I loved Digimon as a kid, and while Pokemon had better games, Digimon’s anime stuck with me more, having children trapped in a digital world, fighting for their life while establishing bonds with these cute, and cool creatures.
I was done with Digimon for a while, relegating it to a fond childhood memory like many others. But after trying Digimon Survive out at Bandai Namco’s office, I was wrapped up in a wave of nostalgia and intrigue and wanted to see if the game lived up to the “Survive” in its name, and wanted to see where this mature story would take these new characters.
While Digimon Survive certainly wasn’t the game I was expecting, the title manages to tell an engaging story that remains true to its source material with an intricate Karma system, but its tedious TRPG gameplay doesn’t land as gracefully.
▍An Engaging and Mysterious Take on Digimon’s Lore
First off let’s get this out of the way. Digimon Survive is primarily a visual novel. That means 70% of the game is exploring, talking to characters, and watching the story unfold. Even though that isn’t the kind of game I usually play, I still had a pretty enjoyable time with the game’s story, enough that it kept me engaged throughout its 25-hour run time.
As a visual novel, Digimon Survive is… Good. The story is pretty engaging most of the time, and while it starts off very slow, it ramps up its stakes, with characters going missing, and horrifying events beginning to unfold once you’ve met your first Digimon.
In Digimon Survive, your characters are out on a trip to the countryside, visiting local tourist attractions when your group stops by a local school. After some members of the group get bored, they venture off into the woods looking for a shrine for the Kemonogami, animal gods. Chasing after them to make sure they don’t get lost and come back safe, Takuma, Aoi, Minoru, Ryo, Saki, Katou, Miu, and Shuuji all get stuck in a strange world where the weather is bizarre and inhabited by dangerous monsters.
While it does start off similarly to the original Digimon Adventure anime, the kiddie gloves are off. These teenagers aren’t DigiDestined, their Digimon doesn’t know why they are partners, and everything in the world, and this mysterious fog is out to kill them. There is no outside power or destiny at play here, so anything could happen to the group.
It creates a much more grounded and mature version of the Digimon Adventure series, focusing more on grounded aspects of being stranded in a new place, such as food, water, shelter, and the mental stress of being attacked daily, and trying to figure out how to escape. Because as much as we would love to trust Agumon, if you encountered a monster in real life, you’d probably be just as terrified.
While the characters start off confused and bewildered, through various battles and talking to their partners, you build a rapport with the group and get them to work together, calming them down and making survival easier even in this new world.
With a greater emphasis on character though, means you need to have pretty good character writing, and unfortunately, Digimon Survive’s writing is sometimes inconsistent, or downright frustrating to watch. Characters will often rehash the same discussion you have just gone through or do something completely out of the ordinary to drive the plot. Thankfully outside of those moments the story still manages to keep it together in pivotal moments, making them both heartwarming, and terrifying.
It’s hard for me to describe the story without going into spoiler territory, but Digimon Survive’s story still kept me engaged throughout the 25 hours I played the game, and for someone like me who usually skips the stories in a lot of games, that’s no small feat.
▍The Intricate Karma System That Effects Everything
Digimon Survive features the Karma system, a set of stats that affects several aspects of the game from the Story, how Agumon evolves, and even recruiting other Digimon. Depending on how you respond, be it using the left, up, or right dialogue choices, you raise Takuma’s Moral, Wrathful, and Harmony stats, with the highest one making the most changes to the game.
The Karma system is easily the best addition to Digimon Survive. In the story, humans are linked closely to their partners, with their evolutions reflecting their emotions. So by choosing how Takuma responds to situations, Agumon’s Digivolutions can take a wildly different route, allowing him to evolve into MetalGreymon even if your first evolution was Tyrannomon.
I quite like this idea of handling the Digimon Evolutions this way. It’s no secret that Digimon has several evolution paths, and linking it to how Takuma and the player have been reacting to the world, is an organic way of linking together this timeless world rule to the player’s actions.
The Karma system adds quite a lot to the game in many ways, and I can certainly appreciate its effects in both gameplay and story while being pretty organic and true to the series. It also adds some nice replayability to this story since you can decide to dedicate to a different karma stat on a later playthrough on NG+ to go for a different ending.
▍The Wasted Potential of its Combat
Sadly Digimon Survive’s TRPG sections are a mixed bag. While there are a lot of things that can affect combat, the actual gameplay, and scenarios thrown at you are too simple to fully take advantage of everything the game tries to offer.
Each Digimon is categorized under one of three types, Vaccine, Data, and Virus, with Virus beating Vaccine, Vaccine beating Data, and Data beating Virus. Each Digimon also has a set of elemental resistances, making them vulnerable or resistant to certain attacks. Despite that though, this didn’t really come into play much of the game, because even on a harder difficulty, there aren’t enough ways you and the enemy can interact to make them meaningful.
Each Digimon only has two attacks, a basic attack and a stronger special attack that consumes SP. While Evolutions do change up a Digimon’s stats and abilities, and there certainly is a lot, there’s no real reason to not pick the strongest evolution you have. Doing this allowed me to steamroll enemies and stages. And since everyone behaved predictably, I found myself letting the game autoplay in many combat encounters just so I could continue the story.
Even penalties to evolution like draining SP every turn were never a problem because my Digimon was just able to run through enemies in most encounters before that was ever a problem. Aside from fighting though, you can recruit Digimon similar to the SMT games and Persona 5. But recruiting them is a chore due to the dialogue options and responses often being nonsensical, resulting in a guessing game. Even if you do get all the answers correct, they may still run away from you, forcing you to replay that battle and try again.
Thankfully the game doesn’t require you to do much grinding if you want to play experience the story, with several options to speed up and let the combat autoplay. While it is nice to include these options, I would have preferred having a TRPG system that was fun enough that I wouldn’t skip it in the first place.
▍Digimon Survive has a Good Story for Digimon Fans
While I went into Digimon Survive expecting a more fleshed-out RPG experience like Disgaea, I got a pretty enjoyable visual novel and story out of it. While visual novels definitely aren’t a lot of people’s cup of tea, Digimon Survive presents a nostalgic, yet fresh take on the Digimon lore, with an interesting story and an organic Karma system.
Even though the game’s combat does leave a lot to be desired, it is cool seeing Digimon evolve, and fight each other with the over 100 different forms available. It’s just a shame that the core mechanics and enemies behave too simply to take advantage of it all.
If you’re a Digimon fan like me, there’s a great story to enjoy in Digimon Survive, and I recommend picking it up if you want to experience the heartwarming, and horrific moments that Digimon Survive has to offer.
