I was a Digimon kid growing up, so this series has always had a special place in my heart. The funny thing is, I have only up to this point consumed a few Digimon media: the first four seasons of the anime, some of the digivice toys, and the Digimon World 3 game.
A few of the things that I like in Digimon that aren't in Pokemon is how much more crazy this series gets with the designs and, more relevant to this game, the ability for Digimon to evolve forward and backwards. Early on through my playthrough of this game, I was excited to learn that you can get even a Rookie to become super powerful. However, as cool as the gimmick of having a powerful Rookie is, the fact that they will always have worse moves than higher level Digimon killed that excitement for me. Also, as the game became less fun, novel things such as this lost their value.
The battles in this game are pretty dull. There is no real strategy, and you can kill enemies in one hit most of the time. The game is poorly balanced, as the bosses would often be pretty challenging, while the enemies that precede them would be complete jokes. One of the most frustrating parts about the battles is how often I would miss the enemies with my attacks. Besides the "Miss" sound effect being the worst sound ever to be placed into a video game, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for it to occur as often as it does. For example, I would be fighting DIgimon that I was at least twice as fast as, yet miss them a tenth of the time.
One of my biggest issues with this game is the random encounter rate. The number of steps it takes to get an encounter is very low, probably from 15-20 steps. This number never changes. The only way to somewhat nullify this is to enter another room, which resets the step counter. However, considering how maze-like and long a lot of areas in this game are, or how most of the rooms take at least 30 steps to make it through, you'll probably have at least one encounter in every room you go through.
The one thing that is useful about the high encounter rate is getting experience, because wooh, this game is grindy as fuck. It isn't as grindy as, for example, World 3, but it can get pretty bad, especially when it comes to trying to obtain every Digimon. One of the worst parts about the grind is the certain types of experience required to get certain Digivolutions. You see, this game splits up experience by type. For example, fighting beast Digimon will give you beast experience, fighting holy Digimon will give you holy experience, etc. Certain digivolutions may require, say, 60000 holy exp. This wouldn't be so bad if A)There were any holy Digimon that gave more than 100 EXP and B)The Holy enemies that you can grind with weren't mixed in with Digimon that gave useless EXP. The Aptitude requirement only serves to overcomplicate things ever further.
I don't have much to say about the Farm. I didn't find much use for it, and found placing a Digimon in my Party to be the fastest way of getting them to digivolve.
The spritework is pretty good, on the map and in battle. There are however, battle sprites that were very clearly done by Bandai's D-team. For example:
Also, a lot of the Digimons' proportions were weird. Like, why is Triceramon a midget? Isn't he supposed to be this skyscraper-sized bipedal Triceratops? Personally, I would have favored fully animated sprites in the style of the map sprites being used for battles.
The music in this game is decent, though there aren't too many tunes that you'll be humming after playing it. I did really like the return of the [Digimon World 3's Asuka Sewers theme.][2] The Tamer Union track and the Core Field track were pretty good too. Unfortunately, some of these tracks were overplayed. For example, the aforementioned sewer theme was used in six different places...
The story was fairly decent for a Digimon story. The whole Digimon not trusting humans theme was pretty interesting.
Overall, I did have quite a bit of fun with this game, at least when I started out. It just got old fairly quick. I really felt like I was doing work after a while, especially when it came to getting some of the extra content. Would I recommend this game? Probably, not. Unless you're a hardcore Digimon fan, you probably won't get much out of this.
5/10
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