Digimon World: Dawn

"If this is dawn, I'd rather sleep for a little longer"

As a pseudo-sequel to "Digimon Story", it would be nice that many of the previous game's problems were fixed. Unfortunately, while many issues contained in the last title were actually solved, new problems rise in this one, ones that deeply influence the enjoyable experience that this adventure could have been.

This game's story starts in a simple fashion. Your character, whose sex you can pick, enters a small tournament, where he/she has to fight some characters of an opposing faction. Winning or losing the battles involved is up to you, but once the tournament ends you're attacked by a strange being, which causes severe damage in everything it strikes. Almost all digimon are turned back into their egg forms, and this is exactly where the main adventure starts, with your character having to investigate what happened, and who is the strange being that attacked your city.

Unfortunately, the small tournament is one of a kind, and there absolutely no other similar events to be seen across the rest of the game. In fact, the game doesn't even rely in any kind of set storyline. Instead, you're usually told to visit a specific building, where quests are awarded, and some of them will allow you to advance along in the story. Five counters are available when it comes to accepting quests, and while one provides story-related quests, the others are largely unrecognisable, making it impossible to set up debates on whether you should go for a Dragon quest or one related to Holy Digimon. Why bother picking, if there's no noticeable difference between them? Simply take them both, one at a time, and you'll be getting some extra experience and new goods.

All quests are pretty basic to figure out. Usually, you're told to go to a particular area and find a particular monster, which you should defeat before heading back to town. There are also times where you have to do some exploration across boring dungeons, trying to figure out where several characters are before confronting the final target, but even at those times you'll have your task made easy by checking a certain option from the pause screen, which tells you exactly what you've done and what you have to do next.

While advancing across those quests, you'll have to face tons of random battles, which tend to become rather annoying. Like in the previous game, finding a particular monster in the heat of battle adds up to the data you have, and once such amount reaches over 100%, you're able to acquire the monster you fought against, which will promptly join your ranks. At such a point, you can add them to your farm or put them in your current party, so that they can gain experience and stats' bonus. More experience leads to more level-ups, new moves learnt and new evolutions unlocked, which is where things start to derail.

Those who played the previous title know that each digimon has access to an evolution tree, where they may advance and retreat to gain new forms. Agumon, for example, can now evolve to Greymon or GeoGreymon, depending on his stats, but he can no longer change back to Koromon. This was the first of two restrictions added to the game, you can only change to baby forms once you've befriended such a form. This prevents players from jumping from two major evolution branches at will, if they're in early stages of the game, making it harder to easily acquire powerful beasts.

The other restriction has both a good and a bad point. Basically, when you evolve to a new form, your monster is instantly taken to the next form's level one. This surely allows you to gain more levels, ultimately leading to better stats, but it also makes it harder to evolve your monster to a particular form. If you want to evolve Greymon back to Agumon, you'd have to gain him five levels, which is obviously easy, but when it comes to a point where you have to gain more than 20 levels just to change to a lower form, the game becomes slightly annoying and rather uninteresting.

Farms, an important detail of the previous game, make its return here, with all of the original functions and some new ones. You can occupy up to four islands, place some training devices, apart from add special tiles and theme songs. While devices are randomly used by your monsters, they also enable you to train them manually, a few times a day, which turns out being an important function later in the game, when you want to improve particular stats, for one reason or another. Special tiles and theme songs, which need to be bought for each island, provide static bonus to your characters, raising some of their stats or increasing their growth ratio.

This aspect of personalisation, with each character being treated as a single individual, is an important feature of the game. You can build up characters in any way you like, turning them into powerful killing machines or quick strikers. If you devote your time to all aspects of the game, you can even turn all your characters into perfect fighting machines, with close to no weak points and all the moves that best fit your needs. Unfortunately, such actions take a long time to accomplish, and most players may dislike spending so much time raising the stats of their monsters. Unlike before, you can now perform DNA Evolutions and Armour Evolutions without going online, but most of those are tricky and, unless you're using some sort of guide, may be hard to get to.

If devoting a long time to raising stats and producing rare creatures just isn't for you, there are still other details that may appeal to you. Either via local wireless or actually online, you're allowed to trade monsters, mate them or fight against other players, which is always nice. Exactly like in the past game, mating monsters produces eggs, which may later hatch for rare species. Unfortunately, and unlike it happens with DNA Evolution, this feature is exclusive to those who play online, which may prevent a limited group of players from enjoying all this game has to offer.


In the end, this game not only feels like its prequel but also looks like it. I failed to find any noticeable differences between the sprites in both games, which makes it look like they simply reused the ones created for the previous game. While all characters and monsters are rather easy to recognise, there's a lot that could have been improved in this game, and they seem to have neglected such issue. Special effects, usually seen in the middle of battles, are just poor, and they appear to be constantly reused for attacks that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

In terms of sound, the games features a very few enjoyable theme songs, but that's all there is to it. Keep it off, and you'll suffer no harm.

In case you're one of those players that loves developing their characters to the maximum, this game is worth your time. Digimon fans will also like this game, but if you fall in neither of these two categories I strongly suggest you to stay away from this product.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/24/07

Game Release: Digimon Story Sunburst (JP, 03/29/07)