The saga continues.
#4 Digimon World
When I replayed this game years after I first tried it to confirm my nostalgia, I was surprised by many things. One thing is for sure this game continues to be one of the most unique games ever. This game is not about acquiring monsters and leveling up, or play as a character and level up like your typical JRPG. Instead any stat boost (ie: leveling up) is your choice to make. In this game you have to raise a digimon from a baby into an old powerful monster. The strongest currency is time. This game's day/night cycle means that time is always a factor. Most things in the game take an hour of ingame time to pull off. The more time training at the gym, the less time roaming and exploring the world. But if you don't train, the more likelihood you find a difficult opponent and lose a life. Certain monsters prefer certain stats, others prefer a certain amount of battles. In order to raise each digimon you have to become personally acquainted with them all, even the bad ones will require something like sacrificing your good digimon.
Each digimon has their own techniques and a unique special attack. They all start with one technique, but if your digimon can learn a technique, they can learn the technique by training brains or fighting a digimon with the technique themselves. When you get the technique, you keep it forever and any new digimon that can use it will be able to use it right away. Each technique is interesting in battle with some more useful than others. From jabs to throwing poo to making a thunder cloud to inferno breath to many other things. An interesting completionist medal is getting every technique. To truly get them all logged, takes a ridiculous amount of time played, but you do get a medal for it. Every area has different digimon during the day and during the night, and certain things even have to be done at dusk or dawn.
The battle system can seem difficult at first, especially if your digimon doesn't do what you want it do. But luckily if that is an issue, you can train b rains and if you can't, you can make up for by spamming recovery items. The randomness can keep the battles fresh and exciting, especially if you facee off against the boss monsters. The game can easily be beaten within your first digimon's life, and you can keep playing with many different monster to try to get 100%. Another medal is to attain every digimon, which when you look at evolution table, feels amazing. Getting your first Ultimate digimon feels like cheating because the power spike is so nice. In order to truly get 100%, requires precise training, discipline, battles and weight management. While it is easy to get the fat monsters by overfeeding, sometimes holding back the food or giving them 1 of 128 unique items that is found in the world really helps to get the skinny monsters. As said earlier some of the monsters require being overly cruel or careless. For example, when I was really bad at the game as a kid, my digimon digivolved into one of the best digimon by dying in battle. Another example of being bad is by letting them be filthy and poop all over, they will digivolve into weak filthy monsters like Sukamon. Before getting the training boost by progressing in the game, it is common to get a Numemon due to all of the stats being not good enough for anything else. You can find items to boost your stats though, these are best used to get your desired digimon. Other items let you get a digimon directly, but these items don't boost the stats along with it. So you can have a Champion digimon as weak as a Rookie digimon.
This game has many more unique items. For example, the Auto Pilot item, it enables you to fast travel back to the city, which is amazing utility for a PS1 game. Other items can recover you and you can always use a revive to not lose your digimon, or as said earlier the weight management items. Food and port o potties. All of these items are almost exclusively used for your personal monster.
The main goal of the game is to become friends with many other digimon. As you become friends with more digimon the city improves and builds up. At first you start with a hut and a tiny meat farm. If you befriend Palmon it becomes a giant meat farm. Birdramon gives you fast travel for a price to almost any location. Agumon gives you a bank to store your items. Kuwagamon and Kabuterimon improves your training in the gym. Piximon, Greymon, Meramon, Centaurmon add important buildings to the city like a shop, restaurant, clinic, and battle arena. Many others add small things, and it is beautiful to watch the hut grow into a full fledged city full of digimon. The hut itself becomes a nice house. Becoming friends with all of these digimon takes different methods, the most common being through battle. But other methods include finding them at a certain time, working for them, or playing one of the many minigames. Two of them even ambush you in what you thought was your safe zone in the city. It doesn't matter if you had a baby digimon or your strongest monster, they will still challenge you. One of the most interesting but difficult ones is working in a shop. In this shop you have to haggle with customers based on their feelings and try to make a big profit for the shop. Sometimes it comes down to luck, because if all the customers want is cheap meat, it will be too difficult make as large of a profit as you want.
Other interesting things to do as mentioned are the minigames. One digimon is unlocked by mistaking him for a big fish and fishing him out of a lake. Fishing for other big or small fish can be a good addition to your food stores, but this digimon is the most useful for taking you to the insect island. Another minigame is curling, curling depends on the object and how much power you put into it, but it is also a good strategy to knock out your opponent's pieces. So in the end it is a simple physics game. Yet another simple thing in the game is to trade with the Moyjamon. From Physics to Economics, this game has everything. With these Moyjamon shops you can buy items he wants especially from the regular shop, and trade the items to him for more valuable items, then sell these items at the regular shop. The result is massive profits for you and and a very good money source to buy whatever you want. Typically I would spend all this extra money on card packs. Card packs are completely random like in real life, so with enough money you can eventually collect them all.
One digimon in particular gives you a jukebox, which should be used to listen to the game's wonderful music. However hilariously this jukebox is bugged and will crash the game. Why is this hilarious? Well the digimon in question is Giromon, known as the net keeper. Basically this digimon is the hacker/ bug digimon and his special attack is literally "Crash!". So crashing the game is very appropriate for this digimon.
The music in this game is quite fitting and melodic to each situation. Exciting battle tunes, peaceful city music, spooky mansion, empty canyon, snowy wasteland and my favorite is with goofy Ogremon's various bases. Enter a familiar place and listen to the music and all of a sudden it is Ogremon's music is like "wait a minute, why?" Why did he change the sign to オーガー トンネル? Speaking of the tunnel some activities are time locked. You can open a shortcut by helping the drillers work. This shortcut helps avoid a long trek up a mountain, through easy time wasting monsters. But that same area on the mountain might be useful in the future after many days of ingame time. There is also an area where time goes slower than normal, and right next to it where time goes twice as fast. Those areas can really mess up the time you have with your current digimon. When you just want to fight and experience the battle systems, you can enter tournaments. Depending on the stage of your monster , you can enter various cups and try to earn special rewards. You can order the digimon, but you can't use items, so if something goes wrong, you are in for a challenge. The sheer amount of things to do are represented well by the medal system as mentioned earlier. This medal system was a thing before trophies or achievements ever existed. Accomplishing all of these medals makes for a varied, innovative, and complete game.
This game is simply one of a kind, I can only hope someone makes another game as amazing as this.
