Classic game: Digimon World
21st-century digital toys
“Balance training, exploration, and battling with keeping your partner alive and treading the fine line between happiness and discipline.”
This one’s something of an anomaly – it’s remembered fondly by nearly a whole generation of PlayStation players, yet widely derided and mocked by others. Panned by critics at home in Japan and around the world at launch, the game still sold enough to achieve Platinum and Greatest Hits status in Europe and the US.
Sneering RPG fanatics moaned that only hardcore Digimon fans would eke out enjoyment from Bandai Namco’s Pokémon rival. Jaded Nintendo and
Sega devotees waved off its rudimentary 3D graphics and its tinny audio without a second thought. But a swathe of younger players glued themselves to the world, lost in the ludicrous story of a boy sucked into his Tamagotchi-like V-Pet device and tasked with rebuilding a city in a brave new world of amnesiac monsters. Even PlayStation owners who had never before interacted with the Digimon franchise – which was widely perceived as the pretender to the monster-collecting throne – would fall in love with the nonsensical Digimon
World and its deceptively complicated lore and mechanics.
You land on File Island, a deserted place overgrown with mangroves, littered with disused buildings that suggest a once-great civilisation. There are toilets everywhere, for some reason. A sagelike old monster, Jijimon (‘grandadmonster’ in Japanese) snatches you from the void and gives you either series’ mascot Agumon or bear-wolf hybrid, Gabumon – determined by a vague Buzzfeed-like personality quiz you take at the outset of the game.
You learn that the architects of this curious society have started going feral, losing the power of speech and reverting to their aggressive, animalistic ways. You need to beat some sense into them and convince them to return home to the city in order to stop File Island from becoming obsolete. It’s heavy stuff for what was supposed to be a kid’s game.
CREATURE COMFORTS
Digimon World is its most successful when it’s being cosy. The world itself is engineered to prompt your intrigue; pre-rendered screens (which have stood the test of time) contain myriad hints as to the world that was here before: cut wires, empty power sockets, disused mines, façades of homes kitbashed together from electronic waste. With music ranging from lo-fi chillout beats to sinister, gothic movements that inject personality into the various biomes, File Island gets under your skin. It’s a world as complete as any Pokémon region – and on a home console! In 3D! It’s hard to communicate how novel that was.
Inspired by its roots in a virtual pet game, Digimon World’s actual taming mechanics are questionable at best: they’re unwieldy, poorly-explained, and almost impossible to leverage accurately in your favour. Aside from looking after your partner’s essential needs (sleeping, eating, and pooping) you also need to train them. They will die after existing for a set number of in-game days, so you need to balance training, exploration, and battling with keeping your partner alive and treading the fine line between happiness and discipline, all while venturing out into a world with some ludicrous difficulty spikes. No sweat!
You want a Greymon? You just need to evolve your Agumon, right, like in the anime? Nope. You need to make sure it has at least 100 Offense, 100 Defense, 100 Speed, and 100 Brains, and that you’ve made no more than one care mistake (like letting it poop on the floor) and have it between the 25-35 Weight range. If you can get it to 90% discipline, wonderful – good luck doing that without a vaguely defined ‘care mistake’, though. The game tells you none of this, even through the often-careless English translation.
The game’s obtuse setup and the erratic behaviour of your AI companion served to make Digimon World unique; its weirdly bucolic world and its semi-feral inhabitants didn’t give anything up without a fight. Leftfield puzzles (like an eclectic haunted house), bafflingly convoluted mechanics (such as a shop haggling minigame), and infamous glitches (curse you, Giromon) did nothing to scuff the captivating shine off File City and its band of digital inhabitants.