Digimon World DS

"Quick! Rush to the farm!"

A few years have passed since the release of the first Digimon games, and yet today new series and newer games seem to be on stores. Across the years, many new evolutions and single characters have crossed our paths, and as far as I could understand that was supposed to be one of the attractive points of this game, granting the player the ability to face (and play with) all those characters that we've seen across the years. Unfortunately, not even that can compensate some of the flaws you'll find here.

Containing more than 200 Digimon for you to play and acquire, it may be with a strange smile that you may find that only around half of those will be usually seen in the middle of the areas, with such famous enemies as Agumon being seen only once or twice for every hour of play. Since the capture device in this game is designed in a way that you can only acquire a set percentage of data every time you see a certain enemy (with at least 100% being required to gain that Digimon), it may turn out being incredibly hard to normally capture whoever you want.

Bearing in mind this last paragraph, the best way to acquire a specific Digimon is by getting a certain evolution and then turn it back into the original one. While such task could seem easy, it is way harder when it comes to thinking that each evolution may not even be related to the original Digimon, the one seen in the series. For example, when it comes to Impmon, it can't evolve to Beelzemon, as we were expecting. Instead, he has a quite a few unrelated evolutions, all of which you may not be wanting at all.

Besides, trying to evolve to a more powerful evolution may be slightly harder than you may be thinking, with more requirements than simply reaching level X. Some of those may be indeed hard to attain, and while they could add some interesting value to the game, most of them times a player may be required to play for a lot more than 10 whole hours in order to try fulfilling such requirement, only to fail on such task.

After having all those powerful monsters, it is time to battle. Across your adventure, you'll notice that you can have up to 6 monsters at any time (3 in the battle and 3 which can be used as substitutes) and perform slight tactical changes with them (there are 5 in-battle spots for you to put those 3), turning your boss battles into something slightly easier, if your party is correctly managed. The battle system is usually kinda slow, with it resembling the one of Final Fantasy X and allowing you to check, on this console's upper screen, what is the digimon striking next. By gaining experience in these battles, it is not only possible to increase your stats, but also learning new (and sometimes, a lot more powerful) moves. Some surprises will be found in later battles, but that's for the player to find out.

However, not only of battles lives a RPG, and the exploration issue in this game seems to have been completely ignored. Usually, you simply have access to a single town (where everything you need can be bought), where you can see two warp points, one taking you to your farm (one of the best ideas included in this game) and another which takes you to the level you need to play, where you simply have to travel from point A to point B, where you will find the usual boss battle, hardly any exploration required. OK, there are usually 1 or 2 items to acquire in each of those levels, but even those seem to randomly cross your path, on your way to the final enemy.

So, about the farm... apart from being generally accessible by that city warp point, you will be able to see what's happening in there by looking at the upper screen outside of the battles. While it is generally uninteresting (all your digimon do is hanging around...), at the end of each day the Digimon which are hanging in there seem to raise their stats a little bit. Staying there requires you to use food, which can be bought in store or acquired in battles, but that turns out being a non-important detail, as you will find this farm interface to be a quite good method of raising a particular stat, as you can buy unique-stat enhancers to put in there. Don't think "Digimon World 1", as your characters won't die, will not require you to feed them manually and they won't even evolve, while staying in there.

Probably one of the most important things in this product turns out being its online (by Nintendo 's WI-FI) mode. While I couldn't get to try it (I don't have a wireless connection, unfortunately, and the usb adaptor is too expensive in here), I know that you can battle other people in there, apart from being able to mate two Digimon, which would produce a digitama egg. Featuring 48 different ones for you to collect, such feature would better be also accessible offline, but for some reason it wasn't.

With the feature I've just stated, the ability to (hardly) collect more than 200 digimon and even the existence of some in-game quests for you to complete, it may take you quite a while to complete it all. Will you play it that long? Depends fully on you, and how much you get to like the game.

Graphically speaking, the game is great and you can even recognise all your characters, friends or foes, easily. Its quality has nothing to envy to the other games for this console, and it simply has two flaws: First, you don't see your digimon attacking in the middle of the battles, and even the special effects in there are too repetitive. Second, when a digimon is using any machine at the farm, the upper screen turns from the usual TV-like screen into a normal screen, which doesn't look very good, if seen in the proper context.

About the sound, while not being bad, it doesn't seem to fit the series and you will probably get fed up of it after a while, making you turn it off.

Concerning non-Japanese players, is this game good for them? Well, you are required to have some knowledge of the language to complete it, but you may also be able to do it some help from other gamers.

So, who should get this game? Mostly, Digimon fans, as there are better choices for those of you who want to get another RPG.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/20/06