Introduction

This is my first review of a Digimon Game, I've done Pokemon, I've done YuGiOh, I've even done Monster Rancher (Not on this site) but this is the first time I've sat myself down to think about Digimon World in a long time. "Digimon? What's that? Some kind of Pokemon knock off?!", I hear you scream from the top of your lungs. No, Digimon is a program slash addiction in it's own right, similar to pokemon in many ways, even had it's own card game, and was also a cartoon plot to essentially sell merchandise along the lines of key chains, digivices, cards, neck chains, etc. Digimon appeared at a time when the cartoon market was rife with similar products, I already named a few, in the form of Pokemon, Monster Rancher, YuGiOh, Medabots, Card Captor Sakura, Ultimate Muscle, Dragonball Z each one having an anime edge and the goal of corrupting the minds of children by using the power of love to convince their parents they really needed another card pack. Why am I telling you this? So that you won't think that this is a knock-off version of Pokemon and dismiss the game entirely. You need to understand that when Digimon World was developed it was considered one of the most popular things you could own for your Playstation. Still not convinced? Well how about I put it another way; Did you even wonder what playing Pokemon would be like in a 3-D, free-roaming world? Well this is the closest you'll get... (I know there's a 3-D version of Pokemon, but this one has the Monsters running around when they fight)

The game was developed by Bandai and released in 1999, Bandai are a corporation who spend a lot of time developing games for kids, but without ruining the story lines, they've done, surprisingly, Dragonball Z, Ultimate Muscle, Card Captor Sakura, Gundam Wing, Sailor Moon, One Piece and even Ben 10 games for various consoles. At the time of publication, if you saw Bandai on the cover, you know you were getting a decent game. Bandai often tried to put innovative elements into their older titles, Digimon World for example, despite being very similar to pokemon, wound up being very different due to the Tamagotchi element the producers added to the game. Even Digimon World 2, with it's loss of the Tamagotchi element, had it's own distinct, if less involving, style. That's enough history, however, lets get down to the review.

Gameplay

"What's this? You're starting with gameplay? Don't you always say that the story is the most important element and that's why you always start your reviews with the story?!" I hear you ask. Well yes, I do agree that the story is usually more important to a game than the actual gameplay, but the gameplay in Digimon world is so unique to any game I've ever played that I had to start here, because the gameplay, more or less, is the story in Digimon World. Well maybe that's going a little too far. The gameplay is unique, it's wonderful, but it's also difficult, difficult, difficult. Digimon World is an RPG, it's a pet simulator, it has turn based battles, it has automated battles, it had micromanagement and macro management, it's a city building game, it's a game of conversations, and it's also about exploration, time management, friendship, money and expecting the unexpected. Also your pet digivolves into weird things.

I'll start with the overall gameplay. Your character has to build a city to stop the Digimon from going feral, to do this you need to seek out as many Digimon who aren't insane, in doing so you change the city and the island. The differences could mean more food for your digimon, more places to shop, less chances of dying and better gym equipment for your montages (You'll need them). But not every Digimon you meet in the wilds will be friendly, and most won't want to come back to the city. Finding as many Digimon as possible gives you better odds at being able to travel farther and finding more places and people as you do because you only have a certain amount of days to get everything done in time, because some elements of the game happen on set days but you might have problems getting to them on time, because of another game element.

Your Digimon needs to train to get stronger, it needs to eat, sleep, go toilet, learn and battle to become a stronger creature and win more and more fights for you, because not all fights are avoidable. The setback to this is that your Digimon can also die, the worst part is that it can die of old age, which is just a matter of, in-game, days and will require you to train it up from a newbie Digimon to a Champion. going out into the world with anything less than a Champion is suicide, but sometimes it has to be done, and your Digimon will not always evolve how you expect, depending on the traits you've given it, how it was trained or if it's contaminated with a virus. For example, my Augumon at different times became a Tyranomon and a Hydromon, instead of the expected Greymon, which could really mess up your tactics for the next battle. And sometimes you need to train your Digimon to become something else if you want an event to happen. While you'll probably love and respect your first Digimon, giving it the training, food and time that it needs to survive grow and become the Digimon you know it can be... you'll probably end up hating the irrational little monster on the second or third go when it's obvious that you're first Digimon had a much easier personality to get along with. In the end I just let it poop itself and turn into a Numemon (Slug-like Sewage creature) and hope I could train that, but no, it's weak.

Fighting is different, it's turn based, like Pokemon, but much more like a modern Final Fantasy game, where your character can run around, dodge attacks and attack back, but still on a time-based, turn-based system. You can tell your Digimon what to do, which depends on it's intelligence, and you can give it new attacks that it's learned, or just let it do it's own thing. The Digimon will dodge, attack, block and run around, more often than not it'll be multiple Digimon against your lone pet, so you're likely to get into a lot of bother if you haven't trained. There are also special moves for each Digimon, including Agumon's Pepper Breath, which power up over time and then require you to press the correct button. Sometimes it misses, which can be frustrating, actually if they took out most of the fighting elements the game would probably be a whole lot better, if somewhat boring.

In terms of the other elements, there's so many. You do get a sense of achievement that few other games give you when your little village expands from a toilet, a bank, Jijimon's house and a tiny farm, to a bigger farm, a hospital, shopping market, gym and all the other little things that you wouldn't think would happen in a game this old. Defeating the bigger nastier monsters if always a bonus, but whenever I find a new digimon who'll expand the farm and get an extra portion of meat for my digimon, well, that's a better feeling than bringing down a drillmogimon with Agumon's pepper breath.

Story

The story isn't all that different from Season Three, where the kid wishes for Guilmon to appear, although what actually happens is that instead of a digimon showing up out of no where, a bullied kid gets dragged into the Digiworld to become the tamer he always wanted to be. Jijimon did this, because apparently the original Digi-Destined were busy or something, and now it's down to you and your Digimon to save File Island. The Digimon have spread out, becoming feral, and there's a dark threat behind it all, only by building the city and creating unity and harmony, can the hero possibly save the Digital World. Okay it's not Hamlet, but it's convincing enough, especially when you go out into the world and find out that most of the Digimon have gone insane, feral or have forgotten to speak completely. However, not everyone is evil, or made evil, and sometimes a simple conversation will get you a new friend in your village. Each newcomer adds a new element to the city, and some of them can even change the world by building new tunnels, cutting down trees and helping in various other ways. Each Digimon has it's own story, no matter how small, some want to test you, others want to make sure they'll be save in the city, and others are just out to make money.

The story isn't great, but it's the connections that you make in the world that develop the real story. The Drillmogimon, for example, have a great progressing story about their trials and tribulations moving the earth and digging deeper into the mountain, which then creates a new Meramon storyline where he's gone mental and wants to flood the world in lava, but you stop and befriend him, creating the best Curry House in town, in the process... And there's many more stories like that in the game. They're short, but they're sweet. The overall story isn't much explained, but I've never gotten far enough in the game to actually find out what's driving everyone mental, the game always had to be back in the library at the end of the week, and someone always had it reserved when I wanted to take it out longer.

Depth

There's a lot to do, and so very little time to do it in, you're gonna make a lot of mistakes, even with a walkthrough. There's more Digimon to find than you would have through possible, there's creatures lurking in unexpected places and every time you think you've found the last area to explore there's another one just waiting to be opened up. You're gonna have to learn how to do a lot of different things to find new people, and there's gonna be more than a few jobs to do, people to fight and problems to solve. There's a maze, there's a tunnel to dig, there's a shop to run, there's a digimon to train, feed, protect, teach and evolve. Some areas are normal, others have crazy effects, one ages your Digimon faster than normal and another has traps. You'll have to learn who is important and who's just another feral digimon, and eventually you're going to have to push your limits and activate some of the most dangerous places in the Digital World. 

It doesn't sound like a whole lot, but remember than each day has a morning, noon, evening and night. Your Digimon will need to be fed, it will get bored and tired, stressed and hungry. So you've got a whole lot of time devoted to taking care of the strange little lizard. The game probably wouldn't last quite so long if it wasn't for the fact that the Digimon will die of old age, causing you to need to train it up again, making it's personality change, it's evolution tree change and more likely than not you'll never see it progress past the Champion stage. I've only even trained one Ultra, but that was a Skull Greymon, and not exactly the best result... 

Addictiveness

Hard to tell how addictive this game is, because there's no element which is repeatedly enjoyable. The battles are fun, building the city is cute and addictive, finding more friends is also cool. I suppose I rated the addictiveness high because it's been fifteen years and I'm still talking about it, wanting to pay it and annoyed that I don't currently own it. Digimon World offers something that other games don't. It doesn't quite fit into a neat genre, there's multiple facets to it's character and the Digimon themselves are fun to train and add collections to their evolution trees.  It's easy to be good at this game, but it's difficult to be amazing. The techniques are hard to come by, becoming an Ultra is almost impossible, or possibly just boring, the time constraints can be rather disappointing as well, but you don't need to find every person in the game to complete it, heck, I'm not even sure if you can complete this game. Maybe you should just look at it as a fun choose your own adventure, you can be the completist, the casual gamer, the battler, the trainer or the collector. There's a lot of satisfying elements in this gorgeous little piece of gaming history.

Sound

The sounds are good, I think some of the music if misplaced and the sound effects are a little dull. The most special moves in the cartoon are represented with little growls, digitalised sounds and some pathetic splashing noises. Some sounds don't even sound like what they're supposed to represent. I suppose it can't be helped and it doesn't distracted too much from the game. The sounds made by some of the baby Digimon is very loud and annoying, and I don't think there's a single Digimon that makes a noise that is made in the cartoon itself. However it doesn't distract too much from the game.

Graphics

The Graphics could be better but for the time they were pretty good, especially considering that there were few games of this size. I like the cute styles used for the Digimon, it distracts slightly from the seriousness of the game and the larger digimon are dwarfed and made awkward looking to fit the pre-rendered one-view scenes that are your only option in the game. This form of camera style also means that you cannot see what's going on in half of the battle scenes, but that doesn't always matter, unless you can't tell your Digimon's status.

Conclusion

This is a great game to sink your teeth into if you have a spare few hours. It's involving and micromanaging, so it's great if you enjoy taking care of others, battling and developing a world for your own ends. The lack of control over the game is a little annoying, the almost random way in which your Digimon Evolves can be possibly the worst aspect in the game because you might love your Agumon, Koromon or whatever, and then it evolves into your most hated Digimon from the series and you just want to stop taking care of it and let it die, or something. The time consuming nature of training your Digimon can be rewarding but I think the best part of the game is the exploration and the short story lines each new character develops. Perhaps it's not the greatest game ever made and if it were up to me the Digimon pet system would be downplayed a little more, but not as much as in Digimon World 2 where it was more or less removed, and you wouldn't have to worry about it dying of old age, it would be nicer if there were more in-game hints towards where to find Digimon as well. In the end, I would recommend that if you want to play this game you should make sure you have a walkthrough sitting ready.

''Story is the most important element'' 

I'm done, see ya in a few minutes, I'm gonna release a crap game with an awesome story, and everybody's gonna give it an awesome review!

Well, This was a good reivew, but I strongly disagree with the story element.  However the review was very detailed, and I liked it.Good review it was long, however dragged a little bit on the beginning and some other parts, anyway. good job.

imamonster : Well those types of games are called Visual novels and they are very popular. RPGs are also a very popular way of telling a story through game-play, and before the computer these types of games existed as table-top roleplay where you sat around with friends and imagined the world as you threw dice, which are also popular and continue to be so.

But there are also games with no story-line what-so-ever and they continue to be popular, so perhaps I'm being a little narrow-minded in my approach and should consider farming simulators, flight simulators, bubble-popping games, maze games and quiz games when I do my reviews in the future.