I can’t believe I actually bought a Pokemon game.

In my defense, it’s the only one I’ve ever bought, and it’s not one of the regular games in the series. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time is actually more of a roguelike, similar to things like Angband and Nethack more than anything else, and I loves me some Angband.

The story, such as it is, seems to be that I’m a human who’s somehow been turned into a Pokemon and lost his memory, so it’ll probably involve finding out what happened to me. A personality test at the beginning decided that I should be a Charmander, and I chose a Mudkip as my first companion. We’ve joined up with some kind of group of hunters and formed an exploration team of our own, and you get tasks from a job board to hunt down outlaw Pokemon inside dungeons (I think more types open up later on).

Once in the dungeon you move around from room to room, killing other monsters in the way, finding items, and making your way down the floors, much like any other roguelike game, and eventually you find the one you’re hunting, beat it, and return to the guild for your reward. Combat is fairly simple, just hit ‘A’ for your basic attack or open up the menus for the more advanced attacks that Pokemon usually have. You don’t directly control your partner, but you can tweak his ‘IQ’ settings to control his behaviour.

So far I’ve done a handful of these hunting jobs and gotten up to level 11. The story so far is that time is messed up somehow, as the name of the game implies, but things are still pretty vague so far.