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 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.