Digimon World: Dawn

"It's always "could have been""

As a digimon fan, I must say that Digimon World: Dawn is a good game to play, although it could have been great. If you look back at all the Digimon games in the past, this is by far the best rated one.

Story: (5/10)
You start by choosing your "pack" of digimon to play with but somehow you'll always end up with that little red guy (and this annoys me, why did they make a new digimon and force me to play it? It doesn't even feel like digimon, the dusk version one is laughable). As soon as you enter the game, you'll find yourself in a team called Light Fang and they're losing in some tournament and you must help them. Later on you'll find the world in danger and you must save them. It's a pretty simple story. This is where the game goes wrong. First off, what is the digital world? What are digimon? How did you end up in this world? I guess if you're not familiar with Digimon, you probably don't have a clue what's going on. The game hardly has any character development, in fact it has no character development. Your character doesn't talk making you feel like you don't really exist. But that's not really a problem, I guess. :/ The story is really short, but that doesn't mean you will not enjoy this game.

Sound (6/10):
I didn't expect much. The music is ok I guess, but the whole random battles will ruin it before you could enjoy it anyway. It would have been really better if it has the original (Japanese) evolution theme. But what do you expect anyway, this is not the TV show... The battle theme is quite repetitive. I turn it off most of the time. The music isn't catchy at all.

Graphics: (8/10)
You can see your opponents pretty well. Great, they're moving! Cool! They're alive! The sprites are great! Hey, wait, where's my cool-looking digimons? All the time I spend choosing my digimon just to see their avatars? It's a pretty big let-down. But that's not all. All the attacks are lame, considering this is a DS game. ALL the attacks are just a little different from each other, and why must the double, triple attacks repeat like that? I mean, the digimon attacks, the damage number appears, then the digimon attacks, then the damage number appears, and again if it's a triple attack. Why can't they just attack 3 times continuously and then a total damage number appears? And when I run into battle, why must I wait for each of the opponent's digimon to appear? Why can't they show up all at once? These are really tiring.

The surrounding areas look ok, but very bland. They could have added some movements, like the water, or the trees' leaves moving. But let's not forget their hard work. It contains nearly 400 digimons and all have 3 different sprites, one more for attacking and one more for being attacked. That's a lot of work and I appreciate it.

Gameplay (6/10):
As I said before, the battle system are very boring, and the encounter rate is ridiculously high. Sometimes I just wish they have some "repel" item, or something to stop the random battles. But don't let that fool you. This game is fun to play.

The evolution route is really interesting to explore, though I was very mad because they missed out some very basic digimon. Hawkmon, for example, can only normal digivolve to Aquilamon, the whole Hawkmon line only consists of Hawkmon and Aquilamon, a Rookie and a Champion digimon. Isn't that ridiculous? In the TV show you can clearly see Hawkmon In-training form. I like Hawkmon but I can't play that digimon. It can't evolve to Mega form and the best it can do is armor digivolve to Ultimate (which was supposed to be Champion, weird game). They miss Magnadramon, another Mega form of Angewomon and some more. That said, the other digimons are still very amusing. They could have added something more original to each evolution (I mean, In-training, Rookie, Champion, Ultimate, Mega, whether they evolve or degenerate it looks the same).

The quest system is somewhat fun to play. There are five counters for Aquan, Dragon, Holy, Bird and Union quest. But the funny thing is even though they sorted all the quests into 4 types like you see above, that doesn't mean you will fight that type. And what's more, the reward isn't really... rewarding. The money? OK. The items? No. Most of the time it's some cheap item you can buy anytime. I don't understand why did they put that in anyway.

Replayability: (9/10)
What should I say, this is the whole idea of this game. I mean, you couldn't have bought this game for the story, could you? :D It would be fun if you have someone to play with. This game has Wifi too, which is a good thing. I have yet to try this so I can't really give any comment.

Trivial stuffs:
Some dungeons are very confusing. I don't think that little kids could figure it out themselves. And the random battles sometimes make you forget where are you going, making you completely lost. I'd love to explore all the dungeons to appreciate the designers' work, but the random battles are really too much. The characters look pretty weird. Maybe I expect too much after all. I'm a big digimon fan. I was very happy when the game came out.

Overall: (6.8/10)
This is a good game for a DS. If you're a Digimon fan, it's a must. If not, it's worth a try (that is if you can stand repetitive battles).

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/23/09

Game Release: Digimon World: Dawn (US, 09/18/07)