The fifth generation of consoles was the pinnacle of fighting games, where many renowned franchises debuted to craft their legend and where already living myths magnified their status with the advent of 3D. With almost anyone attempting their luck at this genre, a franchise as Digimon, which precisely focused on battles, couldn’t stay back.

Digimon Rumble Arena was their first attempt outside of the traditional adventure games the franchise had been publishing since the late 90s. Now, we could finally pit together our favorite Digimon and battle out in awesome but dangerous stages, with the help of items to turn the battle in our favor and with the ability to digivolve into our digimon’s strongest form ever seen. What’s not to love about this game?

GRAPHICS: 9

The character sprites were actually kind of nice and the stages do look awesome. Crazy Battlefield pushed the graphics to an awesome level, thanks to the rotation system of the stage and the platforms that vanish into thin air if a player stands too much on them. However, the game’s not perfect as bugs are sure to be encountered here and there. Wouldn’t normally be a problem, but when you’re pushed over a cliff by a giant rock that wasn’t supposed to hit you it’s an absolute pain.

SOUND: 8

First off, the music. If you played this game on the standard one-player mode, you’d mostly listen to the calm ambient music of the stages: the mystic of Sanctuary in the Sky, the folklore of Dangerous Forest, the apparent calmness of Freezy Arctic... However, even then we have a glimpse of the other side of the soundtrack, which leans towards rock music. The boss fight against Reapermon is the best example, and also Reapermon’s own theme when picked for battle. This other side is rare, mostly being brought forth through special circumstances, and thus the average player may not get to hear this awesome side.

The sound by itself isn’t anything great. There’s not an incredible variety like in other fighting games, so all in all a battle without the background music can end up being monotonous. Character voices have some brilliant moments, like BlackWargreymon’s Terra Destroyer, but overall they keep being rather simple. Too much unbalance between these several fields.

ADDICTIVENESS: 6

While the game doesn’t have much to offer, it does include a few unlockables worth aiming for. The ability to unlock digivolutions as separate characters for limitless rumbles entices you to clear the game with all characters. Minigames aren’t extremely funny so as to be of any competition against the main modes, and just being three of them feels a bit disappointing.

STORY: 0

Apparently there’s no story to be told since there’s no character interaction nor do we get any explanation as to why we fight our opponents. Kind of strange, because Reapermon is exclusive to this game and hasn’t appeared anywhere else, so the fact it was left without any public background as to why it appears makes this game look unfinished. If there indeed is a story, not even the opening for the game has given me any signs of its existence.

DEPTH: 4

Like I said before, the fact you have to play with all characters at least once to fully unlock everything gives this game some meaning. However, that’s basically it. Outside of unlocking the characters there’s nothing else to do, so once you have the full roster all that’s left is to just battle for the fun of it. Definitely, this game could have offered more.

DIFFICULTY: 4

Stages are a bit tricky to dominate, but overall it’s fairly easy to get used to them. Controls aren’t hard to learn and master, and while items do offer a wide variety of actions they’re easy to keep track of. Lastly, the game isn’t that hard to beat, you do have the disadvantage of the lower level and a featureless stage but with the correct strategy and timing it shouldn’t be all that difficult. Not exactly a breeze to play through, but challenging enough to make you rethink your ways more than once.

OVERALL: 6.5

It serves its purpose to have a good time battling with your favorite Digimon, but that’s mostly it. Personally, a game which gathers characters from three anime series and one or two movies could include way more than this. Not a bad first attempt at a fighting game, and thanks to it we saw a few sequels and successors of its spirit in more modern consoles.

POSITIVE

-Nice music. Perfectly fitting the stages they were assigned to, but even more awesome to hear the fast-paced music for the boss battle and the rarely-seen battle themes with their guitar riffs. Not many games of its time can boast of having such a good soundtrack, even more modern games can’t.

-Trickiness intensified. Each character’s moves, besides the “palette swaps”, are all unique in their abilities, so no character plays the same as another. Stages also play a good gimmick: a rock slide heading to a cliff, heavy machinery being processed, a volcano in the midst of an eruption… And we also have the items, which can sometimes be harmful to the user. Oh, and character natures allowing attacks to be more or less effective depending on which characters are facing off. At least we can all agree that this game is not simple.

NEGATIVE

-Character roster. 24 character slots doesn’t sound bad, but 10 of them are for already playable characters through digivolution. With only 14 real character slots being used, the roster is very small for a fighting game with so many characters to pick from. Those 10 slots could have been easily occupied by the remaining digi-destined of the anime series and other movie characters and with that this game could have matched rosters like in Tekken games or other anime titles like Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22.

-Lack of story. While normally a fighting game doesn’t need a big plot behind the action, if you include a character exclusive to the game then an explanation must be given, most often via the game’s storyline. Just including the character to waste yet another slot was a big mistake from the developers, unless there was a project to give said character some story in the future that has eventually been discarded.

-Minigames. Just so not everything is battling sounds like a good explanation to add them. However, by adding just three of them we get literally nowhere. They’re not anything special either: button mashing for one and aim and fire for the other two. Clearly gives the feeling that this game was rushed or unfinished.