Digimon Survive

Genre: Visual Novel / Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Digimon Survive, first announced in 2018 with a planned 2019 release, seems to have suffered a troubled development, with the game’s intended scope surpassing its limited budget, changing development teams and restarting development from scratch, and ultimately releasing in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Despite what seems to have been a rough development, the final release is a surprisingly polished game despite being an odd blend of genres. Digimon Survive is largely a Visual Novel, but with battles that play as a Turn-Based Strategy-RPG.

While it may be an odd pairing, the two types of gameplay work well enough together – just picture replacing the story bits you might find in a Strategy-RPG with Visual Novel-style conversations instead, and you have a decent idea. There are a few issues here, but these issues are not due to this game’s unusual concept – that works fine.

Nor are this game’s issues in its presentation. Digimon Survive features some lovely, detailed 2D artwork for its backgrounds and characters, with some light use of 3D to give everything added depth. Everything here looks wonderful, on par with some of the better Visual Novels I’ve played.

However, even better than the visuals is the sound. Digimon Survive features and absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful instrumental themes like Kizuna (Instrumental), Track 6, Track 17, and Track 32, with delightfully moody pieces like Track 26 and Track 34 making for excellent atmosphere. This game is an absolute treat for the ears.

It’s not just the music, either. This game features some decent Japanese-language voice acting, though unfortunately it is not present for all spoken dialogue. The characters’ nervous and panicked voices do a lot to help to convey the ominous tones of this game, something one might not expect from a Digimon game.

On that note, this game’s story involves a group of Japanese school students on a trip to visit a rural area known to be the site of an old and obscure shrine to Kemonogami, who are said to be gods that took the form of beasts (in this game, this is what the Digimon evidently are), and who were once the recipients of human sacrifices, and have supposedly grown angry that these sacrifices no longer take place, leading to mysterious earthquakes and mudslides in the area. After a series of mishaps, the students find themselves at the forbidden shrine of these local legends, where they are attacked by hostile monsters, and find themselves in a world that resembles their own, but appears to be different.

All of this is quite well done, but it’s about time I start talking about this game’s big issue, and that is that it features atrociously slow pacing. Simply getting through the game’s prologue seemed to take hours, and getting from one battle to the next involved an absurd amount of time reading through dialogue.

This would be less of an issue if more stuff actually happened, or if this story were conveyed in a manner that filled this time with a sufficient amount of humor, suspense… anything really. Unfortunately, Digimon Survive’s characters, while not bad, are nevertheless pretty archetypal, and do little to justify making players sit through their prattle. And while the story concept here is very good, it’s so drawn out that it’s either frustrating when you want to see what happens next, or outright tedious when the characters are running around doing nothing to advance the plot, or take forever to come to the same realization you did ages ago.

Even if the Strategy-RPG gameplay wasn’t so spaced apart, it would still do little to balance out this game’s issues. As with the story, the gameplay here is fine other than the pacing issues, but it is only fine, and does nothing truly remarkable for the genre, beyond the simple fact of it being present in this game at all.

It’s a shame that Digimon Survive’s pacing tarnishes this game as much as it does, because there’s a lot of good elements here, particularly when it comes to the presentation. Fans of the Digimon franchise, as well as the more patient players who enjoy Strategy-RPG games and Visual Novels, may want to give this game a try to enjoy those positive elements. However, I think the average player will likely lose interest and shift their focus to another game in these genres that won’t try their patience.

tl;dr – Digimon Survive is a game that combines Visual Novel and Turn-Based Strategy-RPG gameplay, with a beautiful presentation and a surprisingly dark story involving a group of high school students in Japan who get trapped in another world. While there are some excellent elements here, this game is dragged down by some atrociously slow pacing. If you’re a more patient fan of this game’s genres, you may find it work a look, but otherwise be warned that this frustrating and tedious pacing will very likely tarnish your enjoyment of this game.

Grade: C+

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