My investigations into the mons scene continue, this time with Digimon. This is the most Pokemon-like Digimon game I’ve seen: You can raise any digimon you see and the pet sim elements have been removed to focus purely on battling. This makes it very easy to compare with Pokemon, which is useful because it does a number of things differently.

One: All battles are 3v3. This is good for obvious reasons and Pokemon really needs to get with the times at this point.

Two: A “combo” mechanic. Because multiple digimon can battle at once, there is a mechanic for them to boost each others’ abilities: If multiple allied digimon have adjacent turns in the turn order, there’s a random chance based on their “camaraderie” stat that they’ll boost the active digimon when it acts. The actual execution of this is very simple and kinda disappointing; there aren’t any cool combo techniques or anything, they just boost the power of your action a little bit. Still, it’s an interesting idea that, if expanded, could add a lot of personality to the mons. It reminds me a bit of the new “relationship” mechanic in Darkest Dungeon 2.

Three: Instead of catching individual digimon, you automatically scan enemy digimon at the start of battle, and after enough scans you can birth that species in your home base. One particularly interesting result of this is that you don’t even have to complete the fight; fleeing immediately will still get you the scan data, making it significantly less grindy than you may assume. This avoids all the random variation problems with Pokemon’s mons, though I know some people like those. It does mean it can be tedious to hunt for specific digimon because you have to encounter them not just once but many times, but the tangled web of digivolution trees as opposed to the set lines of Pokemon mitigates that problem.

Four: Party size limits are more complex. Though there is a hard upper limit of how many digimon you can hold at once, you can’t just fill it out immediately like you can in Pokemon. Instead, every digimon takes up a certain amount of memory, and you need to upgrade your protagonist’s RAM if you want more. Stronger digimon take up more memory, so you also can’t trivialize the game by powerleveling into advanced forms earlier than you’re supposed to. RAM upgrades are doled out over the course of the main quest, so your party size gradually increases over the course of the whole game instead of maxing out almost immediately and then staying there like in Pokemon. I think all of this is a very good idea.

Five: The aforementioned digivolution webs. If you’re not aware, Digimon’s evolution is way more complicated than Pokemon’s; instead of evolutions being unique, linear lines, digimon often have multiple different digimon that can evolve into them, making their evolution charts tangled, branching webs. I think this actually works well with the format (certainly much better than it did in Digimon World), because it encourages you to raise multiple instances of the same baby species so you can branch them into different evolutions. It creates a similar feeling to a class specialization tree in RPGs — though it would help if we had a better idea of what each evolution did instead of them being mostly unknowns.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Digimon if they didn’t take this way too far. The total roster comes in at a whopping 341, about twice that of the average Pokemon regional dex. This makes individual digimon struggle to find a unique identity, and they end up mostly interchangeable. The game would likely be better if the roster had been slashed in half; sometimes less is more.

Six: You can de-evolve digimon as well as evolve them. This has various gameplay benefits (raises their level/stat cap and keeps any learned skills), as well as making it easier to fill out the whole web by allowing you to explore multiple branches with the same digimon. While this is useful from a “gotta catch ’em all” perspective, it did make me much less attached to my digimon due to their lack of persistent identity. I can’t even remember where my original starter ended up. It would be nice if digimon recorded a record of their past digivolutions to help you keep track.

Seven: You can grind digimon into EXP to strengthen others. This hideously unethical practice is never commented upon in the story, even as you fight “evil” hackers who are “abusing” their digimon unlike you, the noble hero who everyone loves. It makes a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective, as the passive nature of digimon collection means you’re likely to accumulate lots of trash mons, but yikes. Save the horrorshow mechanics for grimdark series like Shin Megami Tensei, guys. Why have so many JRPGs seemingly abandoned the concept of thematic consistency between gameplay and story? (Once again, Yo-Kai Watch is the only mons franchise that seems to care about this…)

Unfortunately, Pokemon’s problem of most battles being won before they begin is still in full effect. The game has not one but two separate rock/paper/scissors systems, both of which stack, and extremely little diversity in abilities beyond elemental affinity, so there is little strategy beyond matching your digimon to your opponents’. All of the usual flaws of JRPGs — tedious, grindy, repetitive battles — are in full force. By the end I was just pretty sick of it all.

Despite the title, storywise the game is nothing to write home about. It’s decent but way too backloaded, to the point I think the dramatic change to the status quo in the second half is where the story should have started. The first half is just a lot of fetch quests and inane wheel-spinning as characters slowly piece together the shocking revelation that digimon exist and do things. Once the story actually begins it has somewhat interesting things to say about how humans would react to the sudden appearance of mons (I was particularly amused by the tongue-in-cheek NPC dialogue about the world becoming like an RPG) as well as what digimon think of the human world, but since it’s a linear JRPG you don’t get to express any opinion on the topics raised. The plot actually feels like it would be a great setup for a Bioware-style “Your Choices Matter!” RPG, but you’re never allowed to really engage with it. Oh, and the villain wants to make the world a better place, but this is bad, because.

The text was also very rough, with a lot of typos and awkward phrasings I assume are over-literal translations. It had the quality I would expect from a one-man fan translation, not a professional localization.

Additionally, the protagonist is a bizarre combination of a silent protagonist and not. We have to listen to their inane internal narration constantly, but when it comes to audible dialogue they just do the thing where they make mouth movements into the camera and the other character summarizes for us. Why. Silent protagonists serve a specific purpose. Commit to it or don’t use them at all.

Also… I don’t normally complain about this but the graphics are awful, to the point I can’t believe it was made as recently as 2015. Camera angles are completely fixed, the protagonist’s movements look like a parody of deliberately awful retro animation, and battles do the Pokemon Stadium thing of only showing one actor on camera at a time instead of actually showing attacks connecting. Environments are also extremely samey and simplistic cyberspace backdrops, as opposed to the full biomes of World. The whole thing looks like it was designed for the PS1, not the Vita. I don’t know how they screwed up this badly, especially when Re:Digitize looked fine despite coming out 3 years earlier on an older console.

The story did surprisingly well on women, though! The girl deuteragonist is the one who gets all the ridiculous undeserved shonen powerups just by screaming about FRIENDSHIP!!! a lot, and there is another major female character motivated by her fridged brother, who herself has a girl best friend who exclusively uses female digimon and is a really strong tamer. The women all have vacuum-sealed breasts, because this is still Anime, but still, progress. There is also a minor sidequest NPC who casually mentions he’s gay, and a few instances of gender-inclusive language when discussing dating options. So it’s good to see Digimon has become a bit less misogynist in the intervening decades, even as the number of waifu-mon have skyrocketed. (Seriously, there’s a whole family that are literally just human women, apparently made just for this game! MUNKY NOT WAIFU, please.)