Digimon

I've been playing Digomon World Data Squad for the past few days, and I must say I'm really enjoying it. I've always been a fan of the Digimon series. I feel that it was a more epic drama with better characterization that it's competitor, Pokemon.

Unfortunately, the video game adaptations are seldom done well. I was really excited when I first heard about the original Digimon World, and it wasn't really that bad except for 1 concept. Each of your Digimon stages last about 4 hours of real time, and if you didn't get your stats set right to digivolve, then your Digomon died and you had to start with an egg again. There was so much grinding just to fail again and again before getting it right.

Digimon World 2 had a similar flaw. This time you got three digimon to work with at a time, and you could get more. However, they had level caps. In order to pass the level caps, you had to combine two more powerful digmon and start over again with slightly better stats. Unfortunately, the level cap was set by the weaker digimon, so you always had to sacrifice two strong ones or you got screwed again.

Digimon World 3 was actually a better adaptation. This time you had three characters, who each had one digimon. They introduced the concept that a single digimon could digivolve into multiple creatures and change back when it wanted to. This was a good step forward. The downside was that would have to level up each form separately, so there was a lot of grinding.

Digimon World 4 changed the game from an RPG with trainers to an action game where you play as the digimon. The good news is that you could still choose from multiple forms, but you had to retrain every form to use weapons, and there were six different styles of weapons. To make matters worse, weapons had skill requirements, so you could be using the best weapon in the game, and you go back to the starter weapon when you digivolve. The game required you to store dozens of weapons just to be able to work up your attack power again. Other than that, it was a decent game.

Digimon World Data Squad seems to have finally learned what the game is about, though. They are back to the RPG aspect. Digimon get and retain multiple forms. There is no need to retrain at all once you level up. So far I'm really enjoying the play and variety of Digimon forms, though I still don't know why four of my characters turn into Numemon.