Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers will find a real gem among games added to the catalog on Friday: Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team. Released in the United States for the Game Boy Advance in 2006, the game is one of two titles that spawned a novel spin-off series in which you play as the Pokémon themselves. There were many reasons to love it, but I’ll remember it for giving us the official Pokémon personality quiz.
Generally speaking, most Pokémon games released before the Mystery Dungeon games focused on collecting and battling monsters. I never really thought about what kind of Pokémon I would be if I could be one. Red Rescue Team that changed. In the game, you play as a human who mysteriously transforms into a Pokémon. Instead of choosing which creature to play as, the game tasks you with taking a little personality quiz to find out which of its beloved creatures best matches your preferences in real life.
It’s a compact quiz that only takes a few minutes to complete. Some of them are basic yes-or-no questions that ask how you see yourself, like “Do you think you’re cool? Be honest.” But some of the questions are a bit more peculiar. One asks if you’ve ever made a trap, and another presents a scenario asking what you would do if you found a lost wallet. At the end, the game grades your answers and assigns you a Pokémon based on how you answered.
Photo: Chunsoft/Nintendo, The Pokémon Company
So if your answers were a little crazy or erratic, you could become the cheerful water-type Squirtle. If you were a little hesitant and the quiz deemed you odd, the game assigned you Meowth, and if it thought you had a serene disposition, you got Mudkip.
The personality quiz can be annoying if you just want to play as your favorite Pokémon. (I remember wanting to change my character’s name at first, so I had to restart my save file. I think I repeated the quiz a dozen times just so I could play as Cyndaquil again.) Plus, at the end it asks you if you’re a boy or a girl, which is pretty stupid since anyone can like any type of Pokémon.
But I still appreciated the scope of the quiz. I grew up taking personality quizzes in magazines and online through sites like BuzzFeed. I wasn’t a huge Potter fan, so I wasn’t crazy about finding out which house I belonged to through sites like Pottermore. But I jumped at the chance to find out what Pokémon I would be.
Now that the game is coming to Nintendo Switch on Friday, I can’t wait to return to the game after all these years and see which Pokémon I’ll be playing as this time around.
