Digimon Survive is a visual novel/tactical RPG with horror elements. Despite being largely unimpressed with Digimon’s catalogue, I decided that sounded interesting enough to give it a shot.

Let me tell you, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a game whose mechanics were so at odds with its narrative. This thing is a train wreck.

The Wikipedia article’s “Development” section provides some context I find very enlightening:

At Digimon Con, on February 27, 2022, it was confirmed that the developers had been changed at some point from Witchcraft. The official Digimon Survive website then changed the developers listed on the website to Hyde. On April 18, 2022, the game’s Japanese release date was finally revealed as July 28, 2022. Two days later, the localized release date was announced as July 29.

In July 2022, shortly before the release of the game, Habu stated that they had changed the development studio as his original intention was to create the game with a small team on an indie game budget, rather than the budget a Digimon game would usually get, but as the project went on he realized this wasn’t possible and had to switch to a bigger studio with a bigger budget to be able to achieve his vision for the game. He also stated he was lucky that the smaller studio (Witchcraft) hadn’t used much budget as it allowed him to convince Bandai’s stakeholders not to cancel the game.[citation needed] As Witchcraft were using a custom made engine that Hyde could not access, development of the game had to be restarted from scratch which caused the game’s development time to double from two years to four years, with development switching from the custom engine to Unity.

So, to summarize: This game was not developed by Bandai, but by an indie studio so obscure it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article. It then changed to a completely different studio, who proceeded to remake the game from scratch. The director claims this was to bring the game in line with his vision, but it was actually because they didn’t have the rights to the previous studio’s work. All of this was done on a shoestring budget.

Let me tell you, after having played the result, this explains a lot.

I am 99% certain this was not originally a Digimon game. The digimon aren’t even digital; they come from a standard fantasy spirit world that has existed for millennia, rather than the internet. The word “digimon” in fact is never used in the script (outside of one ending that awkwardly tries to justify it); they are instead referred to as “beast gods”. Or rather,

The whole thing honestly reads like Digimon fanfiction; they seemed inspired by many of the core elements and themes while trimming details they didn’t care about as much. Reading between the lines, it’s possible that “we needed a bigger budget” meant “We needed to partner with an existing mons franchise because we couldn’t design a whole bestiary ourselves.”

That said, I’m not sure Digimon was the first franchise they approached. Many aspects seem strongly inspired by Shin Megami Tensei, especially Devil Survivor. There’s a digimon recruitment mechanic that’s straight out of SMT, a random OOC bad ending that’s straight out of Persona, and the alignments are literally referred to as “Law”, “Neutral”, and “Chaos” in the game’s code. A whole bunch of things are weirdly similar to Devil Survivor, too: they’re not just both isometric tactical RPGs, they also both feature a world map and a time management mechanic (complete with “free battles” that don’t advance time).

This should be a good thing, because I loved Devil Survivor. Unfortunately, the developers did not understand that you can’t just transplant a game’s mechanics into a completely different narrative and have it make tonal sense. DeSu’s mechanics were extremely well-integrated into its narrative, but here they just undermine and confuse the narrative at every turn.

To give a quick rundown of why DeSu’s movement mechanics worked in that game:

• The location is well-known to the characters, so it is believable they could quickly travel across the map.
• Locations are relatively large, being city districts, so multiple scenes can easily take place within a single location.
• All events take time, which gives the sense that travel time is being accounted for.
• If there is nothing of note to do in a location, you can’t explore it; you only get a bit of NPC chatter that implies you aren’t staying there for a significant length of time.
• Logistics are rarely important to the plot, and the few times they are, your movement is heavily restricted.

For contrast, in Digimon Survive:

• The plot is the standard Digimon isekai, so the location and its dangers are completely unknown to the characters.
• Locations are extremely fine-grained, often the size of single rooms.
• Time management is only a mechanic during “downtime” where nothing significant is happening, implying travel during plot segments is instantaneous.
• All locations can be entered and explored, making it much harder to handwave that you’re just passing through.
• Logistics are extremely important to the plot, with many plotlines revolving around reaching a specific location under a tense, time-sensitive situation.

The ability to instantly travel across the map whenever you feel like it fundamentally does not work with this framing. You can’t tell me it’s super important we rush to Point B to rescue Character X from certain death but also I can take all the time I like turning over every stone in the woods for secret items or fighting random encounters. Definitely the worst aspect is the tiny locations, because every single time the story needs to make a scene change you’re booted to the world map and allowed to dick around wherever you want, which atomizes the pacing. But I think what frustrates me the most is that the time management mechanics are completely inconsistent: You’re often railroaded into story-critical bottleneck events during “free time”, and sometimes you’ll have limited actions even during segments that don’t explicitly have limited activity points. The game absolutely should have kept you on rails outside of downtime segments. I suppose the issue with that would be that you couldn’t grind before boss battles, which brings me to my next issue…

This game should not have had a recruitment mechanic. It’s clearly only there because this is a mons game so you gotta catch ’em all, regardless of how little sense it makes. You can’t have a narrative where characters constantly freak out every time they see a digimon and act like it’s a mystery which ones they can and can’t trust and also let us recruit unlimited numbers of hostile digimon as a side gig. It’s even possible to recruit generic digimon that are the same species as digimon characters in the narrative, which is deeply weird. It also undermines the whole ANYONE CAN DIE thing when generics can fill in for the latest casualty — there’s no actual sense of dwindling manpower. The game really needed to be trimmed down — if the only battles were story-based and your party was limited to the main characters’ digimon, that would both be easier to design for and provide better ludonarrative synergy.

Not that it would have helped much because the battles are also garbage. DeSu was an absolute banquet of rich tactical depth and fun, interesting maps; Digimon Survive feels like Baby’s First Tactical RPG, full of empty, boring maps that are just frustrating to navigate. There are rarely useful choke points — you know, the cornerstone of all strategy in tactical RPGs — despite the game also featuring not just backstab but sidestab mechanics, so most battles feature you and your opponent dancing behind one another for backstabs, turning that mechanic into a farce. There’s also little in the way of customization (the thing responsible for DeSu’s aforementioned rich tactical banquet) — by default digimon only get a melee attack and their signature move, with the option of adding two whole other skills! …If you neglect stat-boosting and status-resistance equipment, because they compete for the same slots (of which there are two, I feel I must reiterate). This means that for the most part strategy is limited to fielding the best type matchups and throwing your strongest moves at the enemy. That’s right, despite being a tactical RPG it has about as much tactical depth as the most generic of jRPGs, but with the addition of forcing you to waste five turns crawling over to the enemy with your snail-like movement speed.

Even visually, the battles feel like they were designed for a different game. Here is what you first see when you start up a new game:

Creepy screen filter! Shadowy figures! Danger! Grimdark!!! Then you’re thrown into the tutorial battle and…

…suddenly we’re in the land of brightly-colored chibis. What horror?

I genuinely have to wonder if this wasn’t originally two games they ended up awkwardly stapling together. Everything about the RPG gameplay feels incredibly tacked on — the battlefields don’t match up with the cutscenes at all, with characters suddenly teleporting half a mile and previously-unmentioned flunkies spawning out of thin air (giving me Fire Emblem flashbacks), and as I’ve said previously all the mechanics are half-baked at best.

They also just… don’t seem to understand how it’s supposed to work at all. This is the actual tutorial, I kid you not:

Yes, they really tutorialized a mechanic just to show you that it doesn’t work. Boy, that sure teaches players to use it!

But don’t think this means the visual novel segments are any better. The story really, really wanted to have tons of complex scenes with characters running around, fighting, and getting captured, but chose to illustrate them entirely through portraits staring into the camera on a static background. There are occasionally unique cut-in illustrations, but they’re no better animated and way too rare besides. (Also, the standard VN shorthand of characters fading out to show they’re leaving a scene? Terrible fit for a story about people mysteriously disappearing.) There were several times when I was confused by the basic logistics of what was going on in a scene because everything is so implied.

Seriously, look at this crap. They sold their soul to Bandai for AAA money and this was still the best they could do?

Weirdly, some cutscenes take place in the battle engine, though the animation is even worse there even before considering the awkwardness of the chibis. Even still, I think I’d prefer if all cutscenes were done that way because at least then I’d be able to tell where everyone was supposed to be standing.

Honestly though, the chibis might have been a better tonal fit anyway, because the dialogue is… whoof.

(This might have been reasonable dialogue if this were the prologue, but it’s not. This is 2/3 of the way through the game, after we have beaten multiple monsters with the superpowers we very much do have.)

Kotaku apparently described the game as “[feeling] like reading over the shoulder of someone who’s taking too long to turn the page,” and BOY HOWDY do I second that. We have to sit through the digimon peanut gallery parroting everything the humans say followed by the idiot protagonist reiterating the entire scene in his internal narration every time the plot progresses an inch. There is so much stupid, pointless, vapid dialogue and it is exhausting. I really hope it was filler dialogue they meant to replace in a later draft, because if not… Jesus. People got paid money to write this?

The story itself is unremarkable. Middle school students get isekai’d into the Digimon — sorry, “Kemonogami” — world and take ages to accomplish even the most basic tasks because they insist on spending half of each day dicking around doing nothing. Some of them die stupidly, then there’s a damsel-in-distress plot rendered incoherent by the translators’ belief our dumb American brains will explode if we see the word “miko”. (“Shinto” and “magatama” are fine though.) The other world supposedly needs to eat kids to sustain itself, but actually it just needs belief, so you’d think it should let the kids go to spread more stories about digimon, but it doesn’t, because ???. The solution to this is to spread stories of digimon on the internet, which is why they become known as “digital monsters” in this continuity even though that makes no sense.

There’s also a significant plot point about a certain character being displaced in time, but though they’re textually from 1970, they’re written as if they’re from 1950 (they don’t know what computers are and their old house is clearly 1950s level of technology). Given the game was in development hell for ages, I have to wonder if “50 years ago” was closer to 1950 when that plot point was first conceived.

As with so many YOUR CHOICES MATTER games, your choices do not matter. The first two deaths can only be averted on new game plus because we have to inflate this game’s playtime as much as possible. (Just to make it confusing, the characters ruminate, for ages, on what they could have done differently, but if you think that’s telling you you screwed up and should reload, you’ll discover that no, they could not have done anything differently.) The game eventually splits into different finale routes based on the (completely nonsensical) moral choices you make throughout the game, but the results have almost nothing to do with your choices, you’re just arbitrarily railroaded into different events based on how many alignment points you have. (For some reason you are still given alignment choices after this, even though alignment no longer matters.)

The game is also weird about women, unsurprisingly. It’s much, much better than previous Digimon games — the girls aren’t sexualized and there are few waifumon — but that only brings it up to baseline sexism because the bar is at the Earth’s core. The affection system shows a very shallow and dehumanizing understanding of what women want (they’re incorrigible and want nonsensical responses, and also 15-year-old girls appreciate being told they’re like a mom), and one of the few waifumon is given to… the sexual abuse victim. Yes, really. Her boobs jiggle.

Nintendo Life apparently called this “One of the best visual novels to come out so far this year [2022].” I haven’t played the other visual novels that came out that year, so I guess I technically can’t dispute that, but Jesus Christ. Maybe video games really do turn your brain to mush! Get better standards, people.