I really like Digimon. Not as a competitor to Pokemon, but as it’s own thing. But Digimon games are a bit of a sad issue. There are a LOT of Digimon games out from Japan, but they rarely ever get localized.

There are essentially two genres of Digimon games, fighters (and I use that term loosely) and RPGS, along with a few spin offs like Digimon Racing, and the card game. To start with fighters, there are 2 series, the battle spirit for the Gameboy Advanced, and the Rumble Arena games for a variety of consoles. I’m gonna be honest, really NONE of these are good games. They’re entertaining because they have Digimon but as fighting games they’re very poor.

The RPGs on the other hand have much more variety and and a lot of them are pretty good. It started with Digimon World on the Playstation, it was super true to the core of Digimon, raising a single creature from birth to death and continuously getting better at it as you progress. Pretty much after this, almost all the Digimon games became more like traditional RPGs with levels, experience points, even equipment which just feels weird. That’s not to say they aren’t good games, Digimon World 2 and 3 are regarded as great games.

The most recent Digimon RPG games we got were the Digimon World DS titles, DS, Dawn and Dusk, and Championship. I didn’t really get to play Championship but I’ve played DS and Dawn a couple times each, which is really a lot less than you’d think because they are practically the same game. Dawn and Dusk reuse maps from DS (which is actually kind nice because the swamp level uses warp points to navigate around) and pretty much every mechanic from the game is reused except they give you 3 Digimon to start with instead of 1. These aren’t really BAD games, they’re just very average with lots of padding to make the them last longer. Dawn and Dusk were certainly improvements over DS, but they’re still pretty disappointing.

We got most of the Digimon World games, but around the time we stopped getting new Digimon games in the West, the one Digimon RPG that looked incredibly promising. Digimon World Re:Digitize. It was essentially a spiritual successor to the original Digimon World game, where it was less about being a traditional RPG, it was about raising your Digimon like a pet, training them in specific areas to determine how they’ll evolve when you reached a certain age. Now since it never came to the states, I had to play a Japanese version, which obviously came with some difficulties, but thanks to a guide I was able to get a grip on how it actually plays and where to go to continue the story. I actually did really well in the game, I got to the final boss, I had AWESOME, like max level Digimon, and I got a pretty good idea what the story was despite not understanding it.

Re:Digitize was the breath of fresh air Digimon needed, but because of Digimon’s lack of popularity outside of Japan and the fact that it was a PSP game, it never made it over, not even when it was remade into a 3DS game as Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode.

We haven’t had a Japanese made Digimon game in years. The last one we got was Digimon Rumble All-Stars, which came out in 2014, but it’s awful. It wasn’t even released in Japan, that’s how bad it was. They’re still coming out with new games in Japan, but the odds of any of them coming to the USA or anywhere outside of Japan are slim to none.

There’s one last Digimon game I wanna mention, it’s called Digimon Masters Online for PC. I don’t think it’s an officially licensed Digimon game, it’s made in Korea. But it’s a giant Digimon MMO, you can run around with your Digimon following you, see other players and their Digimon, even get ride certain Digimon for increased speed! It’s a pretty fun game, but it doesn’t have a lot of incentive to keep playing. The quests aren’t written very well and they’re really only a guide to the next area. The biggest appeal is the vast amount of Digimon they put into the game and how detailed each model is. It’s definitely worth checking out.

I’ve actually done a couple full reviews of Digimon games and I should have a third one coming out soon, if you wanna check em out here are some links!

Digimon World

Digimon World DS