Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have, shall we say, odd relationships with historical preservation. After all, if any major publisher is imbued with nostalgia and legacy, it's Nintendo, right? And yet lack of backwards compatibility and a ferocious gatekeeping of its property means that many classics are difficult (if not impossible) to obtain. At least, not without an emulator, or until Nintendo decides that it can sell them back to you for the second or third time.
If you haven't been hoarding decade-old consoles (as many understandably have not) there is no legal means to play fan-favorite creations like Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Nintendogs, Punch-Out! for the Wii… and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky.
Quick history lesson: back in the day, there was an RPG dungeon-crawler roguelike series called Mystery Dungeon that was fairly big in Japan, but struggled to get a strong footing in Western markets. Then the developer, Chunsoft, cut a deal to make Pokemon-themed versions of the game, imaginatively titled "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon". The first of these were for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, but they endure even today (a remake of those first games appeared on Nintendo Switch in 2020 to depressingly little fanfare).
Some of these games were great, like that first generation! Others, like Gates to Infinity, were… doing their best, I guess. But then there was Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, which is – with no hyperbole on my behalf – probably the best Pokemon game ever made. Yeah, you heard me. And having dug out my old 3DS a couple of weeks back, it's still holding that title nearly two decades later.
Where the not-so wild things are
A Simpsons Hit and Run Remake will probably never happen – and I don't want it to
Though we can't credit it for its originality. Explorers of Sky's premise is the same as the Mystery Dungeon games before it: you're a human mysteriously transformed into a Pokemon and dropped into a world occupied solely by the lil' critters, with no people or Poke Balls appearing in the whole game. There's inevitably some kind of catastrophe building in the background (here it's sections of the world becoming frozen in time), so you have to work out the cause while also going through the personal journey demanded by your Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Or in layman's terms: why is the world ending, and why did I have to be turned into a cartoon duck to deal with it?
The end result is tonally somewhere between Winnie the Pooh and Earthbound: all tranquil treehouse villages of earnest Pokemon, determinedly setting out to help when others fall into peril. And despite a sedate start, the slow escalation from "save little Marill from a local scam artist" to "the timeline is collapsing unless somebody sacrifices themselves to stop the rampage of the primordial gods" somehow manages to feel natural and consistent, in part due to a story that's comfortable taking its time to get us invested in the world and cast. Pokemon games in recent years have lacked true heart (at least in my eyes), but the strong character focus of the Mystery Dungeon franchise means that their famously emotional endings are able to make strong men weep.
Explorers of Sky was also one of those in-betweeny Pokemon games that the series as a whole doesn't produce anymore, a hybrid of Explorers of Time/Darkness that was superior to both. It was bolstered with new Pokemon, gameplay features, quality of life tweaks, and even optional episodes based on beloved side characters, like country boy Bidoof learning self-confidence. It's all very charming…
The Relic Treasure
… But none of this really matters, does it? After all, you can't play Explorers of Sky. At least, not without an emulator. The last console that could run it stopped being made half a decade ago, and the game itself was born from a limited run from the same year as the first Hangover movie. Consequently, the few surviving copies are actually significantly more expensive now than when they were made – that's the Nintendo second-hand market for you.
Explorers of Sky isn't perfect – there's definitely flaws and repetitive elements baked into the gameplay – but frankly I don't know a Pokemon game that isn't guilty of that. Meanwhile, the strengths of visual design, memorable music, and fable-like storytelling that at times remind me of Studio Ghibli elevate the whole thing to something that is quintessentially charming, and to which I find myself investing in even more than some of my favourite RPGs in recent years, like Baldur's Gate 3. Sure, the early Mystery Dungeon games were all very similar, but they were all working from the same superb foundation, and Explorers of Sky took it further than any other.
So consider this both a public service announcement, as well as a plea to the boardroom overlords at Nintendo and The Pokemon Company steepling their ring-covered fingers: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is the best Pokemon game ever made, and it deserves to be available to the world at large. It deserves to be preserved and remembered and acknowledged on some real level. It deserves a legacy.
Our list of the best Pokemon games doesn't include games from the branching series, but you can be sure that Explorers of Sky would've been on it otherwise!
