This is a sub-page of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time & Darkness.

The portraits in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky are one of the many unique details in the game, and likely had a large chunk of development spent on them. These portraits are both very thorough and very disorganized, meaning that there are plenty that slipped through the cracks and remain unseen in the final product.

As a general note, the very first portraits in each group is referred to as "NORMAL", and is the default portrait used in Explorers. Every NORMAL portrait shown here is actually used, and is meant to be used as a comparison to the unused ones.

For Explorers

Non-Selectable Partners#

Similarly to Rescue Team, Explorers of Time and Darkness does not allow the player to select Meowth, Skitty or Munchlax as the partner, which left a handful of unused portraits. Explorers of Sky would eventually allow any available starter to be chosen as the partner, which has remained the series standard ever since. Meowth and Munchlax would eventually be relegated to being partner-only in Sky, to make room for the new starters.

• "ACTION1" (sighing, the 4th column from the left) was newly drawn for Time/Darkness.
• Meowth and Skitty's other portraits already existed within Rescue Team, and were also unused in said game. Their "GLADNESS" (3rd) portraits have been edited to remove the tears that were previously present in Rescue Team.
• Munchlax's "WEEP" (2nd) and "GLADNESS" (3rd) portraits were used in Rescue Team, during a rare Pokémon Square event.
• Munchlax's "ACTION3" (5th) portrait was used in Rescue Team, and remains unused in all versions of Explorers.
• Unlike all the other starters, an "ACTION2" (stunned) portrait does not exist for Meowth, Skitty and Munchlax within Time/Darkness. Those portraits would later be drawn for use in Sky.

Despite not being used in the games themselves, the Japanese Official Guidebook for the games showcases all portraits mentioned here in the hero/partner summaries, with the sole exception of Munchlax's "ACTION3" portrait.

Sableye#

Sableye has an unused "ACTION1" portrait. There are a number of scenes where this could've fit, but all of the Sableye's dialogue solely use their "NORMAL" portrait, presumably to keep their scenes tonally consistent.

Explorers of Sky would eventually use this along with 5 new Sableye portraits in Special Episode 5.

Red/Blue Rescue Team Leftovers

The vast majority of portraits from Red/Blue Rescue Team are in Explorers of Time and Darkness, whether used or unused. Exceptions include a number of portraits that were redrawn, and a placeholder portrait for Skarmory that was present in the previous game.

Hero/Partner#

All of the starters from Rescue Team are still present here, fully identical to their original form. These lack the 3 new portraits that the Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky starters have, still include droplets on their "SHOUT" and "GLADNESS" portraits, and also have Rescue Team's "やさしい" (kind/gentle) portrait in place of what is meant to be "DECIDE" (The 4th portraits from the right), meaning that these are simply copy-pastes.

Eevee's set of portraits are present as well, but rather than being identical like the previous ones, these received a new palette. These portraits would later be used for Sky, although "THINK" (the 5th from the left), "SHOUT" (8th), "DECIDE" (10th), and "GLADNESS" (11th) were redrawn, and the new portraits for Time/Darkness/Sky were added.

Misc.#

The minor characters in Rescue Team often had unique portraits, and Time/Darkness kept most of them in the files. These particular portraits are identical to the Rescue Team portraits graphically. Some things to note:

• Charizard's "DECIDE" portrait (the 4th one in the image) is not present in Rescue Team's files, making it unique to Explorers. The portrait's placement as "DECIDE" is very similar to the Rescue Team-exclusive "やさしい" (kind/gentle) portraits still included for Psyduck, Machop, Cubone and Eevee, suggesting this may be Charizard's version of this portrait type. In addition, the portrait order was re-arranged internally and are, apart from the "DECIDE" portrait already mentioned, assigned to the correct emotions. In practice this only allows the "HAPPY" portrait (not shown here) to be used in unusual circumstances, as explained in the note below.
• Blastoise's "HAPPY" portrait was re-arranged to account for its rare usage in Explorers (see the note below). The two unused portraits keep their order from Rescue Team.
• Curiously, Caterpie also had its portraits re-arranged despite not having an NPC role in Explorers, and are assigned correctly to "TEARS" and "EMOTION".
• Magnemite's unused portrait would later be used in Sky, with an additional portrait exclusive to that version. In addition, Sky would edit these portraits to reverse the thread on its screw, and would add flipped variants of each portrait.
• Female Wobbuffet only has a "NORMAL" portrait in Time/Darkness. Sky would add and use a female variant of the "HAPPY" portrait, while the original male variant of this portrait remains unused.
• Lombre has duplicates of its flipped portraits. A few of these portraits are used in the Debug Room.
• Shiftry's female portrait collection has unmodified duplicates of its unused portraits. (In fact, even its used one is unmodified...)
• A Medicham character appears in both Rescue Team and Explorers. Time/Darkness used the "HAPPY", "ANGRY", "THINK" and "SURPRISE" portraits, but "PAIN" and "ACTION1" were left unused. Sky would eventually add 2 new portraits and use the portraits listed here for Team Charm's special episode.
• Latias and Latios's used portraits were edited between Rescue Team and Explorers, but their unused "HAPPY" portraits are identical.
• Jirachi's unused portrait would later be completely overwritten with a different portrait in Sky.

As a side note, Charizard's "HAPPY" and "SURPRISE" portraits, along with Blastoise's "HAPPY" portrait (not shown here) can be seen in very specific circumstances; "HAPPY" can be used by a Charizard or Blastoise partner while recruiting Cresselia, and "SURPRISE" can be used by a Charizard partner while attempting to go to the Hidden Land using the partner as the leader, which is a role they will refuse to take. The two "HAPPY" portraits are very easily missed, as they require the player to leave the scene untriggered until after evolution to be seen.

Red/Blue Rescue Team

Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky

More leftover portraits for minor characters, but these have new palettes between Rescue Team and Explorers. Most of these changes were done to make them more color-accurate, but the Mankey is debatably worse...

Red/Blue Rescue Team

Explorers of Time/Darkness

Spinda's leftover portraits have a whole list of changes. The existing Rescue Team graphics were given a new palette for Explorers of Time/Darkness. Spinda, like Lombre, includes duplicates of its flipped sprites at the end. Finally, there are bizarre-looking duplicates of its portraits with its face spots removed, likely used as a base at some point. Sky would remove the duplicate and spotless portraits, overwriting them with proper portraits for Spinda's Cafe.

In the files of Red/Blue Rescue Team, all of a Pokemon's normal portraits were placed in the list first, and its flipped versions would be placed afterwards. The Explorers games instead placed each flipped portrait immediately after its regular counterpart. A few of the Pokemon that originated from Rescue Team have duplicates of their flipped portraits at the end of their respective portrait lists, showing that they were copy-pasted and not re-arranged to fit Explorer's format. These include Lombre (as mentioned above), Spinda (also mentioned above), and Absol, which has a single duplicated version of its flipped portrait in its files.

Placeholders

There are placeholder portraits for various Pokemon, which indicates that more portraits for these Pokemon were planned but never created. All of them correspond to important story characters from Rescue Team and seem to allude to its development, although they are not found in the data of Rescue Team itself. These portraits have broken palettes and most of them are numbered 1-4, except Moltres, which just has 4 duplicates of the same unused portrait, and Alakazam, which has actual used portraits in place of the 1 and 2.

The Ninetales placeholders were replaced with 4 duplicates of its used portrait in Sky; since this game introduced Vulpix as a starter, it was most likely done to prevent a Ninetales partner from using these portraits during rare post-evolution dialogue (such as recruiting Cresselia).

Misc.

There is a strange, alternate version of the used Golem portrait. This version has a different palette, various minor touch-ups, and lacks fangs or a well-defined pupil. While Golem has a portrait in the Rescue Team games, it is completely identical to the used Explorers portrait. Considering the various Rescue Team placeholders included in the game, it may be an earlier version of its portrait.

The normally-colored Celebi portraits include recolored versions of the portraits used for shiny Celebi, though they likely aren't any more than a copy-paste job. Explorers of Sky eventually added more portraits to the shiny Celebi's list, but did not recolor them for the non-shiny version. The normally-colored Celebi only uses the first portrait in-game.

An unused alternate portrait exists for Groudon. The first portrait is identical to its portrait in Rescue Team, but the second has a slightly redrawn mouth and various minor touch-ups. This might be another early portrait, dating to Rescue Team's development.

Every Pokemon with a gender difference has a separate entry at the very end of the list of portraits, filled with versions that were modified to match these differences. For some Pokemon, such as Dustox, Xatu, or Scyther, their differences are not visible in the portrait, and so the designers did not create separate entries for them. However, as mentioned above, Shiftry's female variants are simply duplicates of its male portraits. Shiftry's leaves are barely visible in its portraits, so the designers likely created the separate entry, realized they couldn't do much to change them, and abandoned them. Beautifly also shares this quirk.

There are several entries which do not correspond to valid Pokemon. 534-551 are simple duplicates of Bulbasaur's portraits, and 553 and 554 contain duplicates of Rescue Team's Munchlax portraits (not including the new ones made for Explorers, however). Sky replaced 534, 535, and 536 with Shaymin, Shaymin Sky Forme, and Giratina Origin Forme respectively, but left the rest alone and added extra portraits after them for some reason.