Reviews

I enjoyed this but it's a tough recommend. Firstly, it's super long. Egregiously so. But, unfortunately, it is weirdly front-loaded in terms of content. Like by the time you get to the final two chapters, you finally unlock the ability to digivolve to all these major Digimon that have been hyped up the entire game (not that you necessarily need them, there are just some cool-to-have ones), but you straight up have to grind at that point to (a) unlock them individually and (b) level your Digimon up to even be able to digivolve. And these endgame Digimon have VERY high stat requirements. So by the time you're all done, all you can do is wander aimlessly in the mostly empty dungeons you already cleared or compete in the offline colosseum, which has its own ridiculous difficulty curve. I guess there's New Game+ but the story isn't exactly enticing enough to make me want to dump a second 50-70 hours into it just to evolve a handful more Digimon. There's minor translation issues constantly - to the point that some dialogue options are one sentence split up across three lines and you pick one of the lines - and a plot that introduces and picks up new characters and plot threads all the time. It's long enough of a game that, looking back over time, you can squint and see it as multiple seasons of a show, but taken as a whole, it can be a little nonsensical. It makes me wonder why they even wrote the story they did and if I would have been better served going right to a more low-stakes story in Hacker's Memory. But, again, I don't feel particularly compelled to drop another 50-70 hours for a slightly better plot.

All that said, the core of the game, the Digivolutions, is strangely compelling. Wide-branching webs, stat requirements, de-digivolutions, and doing all this at will really set the bar for monster taming mechanics. The CAM stat could use a bit more refining (it's trivial to cheese), but they really set this game up to facilitate tons and tons of movement along multiple evolution lines. It helps that the starters they give you have some really wild options even if you stick with its "main" (I use that term loosely) evolution line.

There's some other small things that I think could have been improved like the reliance on palette swaps, lack of notice that you can nickname your Digimon (super helpful for tracking who you want to go where), occasional long animations in the overworld, but it's hard to obscure how much the Digivolution concept really stands out. I picked this up specifically after getting increasingly bored with Pokemon since back in the DS days and this really goes to show even one of the ways this subgenre can really innovate.

I am a hair away from giving this game a "recommended" and not far away from that is "exceptional". It's SO CLOSE to being an experience that easy to recommend but just falls flat in the last third of the game. It's becoming a bit of an annoying trend in recent years for franchises to build up the intrigue levels of the viewer only to just frustrate and underwhelm right at the end (Game of thrones, lost etc) and this honestly feels like it belongs in that group. The game starts off with a very unique beginning, having you walk through a "text adventure" style introduction to the main character and his devolving relationship with his sick partner. It's genuinely interesting and when you stop and think about it, it fills in context for why your main character decided to run away to partake in the strange profession of minding a forest.

But then looking at the game with hindsight, this fact like many others don't account for much. I understand the impact that subverted expectations can install in people, but sometimes it's just annoying. Sometimes I want pay-off and satisfaction for trying to put the pieces of the mystery together. As things become more and more strange, you really feel like you're building to something big. So much media rely on youtube videos explaining to you how the true depth to the story was placed in the blurbs of the books in the backdrop of the scenery. 

Other weak points are the main gameplay loop of walking around the map (that's it, that's all your doing) and the games performance is very janky, resulting in bad frame-rates. 

If this game took the story and made the conspiracy something interesting instead of trying to go against my expectations, this may have been a 9/10 in the "walking simulator" genre for me. Instead the pay-off is an uninteresting slap and a 6/10 at best.