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Before we delve into the doings of cute and fuzzy creatures like Pikachu and Charmander it would behoove us to look back to 1980, long before the average Pokémon fan was ever born. It was then, at the dawn of the Reagan years, that an obscure videogame called Rogue was coded and unleashed on the world. Like most videogames birthed in the early days, Rogue was rudimentary. Players crawled randomly generated dungeons. Fights were turn-based and fairly simplistic. Everything was rendered in ASCII text. The spare, frequently punishing formula wound up being a potent one. To this day folks continue to ape the originator, creating rogue-likes -- pared down RPGs that focus on the sheer danger of dungeon exploration. Chunsoft, the makers of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time have made a long career out of crafting rogue-like games. Earlier this spring Sega re-released Chunsoft's Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for the Nintendo DS. The similarities between the 1995 SNES game and the brand-spanking-new Pokémon adventure are striking. More interesting are the differences.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time is significantly easier than other rogue-like adventures. This is quite understandable considering the fact that tons of young ones will be playing the game. That's not to say that the game is a pushover. The game does, in fact, get pretty tough at times, and once players experience the game's main story there are a series of continuing quests and dungeons that are, as the kids say, totally hardcore. The difference is that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time eases you into its punishing ways. Yet it still never becomes quite as punitive as it could. In Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer defeat is an enormous setback. Players lose all the weapons and items they have on their person. All the money in their pockets disappears and all the experience and levels they'd gained are dialed back to zero. The Pokémon games have always taken a less heavy-handed approach. Lose a battle and you merely faint. Same thing happens here, except when you awake you'll feel somewhat lighter -- money and some items are lost when the dungeon gets the best of you. But all that experience you've gained and all those skills you've learned don't go anywhere. No matter how many times the player fails, there's always progress in the bank so to speak.

Another fairly major difference between Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and other rogue-likes can be seen in the game's story. The Nintendo DS game has a fairly rigid plot. Players play as an amnesiac Pokémon who wakes up on a beach and soon becomes involved with a gang of critters who make it their business to explore dangerous caves, mountains and forests. Soon the player gets wrapped up in a mystery involving a stolen "Gear of Time." This straightforward approach to story is rare in rogue-likes. Games like Dwarf Fortress and NetHack don't bother with plot and rather let the narrative emerge out of the simulation. Even Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer keeps plot to a minimum. Characters and settings are there for flavor.

At least initially, players don't really drive the story in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time. Instead they influence gameplay in the way they customize their team. This influence begins right off the bat when the game decides which Pokémon the player will be. Before the game begins players take a personality test. These questions help the game select which Pokémon players will inhabit when they play. Then, perhaps to ease the lack of control suggested by such a quiz, players are allowed to manually select their Pokémon sidekick -- the creature that will play their devoted buddy for duration of the adventure.