Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team and Red Rescue Team/Battle Concepts

This page covers the different battle aspects of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon to help familiarize you with the different way of battling from the classic Pokémon games.

Turn-Based Battling
As mentioned in Game Concepts, the style of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon's movement is turn-based, which means that you move, your team mates move, and then all other Pokémon on the floor move. This means careful move planning is needed before you move and end your turn.

Learning Moves
Learning moves in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is similar to the way you learned moves in the classic Pokémon games. You learn them either by leveling up or by using TMs to teach Pokémon moves. TMs are found scattered throughout dungeons, and can also be bought at the Kecleon Shop from the purple brother on the right. Pokémon also naturally learn moves by leveling up to certain levels, or by evolving. Also, unlike past Pokémon games, a Pokémon can learn the same move multiple times. Therefore, if, say, you liked the move Ice Beam, and you had four copies, any Pokémon capable of learning Ice Beam could have every move slot filled with that move.

Linking Moves
Linking moves lets you set up a combination of two moves. In essence a Pokémon with a linked attack gets to attack twice in a turn while the opponent still is stuck with one attack per turn. The best use of this is to combine a stat lowering/boosting attack with an offensive one. An example of this starting out is scratch and growl. For longer dungeons every PP of offensive attacks are valuable since they guarantee higher experience from a win. An added benefit is the high amount of PP the basic stat lowering attacks have. Be careful when you link moves. This doubles how fast you lose PP since 1PP is spent from both attacks each time a linked move is used. If you run out of PP on one of the moves the link will break and will need to be reset at the Gulpin Move Link Shop or with a Link Box if you are lucky enough to find one.

For a more offensive approach if you need to defeat opponents that are stronger than you is to link 2 offensive attacks. This can be helpful for a boss battle or if a new dungeon is full of Pokémon of a much higher level than your main team.

There are countless combinations so do not restrict your link ideas by these suggestions. Experiment with linking attacks a Pokémon already has (and TM attacks) until the perfect link combination is found for that individual. There will also be times when a new combination would be more effective for a specific dungeon. For example a Squrtle has withdraw and bubble linked. When going to a water based dungeon it could be more effective to swap out the water move with a normal one.

Standard attack and Moves
Offensive moves do a much higher amount of damage compared to the standard attack. When another Pokémon is knocked out and a move was used at some point in the battle the experience earned will be approximately doubled. The downside of using moves is there is a limited amount of PP that is restored only from specific items and between dungeons. When traveling through a dungeon be sure to keep track of how much PP you use and note if some needs to be saved for a big boss battle or the more difficult dungeon inhabitants that are a few levels deeper. In a very long dungeon with a hard boss at the end it is a good idea to save some PP or PP restoring items for later on.