Video Games

Digimon Survive Review – IGN

Have you ever seen someone with strong, toned arms but embarrassingly thin legs? However, it skips the boring tactical combat completely. Aside from some serious pacing issues, meeting Digimon Survive’s memorable characters and exploring the grim world they’re in makes the story central to a lot of fun. But while this visual novel has made progress in the areas of storytelling and character portrayal, the slow and dauntingly simplistic turn-based combat system packed into it makes for an otherwise enjoyable story. It’s come to the point of completely ruining it.

The Ice Age opening hours of Digimon Survive feature a group of quirky high school students who are sucked into a parallel world filled with Digimon. many A darker tone and a new cast of characters mean where the similarities end. It’s an unsettling tale full of intense and traumatic backstories, physical and verbal abuse, episodes of psychosis, betrayal, and gruesome deaths next to cartoon mascots on the power of friendship. Tone control police? Yes, I would like to report the murder.

Digimon Survive Screens (English Version)

The dangerous tale of Digimon Survive sees these students and their destined Digimon partners as they try to survive the mysterious and dangerous world they’ve just found, while searching for a way to return to themselves. The thing is, they’re also surrounded by evil and sadistic Digimon who kill children and mutter to themselves about how much they love killing children in the same way. It is also a vehicle.

As uncomfortable as it can be, Digimon Survive benefits from both a dark tone and incredibly high stakes. For example, a character can be killed off in a terrifyingly gruesome way because you didn’t spend enough time building a relationship with them. Naturally, this turns them into the worst versions of themselves, and their deaths are all your fault, bad friends. It works very well in visual novels that put characters front and center, as it has relied heavily on More murders in progress.

The art style is great, as long as you’re out of combat.


All that murder looks great too, thanks to an anime art style that makes you forget you haven’t watched a Digimon TV show half the time. The characters are incredibly vivid and expressive. As such, I’ve almost forgiven the lack of English voice options, which I generally prefer. . Because every time I jump on the low-res textures and oversimplified character models in the tactical gameplay section, I get whiplash. I almost broke my neck. Digimon Survive’s music is also generally of good quality, but unfortunately I got sick of it by the end, as only a handful of tracks played over and over again during its roughly 40-hour runtime.

slow death

As a visual novel first and foremost, Digimon Survive lets you do number-based activities like finding hidden objects and building social links with your allies, but the story around them is very It’s wonderful. It has memorable characters, a unique setting, and some clever twists (admittedly, I’ve seen a lot of that reveal come from a mile away from him). A bit one-dimensional, but likable human companions like cool-headed mother Aoi and chatty goofball Minoru, as well as the much-loved Agumon and the surprisingly quiet and stern Falcomon. Digimon Survive has authentic storytelling chops at just the right time, and the pivotal moments that bend them are the best part of the adventure.

The biggest problem with the story is that it moves at a snail’s pace most of the time. A lot of meaningless filler padding the chapters and characters and refusing to ever stop rehashing the same thing over and over again. He yelled on TV, “Now I know!” The opening hours in particular were very slow and left an incredibly bad first impression until things finally started to develop. , stuck unnecessarily stretched dialogue down its throat. In one section, I walked through the same halls of the waterway and found the same fantastic figure repeatedly (which, of course, fooled my character each time). Of a character who briefly discusses with me before running off to be chased again.

Thankfully, the relationships we forge in the process of unraveling the mysteries of this world are rewarding and have a meaningful impact on the story, with several different endings (plus a secret ending only achievable in New Game +). ) culminates in Most of these endings are worth seeing at least once, but to access them, you’ll need a rigid, unintuitive karma system that scales morality, anger, and harmony scores based on the dialogue options you choose along the way. Must be mastered. To get access to some endings and make characters like you, you need to know what kind of reactions a character likes. Somebody wants me – or worse, he did it just so he could score high enough in one category to unlock a particular ending. favorite.

Evolve into chaos

In between long stretches of visual novel gameplay, slowly progress through Digimon Survive’s absolutely abominable tactical combat. If you’ve played anything like a Fire Emblem game, these turn-based battles will be familiar, but only one particular iteration of the genre is unbearable in nearly every way imaginable. It’s one of the most bare bones designs I’ve seen in a tactics game. Each Digimon he only has two moves (normal attack and signature move), enemies are the same and predictable, and the battle system doesn’t evolve at all. you make progress In fact, with so few factors to consider, even the more difficult difficulties required little tactics or strategy other than choosing the strongest Digimon and rushing the enemy. It became a repetitive and painfully dull combat system that proved aggressive to me, and I couldn’t endure more than a minute at a time before sighing deeply and surrendering myself to a cold, unnerving embrace.

Unfortunately, really worthwhile stories are punctuated by these long, shoddy encounters and often drag on too long. If you’re playing in degrees, you’ll need some grind as well. Regularly boring combat system. Digimon Survive also uses a recruiting system similar to Persona 5. In this system, Digimon can join teams by answering seemingly nonsensical questions with equally nonsensical answers and finding the answers each Digimon prefers. Answering questions correctly to the digimon’s satisfaction gives you a percentage chance of them joining your team. One of the most frustrating experiences in recent memory, and I had a very sour taste during my adventure. I would have enjoyed it more if this wasn’t included at all.

To be fair, the devs included a number of options to make painful combat less uncomfortable by increasing combat speed, turning off animations, and using the auto-combat option. There is also a ‘Retry’ option if the RNG goes awry and fails while trying to catch a Digimon. Of course, with so many tools that allow you to speed up, skip, or not engage in the combat system, a lot of effort goes into avoiding playing half the game at all costs. I would have much preferred if that effort had gone into fleshing it out and making the combat actually fun.

There aren’t many compliments that can be given to Digimon Survive’s combat, but one of them is the satisfying rewards players have for spending time developing social links with the characters in the story. This is because your affinity with a character determines the extent to which that character can digivolve. In other words, the closest character is your most powerful ally on the battlefield. If you’re like me and want to spend some time in a confusing game mode, this gives you a great incentive to spend time with friends and make sure they’re happy.

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