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Perhaps because we’ve been waiting for a new Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game for years now, an indie developer has roughed up a concept blending the franchise with simple Battle Royale mechanics.
Although it’s not a full game by any stretch, it does offer up an exciting lens to see the Pokémon franchise through. Ordinarily, Pokémon battles are perpetuated by turn-based combat. You attack, your opponent attacks, and so forth. However, in spin-offs like Mystery Dungeon, this kind of turn based combat is supplemented with positional strategy too. Each dungeon has a grid-map, and movement across cells counts as one move. The aim of the game is to strategically traverse the dungeons without losing your life. This Pokémon fangame takes the concepts from Mystery Dungeon and adds it onto the breakout gaming trend in recent years – the Battle Royale.
Pokémon are dumped in a room, and each one has to battle against each other to the death. Rather than the typical concept of battling, each Pokémon simply has an attack. A Michael Bay-esque explosion then marks the defeat of each monster, a concept that I can only hope that Game Freak heeds in their next title.
While the game is clearly a fun experiment, it does provoke a curiosity in me to see this polished up and turned into a working project. If I’m being entirely honest, one of the biggest issues I have with Pokémon at the moment is that the current battle design system is far too stationary. While, sure, there are now Mega Evolutions and different forms and so forth, I think the formula is still too dry to the bone. Battling is easy, and there isn’t enough variables or variety in the mainstream Pokémon games to keep things fresh and exciting.
On the other hand, I think Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time is the best Pokémon game (I will die on that hill), and this is largely thanks to the combat system. Introducing physical space as a new dynamic in the system keeps every battle fresh, with no two encounters ever falling into the pitfall of obscurity.
The example video is fairly simple, though it shows off what seems to be autonomous behaviour from each Pokémon. Watching them battle it out in a Gladiator style tournament is pretty fun, and there’s a good chance you’re going to decide on a favourite in no time.
The developer behind the Pokémon Battle Royale fangame goes by their Reddit name, u/__grob, and has as a few examples of other test projects they’ve tinkered with throughout the years. It doesn’t look like the tech demo is available to play, and who knows if it ever will be.
