Digimon World DS

"My first Digimon experience was a good one."

Pet raising games have been one of my guilty pleasures since the days of Lufia 2, circa 1995, but for some reason I had never played Digimon, which I assumed was just a second-rate Pokemon knock-off. First of all, the Digimon fans who get furious whenever anybody makes a comparison between the two "mon" franchises are only fooling themselves. For those who haven't played, Digimon does play somewhat like a Pokemon game, and is just as childish and often poorly translated. As an RPG, you run around fulfilling quests and fighting monsters in order to move the plot forward. Like in Pokemon, Digimon's gameplay essentially revolves around befriending and raising monsters by training them in battle. However, Digimon boasts a much more complex and interesting system of evolution - as your monsters gain experience levels, you can choose to have them follow one of several evolutionary tracks. With this system, you can raise the same creature two or three different ways with drastically different results. Then, if you don't like your results or just want to improve your little friend's overall abilities, you can de-evolve him and start over from an earlier stage in his evolutionary line (or the beginning), keeping some of his abilities and statistics and allowing you to raise him into something more powerful. This system lends a great deal of sophistication to the game and adds tremendously to its replay value.

This game is not, however, without its share of problems. For one thing, it can feel very slow at times, particularly late in the game. Random battles occur very frequently, which can be extremely frustrating when lost in a dungeon or running quests in a dungeon you've already fought your way through once before. Furthermore, each battle loads up quite slowly, not due to the limitations of the DS but rather because the game's designers chose to load enemy monsters onto the screen one at a time, displaying a number for how many of them you've seen. When fighting 5 enemies at a time, this can be quite time-consuming and feels entirely unnecessary. Also, the game's menu system is very poorly done. Any time you do anything in the menu (including just bringing it up in the first place) there is a significant pause, and because of the poor menu design a simple task may require 10 button presses and 10 accompanying pauses. For example, in most RPGs if you want to take a weapon off of one character and give it to another, you can just bring up that character's equip screen, select unequip for that weapon, and hit the R or L trigger to bring up another character and equip the item on them. In this game you have to bring up the main menu, then the DIGIMON menu, then select the monster you want, then select Equip, then select the weapon and hit remove, then back up a step to that monster's statistics screen, then back to the digimon menu in order to select the other monster and do the same thing. That's like 8 button presses and the job's only halfway finished, and remember that each button press has a pause associated with it - that's a really slow and poorly constructed menu system.

The slowness encountered in many parts of the game is its primary drawback, although the story could be considered another. Again, in the same vein as Pokemon, the story in Digimon is very childish and ridiculous, complete with dialogue which goes beyond laughable to the point where you may be embarrassed to be in the same room as anybody else who might see what you're reading. However, in a game which revolves primarily around raising monsters, the dialogue and story aren't particularly important anyway. So in conclusion, though the gameplay is not especially deep, and the game itself is rather slow-moving, it's still a fun and enjoyable game if you're into raising monsters. If monster raising games is not your bag, then I would suggest looking elsewhere.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/05/07