Nostalgia is the longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Many gamers seek to play games from their childhood to relive the experience of playing and to reminisce about simpler times. It is the reason why you would want to hook up an older console to your television and replay that poorly designed movie licensed game again (Chicken Little on PS2 is unironically one of my favorite games growing up). In John Vanderhoef’s Nostalgia, he defines nostalgia as “[the] wishes to recover the lost paradise of the past and reconstruct it in the present. In its zealous efforts, restorative nostalgia is uncritical of past mistakes or failures and instead relies on romanticizing and recreating, brick by brick, the monuments and moments lost to time.” It is this restorative nostalgia that causes players to keep coming back for more. Players experiencing restorative nostalgia views the games through a lens that doesn’t let them see the faults and problems that could potentially be present in the game. The game could have poor game design but it will always be good to them because they have fond memories of playing it in their past. 

One of the more recent moments where I experienced restorative nostalgia was earlier in February playing the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX demo. This new Pokemon game is a remake of the 2005 video games Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red and Blue Rescue Team. I had played Red Rescue Team on the GameBoy Advance when it first came out and had incredibly fond moments with it growing up. Sitting down and playing the demo of the 2020 remake, I experienced restorative nostalgia head on. Starting up the game, I was inadvertently taken back to my childhood for a brief moment. In the intro cinematic before the menu, I was shown a brief overhead shot of the main poke-town hub that looked exactly like it did in 2007 when I played it. The music is just as it used to be except remastered with a more modern arrangement which set the tone for the rest of the game. All the Pokemon NPCs were present in beautiful 3D models and the activities you could do were streamlined for the modern day audience. 

Playing with nostalgia goggles definitely heightened my experience with the new remake of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Afterall, it was exactly as I remembered it when I was young. Although I genuinely enjoyed my experience, my nostalgia did not allow me to see faults in the game. Outside of the narrative and memorable characters, truthfully, the gameplay loop is somewhat repetitive. While exploring dungeons, the main part of gameplay, you are placed in randomly generated dungeon rooms full of enemy Pokemon with one set of stairs that allow progression to the next level. The turn-based combat encounters can be concluded quickly when fighting weaker Pokemon by just mashing the A button and having your character do it’s most powerful move against it. This leads to moments where you are just speeding through the dungeon trying to find the staircase that leads you to the next floor to complete the dungeon. This becomes tedious in later stages of the game where you could be exploring dungeons with up to 99 floors in them.