Overall 8.8 Graphics 8.5 Sound 8 Addictive 6 Story 4 Depth 5 Difficulty 4.5
6.5
Ready to rumble, Digidestined? EX Palen
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.
Graphics 9 Sound 8 Addictive 6 Depth 4 Difficulty 4
Review Rating: 5/5
Submitted: 07-25-18
Review Replies: 1
7
Digimon Rumble Arena: The Reviewening nakina
What's that smell in the air? Could it be? It seems that yes, it's the smell of the nostalgia I have for
Digimon Rumble Arena. If your as big of a
Digimon fan as I am, you may have heard of or even have played this game before. Although, if you have played it then you probably wouldn't be reading this huh? Well either way, let's kick off this review!
Graphics:
Compared to other
Digimon games on the
PlayStation at the time
Digimon Rumble Arena holds up really well. The game that I would compare it to would have to be
Digimon World 2 as it released the year prior to
Rumble Arena. Rumble Arena was released in 2001 (2002 in America) so of course the
PlayStation 2 had been available for about a year by then. However, even if compared to the
PlayStation 2 releases at the time such as
Grand Theft Auto 3 or
Max Payne,
Rumble Arena still looked great comparatively even if it comes with a few more uninvited pixels. Compared to
Digimon World 2, the game was a decent upgrade graphically.
Sound:
As far as sound goes,
Digimon Rumble Arena's sound is about as good as you could expect from a game on the
PlayStation. Every Pepper Breath or Blue Blaster you fire sounds just like it does in the show. Of course, each character is voiced by the same voice actor they had in the show as you would expect from a game based on an anime as popular as
Digimon. The music was good for a fighting game although, none of the tracks ever stuck out to me. If you're looking for a game with amazing music, you'd probably play something like
Parappa The Rapper rather than a fighting game anyway.
Addictiveness and Story:
I'm going to briefly mention addictiveness here as I don't believe it's long enough to warrant it's own section. I've played through this game more times than I can count but it was mostly just to unlock characters and once I finished that goal, I didn't go back and play it much afterwards. I would never play
Digimon Rumble Arena for the story as there isn't much of one. The only story I can gather from it is that Reapermon is the bad guy and you must defeat him after fighting many other
Digimon for whatever reason. I wouldn't even have included this in the review if it wasn't for the fact that they called it "Story Mode".
Depth:
Digimon Rumble Arena is not the deepest fighter you'll ever play. It only has one ground combo and one aerial attack for each character as well as two special moves for each. Every special move can be activated simply by pressing either triangle or circle and you can jump by pressing X. There is also a "digivolution" for each character accessed by pressing R1 when the appropriate meter is full along with an ultimate move that is activated the same way when you are digivolved. Occasionally, some items will appear on the stage that can give you a quick health boost, fire a quick projectile, or even give you an immediately filled digivolution meter. Despite not seeming very deep mechanically, it is just deep enough to offer a fairly engaging fighting experience.
Difficulty:
When I played this as a child, it seemed like the hardest game ever. I was never able to beat Reapermon. That is of course, until a couple years later when I returned to it after running out of new PlayStation 2 games to play. Suddenly the game became much easier for me and I was able to beat it enough times to unlock every character. So the difficulty depends on you really. If you've played quite a few fighting games before, then this game will probably be a cake walk. However, if you're fairly new to fighting games this game could offer you a decent challenge.
Conclusion:
Well as much fun as it has been going down memory lane with you, I'm afraid I must end this review here. There's only so many things I can say about a game from the early 2000's that's based on a children's anime. If you're looking for a good Digimon game or even just a simple fighting game, you should give this game a try. Just don't expect it to be a substantial replacement for Street Fighter or King of Fighters. Who knows, maybe you'll really enjoy it. :)
Graphics 8 Sound 8 Addictive 6 Story 4 Depth 6 Difficulty 5
Review Rating: 4/5
Submitted: 05-30-16
Review Replies: 0
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