Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity hits Nintendo 3DS in March

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is coming to Nintendo 3DS, marking the return of Nintendo's portable dungeon crawling series after a four year hiatus.

Pokémon hasn’t had much a presence on Nintendo 3DS yet. There have been apps like Pokédex 3D and just one small spin-off game Pokémon Rumble Blast, but there hasn’t been an entry in the core series or one of the ongoing sub-series to really hook all those Pikachu freaks out there to Nintendo’s modern handheld. It isn’t quite time to catch them all in stereoscopic 3D but it is time to explore some dungeons. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity was announced on Thursday. The game will be out on March 24^th.

Nintendo hasn’t made a full Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game since releasing Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky in 2009, which itself was a remake of 2008’s Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Dark. The initial two releases of the series sold 4.5 million copies during their first year on shelves, making them extremely profitable for spin-offs.

Nintendo’s consistently popular Pokémon games saw a slight dip in sales this year. Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2 released in October selling a collective 865,000 copies during the first month. Impressive considering the relatively slow sales of retail games this fall, but downright poor compared to Pokémon Black and Pokémon White which sold a collective 2 million copies in their first two weeks on shelves.