Promotional Consideration: Fushigi no Commercials

by Eric Caoili { Apr 20th 2008 at 4:00PM }

Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.

In advance of this coming week's Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 releases, Nintendo has commissioned two commercials to herald the dungeon crawlers, one for each edition, Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness.

Once again, this sequel adopts Chunsoft's Fushigi no Dungeon (Mystery Dungeon) design to allow gamers to play as a Pokemon. It's a solid set of titles, by most reports, but many genre veterans consider them inferior to games like The Nightmare of Druaga and Shiren the Wanderer.

Nevertheless, kids are crazy for the Pokemon branding, and the original GBA/DS Pokemon Mystery Dungeon releases went on to sell over 5.5 million copies worldwide. And that's why we now have a major publisher supporting an extremely niche genre with two separate commercials.

Commercial 1:

Commercial 2:

Pokemon. At the cost of self-identity.

The spots are pretty goofy, despite the "serious business" presentation, but we used to say nonsense like this when we were kids all the time. Except, instead of calling ourselves affable names, like Piplup or Chimchar, we were Michaelangelo or the Green Ranger. Remember when the Green Ranger was the damn thing? He had a flute in his dagger! That's gangsta!

For nostalgia's sake, we've also dug up this old Japanese commercial for the Nintendo 64 release of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren The Wanderer 2. Enjoy!