Let me preface this review: Are you a Digimon fan? If not, this game is absolutely not worth your time and if you want a monster game to play, Pokémon awaits. For the rest of us, however, this game is what you'll have to deal with if you want to fight with your favorite Digimon, and even then, you may get short changed. However, the game is not without its occasional strong points, so if you're willing to endure  what the game puts you through, you might find something worthwhile.

So let's get the excuse of a story out of the way: You, the player, are a nondescript avatar human entered into a fighting tournament. Depending on the version you're playing, you'll be a member of one of two gan-... organizations, Light Fang or Night Claw. Dusk gets a brief prologue sequence while Dawn does not, but it's meaningless and doesn't help you understand the story better, so don't worry about missing it. Anyhow, you win the tournament, but the city which you're affiliated with is attacked by some nondescript digital entity and ends up cutting off your connection to almost the entirety of the Digital World. In addition, it degenerates everyone's Digimon back to eggs, or in your case, child level. No using Perfects for the first part of the game. Anyway, seeing as you're one of the very few Tamers in the city whose Digimon managed to avoid getting completely degenerated, you save the city by forcing the program back. After that, the city chief asks you to go investigate the little bit of the Digital World that you can still get to, and that's pretty much the whole game. You go to one area, find whatever will get you to the next area, lather, rinse, repeat.

I wasn't expecting much, but somehow, I still felt let down. I mean, I knew I was playing a Digimon game, but I thought I'd see at least a little more. This game doesn't even mention the existence of a "Real World," much less actually show it. You're in the Digital World for the whole game. There's no real character to speak of; unlike the first Digimon Story game, your protagonist doesn't even get any lines. Not that that made much of a difference, but at least it was a nice change of pace for a monster game to have a talking player character. The only characters you'll persistently interact with are the chief and the chief's Digimon, Glare and his Ophanimon for Dawn or Julia and her ChaosDukemon for Dusk. You'll also meet up with the player character for the game you're not playing now and then as well, and he or she is the only other remotely memorable character because you just don't interact with the others enough. It's hard to think this came from the same franchise that made something like Digimon Tamers. I know I can't expect as much from a video game instead of a full anime, but I at least wanted to see something on the level of Frontier, which still had a weak and barebones plot, but it tried harder than this. The villains of the game are barely around either; the Kowloon Co. is amusing, but they're not really villains. The true villain is the indistinct digital entity from earlier (possibly combined with a Digimon known as Grimmon? I didn't quite understand the script), and its presence in the game is minimal. Practically the only noteworthy thing about this is Chief Glare and Ophanimon, quite possibly the only real male human/feminine Digimon team in the franchise.

But enough of that. The story is an excuse to collect monsters, and it certainly allows you to do this. If you haven't played a Story game before, here's how it works: every time you encounter a Digimon, you scan a certain percentage of that Digimon's data automatically at the beginning of the battle. Get it up to 100% and you can convert that data into a new Digimon of that type. Get it over 100% (to a maximum of 999%) and the Digimon you create will have higher stats, but this is largely pointless because the time you spent collecting all that data could have been spent levelling and raising the stats of a Digimon converted at 100%. And it isn't as if there's a limit on how much you can raise a Digimon's stats either. Both evolving and degenerating return a Digimon to level one (slightly increasing stats for evolution and somewhat more substantially decreasing stats for degeneration). Both evolving and degenerating may be done whenever you meet the requirements to do so, and if you degenerate, levelling up enough in the form you degenerate to can surpass the stats you were at before degeneration, meaning that the potential stat increases are limitless (though each stat caps at 999). You may also use farm goods to increase stats, but outside of the early game, this is generally slow and ineffective.

Let's talk about the farm, shall we? The farm is easily the best and most unique feature of the Story games. Think of it as what the Pokémon day care center would be like if it were awesome. I'll try to explain: there's a time system in the game (which has nothing to do with anything except for the farm). Doing battle furthers the time along faster than pretty much anything else, so make sure you do it. Basically, you have a gauge at the top left of the top screen, and once it fills, a farm day has passed. All Digimon present on the farm will gain a set amount of experience per day. Farms may be customized in different ways: firstly, in order to do anything with a farm, you have to set a "terrain board," which determines the type of experience Digimon on the farm will receive every day (more on that later). Once you've brought a terrain board, you can also change the background music of the farm to one of several different tunes, affecting the amount of experience that each type of Digimon receives each day, and you can also place farm goods. Farm goods either raise one if your Digimon's various stats or give extra experience of one type to Digimon on the farm. Throughout the day, Digimon on the farm can interact with farm goods during "Live Events," which may or may not randomly raise the stat that the good effects. Placing farm goods also allows you to manually train Digimon in the stat that the good effects, and each Digimon may be trained up to five times a day.

Sound good? Well it's definitely better than Pokémon, but the problem is that compared to the first Story game, farms seriously got nerfed. In the first game, you could place far more farm goods on a farm because that game had a flat number of goods that each farm could be upgraded to hold (up to 8 on a Normal farm). In this game, each good is assigned an arbitrary number value (anywhere between 4 and 16), and you can only place goods that fall within the value that the farm can hold (up to a maximum of 32). Of course, better goods have higher values, so if you want to place the highest ranked goods, you can only place two of them, whereas you could place 8 in the first game. In addition, farm goods in the first game had a chance to raise stats each day for every Digimon on the farm regardless of whether Live Events happened or not, and given that you could have up to 8 goods, what this basically boils down to is that your Digimon could have stat increases every single day even without level ups, making farms a serious alternative to being in the party, unlike how they are here. Finally, training could be done many more than five times a day in the first game if you knew how to manipulate it. There is no manipulating in this game. Overall, it's a change for the worse and adds a lot more unnecessary grinding to the game.

So how does raising Digimon work? At first glance, it's rather intuitive: you scan and convert a Digimon, every Digimon comes equipped with a handy requirements list as to how to move along its particular evolution line (something that I can't believe Pokémon doesn't have even today), you fulfill the requirements to get the form you want, and you evolve or degenerate to get there? Requirements can range from getting a certain amount of experience points from a certain type of Digimon (if you're trying to get a Holy Digimon, for example, the evolution requirement may need you to kill a lot of Holy Digimon to get enough Holy experience points), having a high enough friendship level (just talk to your Digimon at the farm) or having enough of a certain stat. Simple, right? Well... to begin with, you may see some Digimon NPCs in the game, but not actually know how to obtain some of them because you can't find part of their evolution line in the random encounters. This is because a lot of unrelated Digimon lines in the game are tied together at the same baby form, and you wouldn't know it without either checking a guide or mercilessly scanning every Digimon and checking every evolution tree. What's that you say? You're confused as to why Megadramon and Alphamon share the same child level? Well they both have metal on them, so it makes perfect sense, right?  However, there's also the matter of special evolutions (armor or jogress). These have no requirements listed for them at all. Certain helpful NPCs may give you hints as to what you need to do, but for the most part, you have to check guides from people who have broken the source code, because there's no way you'll ever figure it out without accidentally stumbling into it, and even if you do stumble into it, you won't know what it was that caused you to stumble into it. I might have been okay with this if there weren't several, several Digimon that cannot be obtained without using either an armor or a jogress evolution, but unfortunately there are. I wouldn't have guessed that my V-mon needed to be over level 40 to become Magnamon either, but them's the breaks.

Which brings me to the one legitimately solid thing about this game: the battle system. Now granted, it was the same battle system as the first game, but this is the one place they decided not to fix what wasn't broken. Both you and the enemies occupy five "zones" on the battlefield, Mega Man Star Force style with one Digimon per zone. Every attack can hit one or more zones and one or more times. Of course, the more zones or the more times an attack can hit, the more generally useful it is. You can have up to three Digimon in combat at once and three in reserve, but unfortunately, if you have less than four in your party, you are forced to have them all in active combat. The game stupidly does not allow you to have one in combat and three in reserve, even if that one is much more powerful than the others. At any rate, because you can only have up to three Digimon in five zones (a limitation that does not apply to your enemies, mind you), it is possible and encouraged to do some strategic zone placement. Each Digimon has a support ability that will increase a stat of a Digimon in an adjacent zone, but if you put two Digimon next to each other, an enemy is more likely to hit them both with a multi-zone attack. Fortunately, you can move your Digimon around mid battle if this becomes a problem. It's a neat system, and I enjoy its execution.

Now, like Pokémon, each Digimon and move has a typing and you can take advantage of elemental weaknesses, but you won't know what the elemental weaknesses are unless you're paying close attention to the damage numbers because the game doesn't tell you what's effective and what isn't. Also, each Digimon only has one weakness, so look out for common ones among the Digimon you obtain. They're not overly important though; the extra damage you'll do is negligible if you have a high enough attack stat. Buff moves are similarly useless. Status effect moves, on the other hand, are surprisingly helpful, so keep one of two around if you can.

As for presentation, the game's music is forgettable and its graphics are downright depressing. Not only does the game look like it could have easily been on the GBA, a lot of graphical assets seem to be outright stock effects. Many of the moves certainly seem that way. The attacks are outright one of the most disappointing things I've ever seen because Digimon attacks are generally flashy and spectacular. Here they just look like a lame ball of energy bursting into a powdery cloud or a simple punch effect. What's that? You thought Full Moon Meteor Impact was awesome when you saw MirageGaogamon Burst Mode using its energy mace to spin around and throw an exploding ball of light and make a huge crater in the ground? Well surely it will be just as cool when you see it have a stock punch effect followed by an yellow cloud, right? And furthermore, while I do like the look of the individual Digimon sprites, the only ones you can actually see in battle are the enemy sprites. Your own Digimon are completely absent, making the battle look as if it takes place in first person. What sense does this make? Why did I bother raising my Digimon if I can't actually see them fight? Why can't I look at the designs I actually like? It's frustrating. The game does nothing with the DS's 3D rendering potential either, so for better or worse, get used to 2D again. Again, the overworld sprites really look on par with a Mega Man Starforce game, except that that game was filled with 3D models as well. Here, it's just... disappointing.

I really wanted to like this game. I really wanted for there to be a legitimately good Digimon game where I could play with almost any Digimon I wanted. It'd be better than playing that pay to win MMO, right? Well, while the Digimon variety is really, really large in this game thanks to everything being done on sprites, it feels like this was done at the expense of almost everything else. Whether you play it or not is up to you; the core battle system is solid even if many other things are not. I still haven't run through my list of gripes, but I figure if you're still reading at this point, you've probably already made your decision on whether to play or not. Just know that if you play, you're going to have to suffer. Suffer for your favorite Digimon. Or not because Aero V-dramon evolves into Goddramon. Argh.

In either case, if I were you, I'd just wait until Cyber Sleuth comes out, because it promises to be the best Digimon game ever made, and from what I've seen of it, it is. Look up some footage of it right now. If you're waiting for it to come out and you think you can tolerate subpar DS graphics and grinding, then this game may be enough to tide you over in the meantime, but once that comes out, I know I won't be looking back.