Digimon Survive review: A gripping finale can’t save shallow writing

The itinerary for a class trip typically includes safe, normal things — visiting a historical landmark and learning how to cooperate with people from other schools, for instance. You’re less likely to encounter classroom-sized spiders or intense personal trauma, and hopefully, you won’t be responsible for a friend never returning home. This is just a small selection of everyday troubles for middle schoolers. Digimon Survive.

Hyde is the author. Digimon Survive shoulders the heavy burden of evolving the series’ traditional blend of monster breeding and turn-based role-playing — namely, with the addition of visual-novel elements. However, this burden can prove too difficult to bear. This story is best if it has visual-novel elements Digimon SurviveIt wants to tell stories, but it fails to realize its full potential. This could be due to a lack confidence in its characters, or because they don’t understand what visual novels are.

Digimon SurviveIt shares strong similarities with the original Digimon: Digital MonstersManga: An educational camp trip is planned for a group of high school students. Your usual personalities are along for the ride, whether they want to be or not — the popular girl, the prankster and his serious companion, the moody loner, and the insecure class leader — but there’s no sense of optimistic adventuring once they land in the digital world, the series’ name for the alternate reality where Digimon dwell.

Digimon SurviveThe long duration of the game is divided into three parts: exploration, free-time, and battle. During exploration, you chat with your fellow students, look for key items or paths forward, and generally get a better idea of what’s going on in this strange parallel world; at least, you try to. Digimon Survive is tight-fisted when it comes to doling out world-building and leaves most of it for the game’s final three of the total eight chapters, or about 15-20 hours of the total 60-hour run time.

Even so, the broader narrative’s main beats don’t go anywhere surprising, despite a promising start. The prologue outlines the majority of the major plot points. Digimon SurviveThis is, at its core a story of what we owe one another and how can we work together towards balancing tradition with progress to a better future.

Here, more than in any other Digimon game or anime, the characters’ monster companions are essentially digital manifestations of their subconscious selves, aspects they have trouble acknowledging in normal life or would like to forget altogether. It’s not just about being able to find food and shelter in an unforgiving world. You also need to learn to accept your flaws and to live with them.

How to solve the problem is what? Digimon SurviveTells these stories or, more precisely, doesn’t tell them. Four of the game’s eight chapters drag out what might make a suitable plot for two 20-minute anime episodes into 20 hours, depending on your play style. It is basically two hours long of four characters discussing what they should do next.

They argue over food, and whether or not they should search for other foods before doing again nothing. While there are many good moments in this chapter, they do not have the same level of excellence as others. Digimon SurviveThey are too content to repeat themselves in meaningless repetitions to make them stand out. Even after finding six months’ worth of food supplies, the next thing the group does is argue about where they can find even More food.

It’s easy to see why these ideas might seem so solid when written down. Finding supplies is, naturally, an essential part of survival, and when venturing outside could result in your death, deciding whether to risk searching for your missing campmates isn’t such an easy choice. But the execution suffers because it never does anything meaningful or fun with these segments — it never uses them to build character development or tension, and barely uses them to drive the story forward.

If Digimon Survive draws inspiration from Aquaplus’ Utawarerumono games — and the hybrid visual-novel/tactics style certainly suggests it does — it seemingly derived the wrong philosophy from those games. It’s true that Mask of TruthIt spends almost 80% of its time on character moments and vignettes that have little to no relevance to the main plot. In the process, though, it gradually pieces together complex personalities for each important character, so that when the major story developments unfold, you have a strong investment in what’s going on.

Minoru, help in the forest Digimon Survive I was shown that he wanted people to think of him as a competent leader. In a later scene with Saki, Takuma accidentally walks into the gym where she’s changing clothes. There’s subsequent embarrassment and an awkward conversation, but the encounter has no wider ripple effects or character implications, least of all Takuma’s relationship with Saki. It’s harrowing to see the normally stoic Shuuji relentlessly chip away at Lopmon’s psyche in chapter 5 to make the loyal Digimon feel as inadequate as Shuuji does. By that point, though, the game only provided a scant look at Shuuji’s background, and the unrealistic pressures his father burdened him with that eroded his own confidence. There’s little time to even get a glimpse of Shuuji’s internal struggles.

Regardless of who’s left alive and what consequences my choices had as the credits rolled, the cast felt much the same as it did when they first met — a set of disconnected people thrown together because circumstances beyond their control dictated that’s where they should be. It’s a missed opportunity, considering the potential not just in Digimon Survive’s wider themes, but in its initially vivid characters as well.

Also, the term “unfulfilled potential” is a fitting description. Digimon Survive’s combat. The systems are standard for most tactics games (which is why I’m only dedicating three paragraphs to their intricacies). Digimon come with a standard attack as well as a few special attacks which require stamina. Digimon can attack from either the back or side to deal bonus damage. They also have the option of choosing not act during that turn, which will boost their defense.

You have the option to evolve Digimon based on your choices in the story. This almost seems unfair. The Digimon that has evolved can beat most of their opponents, except for the more difficult battles in game plus. Recruiting new Digimon happens in a Shin Megami Tensei-style conversation, where you try to guess the answers to random questions in the hope that your response matches with that Digimon’s personality. This frustrates more than SMT because you can only recruit one enemy Digimon per battle.

Combat isn’t innovative, but there’s a simple joy in crushing a difficult opponent with a well-timed evolution, or seeing Agumon spew fireballs across the map. There should be more. I will also be comparing it to Utawarerumono. Digimon SurviveIt has very few battles. There is also very little variation in map design. Combat feels more like an afterthought rather than a crucial component.

Digimon SurviveThe game was frustrating to learn, dull for half of the time, and mostly disappointing. The framework for something much more compelling exists underneath the prattle, inconsequential combat, and shallow character development, and you can catch a glimpse at what might have been in some of the story’s better moments. Hyde and Bandai should have the chance to make another visual novel-style. Digimon Building on, game Survive’s foundations to create a lasting and more memorable experience.

Digimon Survive It was launched on Windows PC, PlayStation 4 Xbox One and Nintendo Switch on July 29th. Bandai Namco provided a prerelease code for PC review. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions when products are purchased through affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.