Digimon Survive, the new video game made in celebration of the anime’s 25th anniversary, attempts to juggle being both a visual novel and a tactical role-playing game. The result is a slog of a game that’s 70 percent visual novel, 20 percent tactical role-playing game, and 10 percent horror; totalling out as a 100 percent waste of my time.
Digimon Survive, developed by Hyde and Witchcraft, follows a gaggle of teenagers on a school camping trip who are unceremoniously transported to a mysterious world where fantastical anthropomorphic creatures called Digimon run amok. If you’re thinking that concept sounds eerily similar to Pokémon, you’d be right. Digimon is to Pokémon what DreamWorks Pictures animated film Antz is to Disney’s Bug’s Life with the exception that most Digimon can speak. While nefarious Digimon in this new realm wish to use the kids for a ritualistic sacrifice, a small group of kind Digimon make it their life’s mission to get them back home safe.
Digimon Survive tries to fuse the visual novel style of dialogue choices with battle-related social links a la Persona, but it’s not very good at either of those things.
Combat in the game works similarly to the turn-based combat system from Live A Live, where you can position your party members on a grid during fights. While their placement plays a key role in how battles play out, the battle tactics in Digimon Survive manage to be both a cake walk and a slog. As is common in most TRPGs, attacking the side or the back of an enemy results in critical damage. The problem with Digimon Survive is that it takes forever for characters to travel across tiles in the game’s large battle arenas, even if you speed up their animations by hitting the skip button. Most of your movement will be spent getting within range of the enemy, which depending on the amount of party members you’re rocking with, can take upwards of four to five turns before any of the action happens.
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Digimon Survive’s adventure and exploration side of things follows a visual novel formula of waving your cursor over objects and characters in the environment to discover more things about them. This, too, suffers from being a needlessly arduous part of the game. While the game encourages exploration, going so far as to flash the words on screen whenever the moment arises, unless items or people in the environment have an exclamation point on them, you’re wasting your time clicking them. Much like with James Sunderland or Heather Mason in the Silent Hill series, clicking on something like an accordion in an abandoned school results in flavor text akin to a lazy caption for a newspaper photo: it tells you what you can surmise rather than provide any illuminating commentary or of substance. See a pile of dusty drums in an abandoned music room? Chances are Takuma Momozuka, the character you play as, will reiterate the obvious saying, “Dang, those drums sure are dusty. Couldn’t tell you how long they’ve been there.” Thanks a lot, Takuma. I couldn’t have arrived at that point without your help.
Rarely does exploration reward you with items that aid you in combat scenarios. I became inundated with health items I never needed because that was a cakewalk as well.
The teenagers and the Digimon in the game have the emotional fortitude of grade schoolers, which is honestly a part of the game’s charm. There’s a…
Read More: Digimon Survive Is A Painfully Boring TRPG
