Leaderboard

Digimon Survive This was on my backlog. Half visual novel, half tactics RPG, this has got to be the darkest game in the franchise yet. I haven't played them all, but I would be very surprised to learn otherwise. As the name implies, the story is about a bunch of middle school kids who end up in a survival situation when they are accidentally pulled into the Digimon world, and although they have their Digimon partners to protect them the fact remains that these kids can and will die horribly depending on your decisions. While the game does imply after you finish it that it's possible to save everyone, I still ended up with two fatalities by the time it was over. The story really hammers in just how much of a mental toll the situation takes on these kids and the first half of the game can be downright stressful with how much the cast is lashing out at each other due to fear. Things eventually lightened up a bit, at least in my route, but it got grim for a while. Admittedly the story gets off to a slow start and at one time I wondered if I was going to keep going with this game, but after the first death the tone shifts dramatically and I was invested until the end, even with some occasional pacing issues. The tactics gameplay? Well...it's fine. Just fine. It's not exactly Final Fantasy Tactics or even Disgaea. Maps are pretty simple and the mechanics aren't super deep, although I do appreciate that how high you can evolve the main partner Digimon and how often you get free party buffs and heals are affected by how you treat said Digimon's partners outside of battle. There's not a whole lot else to say about the combat, though. You can recruit wild Digimon by talking to them, but with success rates hovering around 20% this can be a slog at times. You'd better do it though, because there will be times when your protagonist is separated from the rest of the kids and thus cannot depend on their Digimon in battle. To be honest, I eventually turned down the combat difficulty because I was more interested in the story than the battles. I suppose that doesn't speak too well about that side of the game, but at least you have the option. You can also turn it up if the battles are what interest you. There are four endings to this game, five if you count a bad ending game over, so there's reasonable replay value here. I don't know if I'll go back to it right away, but I do want to see those other endings eventually so I probably won't delete it off my hard drive like I originally planned to do after I finished it.