt when he left her. But through this revelation, and through his continued demonstration of good, he was given a second chance with Gardevoir. He gets to be different this time, especially because she doesn’t remember him, and he gets to prove that he is a changed person. This is the reason I am head over heels for Red Rescue Team, because it doesn’t just provide an action packed story for a kid to fall in love with, it also has this beautiful completion of a story that seemed to be left unanswered in the main story. And let me tell you, the post game is not easy (as a kid), so this meant I really had to work to get the rest of this story, which made me feel so warm and completed when I did. It was a better reward than anything else the game could’ve offered. I didn’t want a strong legendary, I didn’t want a completion sticker, I wanted to see Gengar and Gardevoir get a second chance, and they did. So, here’s to second chances.
scatterbrain 