You ever see someone with massive, toned arms but embarrassingly scrawny legs? Digimon Survive is a little bit like that person: it overwhelmingly succeeds at being an entertaining visual novel, but completely skips leg day when it comes to its tedious tactics combat. Apart from some serious pacing problems, meeting Digimon Survive\u2019s memorable characters and exploring the grim world they are in make the story at its center very enjoyable. But while this visual novel digivolves in the areas of storytelling and characterization, the slow and mind-numbingly simplistic turn-based combat system crammed into it comes close to spoiling that otherwise enjoyable tale entirely.<\/p>\n
The glacial opening hours of Digimon Survive feature a group of quirky high school students who are sucked into a parallel world that\u2019s filled with Digimon. That\u2019ll be a familiar setup for any Digimon fan, but a much <\/em>darker tone and a new cast of characters means that\u2019s just about where the similarities end. Digimon has always dabbled with dark themes, but what follows here is an unsettling tale filled with intense and traumatic backstories, physical and verbal abuse, psychotic episodes, betrayal, and gruesome deaths, all next to the usual colorful cartoon mascots who turn into sexy humanoids through the power of friendship. Tone Control Police? Yeah, I\u2019d like to report a murder.<\/p>\n The perilous story of Digimon Survive sees these students and their destined Digimon partners trying to survive the mysterious and dangerous world they now find themselves in while searching for a way to return to their own. Unfortunately they are also surrounded by evil and sadistic Digimon who are into killing children and monologuing about how much they like killing children in equal measure. It\u2019s a weird ride to be sure, but also one that\u2019s thoroughly enjoyable.<\/p>\n And although it can be jarring at times, Digimon Survive does benefit from both its dark tone and the incredibly high stakes it sets. For example, characters can be killed off in horrifyingly gruesome ways because you didn\u2019t spend enough time developing a relationship with them. Naturally, this transforms them into the worst version of themself and their death is all your fault for being a bad friend. Those stakes work very well in a visual novel that puts its characters front and center, especially since the Digimon franchise has always leaned heavily on the saving-the-world-through-the-power-of-friendship trope \u2013 this time there\u2019s just a lot more murdering going on.<\/p>\n The art style is fantastic as long as you’re outside of combat.<\/p>\n All of that murder looks fantastic too, thanks to an anime art style that made me forget I wasn\u2019t watching a Digimon TV show half of the time. Characters are incredibly crisp and expressive \u2013 so much so that I almost forgave the lack of an English voice option, which I generally prefer. It\u2019s just too bad that I got used to such stellar graphics in the storytelling sections that make up most of the adventure, because every time I then jumped to the low-res textures and overly-simplistic character models of its tactical gameplay sections the whiplash would nearly break my neck. Digimon Survive\u2019s music is also generally high quality, though there are only a handful of tracks that play over and over again throughout the roughly 40-hour runtime, so unfortunately I ended up sick of them by the end.<\/p>\n As a visual novel first and foremost, Digimon Survive has you doing by-the-numbers activities like finding hidden objects and building up social links with your comrades, but the story around those things is largely pretty awesome. It\u2019s got some memorable characters, a unique setting, and more than a few neat twists and turns (though admittedly I saw many of its reveals coming from a mile away). You\u2019ll get to hang out with some likable, if a bit one-dimensional, human companions like the level-headed mother hen Aoi and the talkative goofball Minoru, as well as the much more interesting Digimon characters like the ever-lovable Agumon and the surprisingly mature and stern Falcomon. Digimon Survive has got real storytelling chops at all the right times too, and the pivotal moments where it flexes them account for some of the adventure’s best.<\/p>\n The biggest problem with the story is that it moves at a snail\u2019s pace most of the time, with lots of meaningless filler padding out its chapters and characters who absolutely refuse to stop rehashing the same things over and over again \u2013 so much so that I was screaming \u201cI get it already\u201d at my television. The opening couple of hours in particular are so oppressively slow that it left an incredibly bad first impression until things finally started developing down the road. But just as things did get going, the fun police would inevitably arrive to shove some needlessly drawn out conversation down my throat. One section had me walking through the identical halls of a waterway to discover the same illusory figures repeatedly (which somehow fooled my character every time, naturally), while another had me bouncing back and forth between a handful of areas as I chased around a group of characters who would argue with me briefly before running off to be chased again. There\u2019s just a ton of wheel spinning that happens in between the otherwise interesting story developments, which bogs down the whole experience.<\/p>\n Thankfully, the relationships you build as you work your way through this world\u2019s mysteries pay dividends and have a meaningful impact on the story, culminating in a couple different endings (plus a secret one that can only be achieved during New Game+). Most of those endings are at least worth seeing once, however accessing them requires mastering a rigid and unintuitive karma system that measures your Moral, Wrathful, and Harmony scores based on dialogue options you choose along the way. Gaining access to some of the endings and getting characters to like you will require learning which kinds of responses one character likes versus another, which means lots of times I wasn\u2019t roleplaying as a character so much as I was giving a response that I thought a certain person would like me for \u2013 or, worse yet, just doing it so I could get a high enough score in one category to unlock a certain ending, which took me out of the experience by forcing me to metagame more often than I would have liked.<\/p>\nA Slow Death<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Digivolve Into Chaos<\/strong><\/h2>\n