Ayen's Reviews #2: Digimon World

[Ayen]

Digimon World is a role-playing, digital pet game developed and published by Bandi and released on the Sony PlayStation console on May 23rd, 2000 to North America. It stars a little boy who is sucked into the world of Digimon to save File City on File Island. The game is based off the popular digital pets called Digimon and spanned several sequels and spinoffs since coming out.

Gameplay: The basics of Digimon World is that you travel File Island with a Digimon of your own that you can raise from its beginning forms all the way through to its ultimate form. Digimon eventually fade away and revert to egg form, and you can choose multiple eggs to start training your Digimon from there as it can evolve to all 65 stages available in the game.

Of course with any good monster based game you have battling. Now the battle system can be rather lackluster at the beginning of the game. All you have is three major choices to choose from and your Digimon only knows one attack until it learns more that you can sort later in the game.

The main goal of the game is to get more and more Digimon to return to File City so the city can flourish like it once did. You can get it up to 100% but that isn’t necessary to complete the game. The thing is you don’t know which Digimon will go to the city until you talk and battle them. Some Digimon will remain feral and not go to the city no matter how many times you fight them.

If you go into it not knowing what to do or where to go, it’s easy to get lost. The game doesn’t have a set list of things to do first. You can do things a certain way and let your Digimon grow from the experience, but it doesn’t limit you too much on where to go which is refreshing.

There are also various minigames you can play the further into the game you get. Like a game where you slide an object to a goal or a tournament battle that is a little more in depth with the battling than a regular battle in the game.

Taking care of your Digimon involves feeding it, letting it rest, and even stopping to let it go to the bathroom. Yeah, you have to stop to poop in the game, and if you fail to make it to the toilet in time they just go on the ground, and that turd stays there for the rest of the game every time you past that point as a constant reminder of your failure to go to the bathroom on time. Although, you can get porta potties as an item for when it has to go, but it just eats it like a food item. Weird.

Story: The story is like I mentioned before, with a crisis on File Island and Digimon losing their memories and leaving the city even forgetting their own language. It’s up to you to save the Digimons’ world and bring wild Digimon back to the city. It grows the city with each new Digimon you get to join and it opens up shops, clinics, and even battle arenas.

The cause of the crisis is left a mystery for most of the game and is explained, sort of, at the end with the main villain. Even though how the villain is finally defeated is left a mystery and isn’t explained that well. After you defeat him the player’s character returns to his world and File Island is safe once again. All thanks to you.

Graphics: The graphics aren’t particularly bad, but they aren’t the greatest either. They do a good job of displaying each unique Digimon and they have neat looking locations. You can tell it’s a PlayStation game by looking at it, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You know right away what it is, and what it belongs to and it hasn’t aged too badly since first coming out.

Flaws: Because the game has no real direction or way to tell which Digimon will go to the city, it can be very hard at the beginning. You have to fight various different Digimon and if you run into one a higher level than you it can be bad for your starter. It takes a long time for anything interesting to happen and it’s very much a game for Digimon fans making it harder for an outsider to get into the feel of the game.

Summary: Overall, what the game does well, it does very well. What the game does horribly, it does very horribly. There are some what moments, but the story is still an interesting one shrouded in mystery and it’s fun to see what type of creature your Digimon will grow up to be. While it can be rather exclusive, it can be worth it to get through the sharp learning curve to learn more about it and see where this franchise grew its roots.

Get It!