After some mediocre games for the past 7 years, the series finally gets a game that moves it towards the monster training and capturing RPG style. The result is a great battling system that saves the otherwise average story and mechanics.



The battling system takes place in a timeline of actions shown to the player and that are executed immediately after chosen. As is traditional of role playing games, the monsters level up through battle experience and learn new skills at specific levels. The key aspect of the series has always been the "Digi-evolutions," which change the form of a Digital Monster to a stronger version, sometimes these monsters having multiple forms they can evolve to. The process is reversible as well, thus giving your trained monsters many possible paths they can take and many skills they can learn along the way. It is very fun and feels very rewarding to shape the best possible team.



This is where most of the praise for the game ends, however, as the rest of it feels rushed or poorly placed together. The environments, though they appear large and full of buildings, are actually very empty and offer little to do. As a result, the puzzles and things to do are bare bones, rarely ever presenting any engaging problem solving and usually just giving you the answer. A shame, given the fact that cyberspace offers so much to create some good puzzle solving. The story is fun and true to the series, but the main character (your avatar) is very dull, even the game itself admitting it through Nokia's self-aware comment on your character being very quiet yet attracting many people.



The game is overall okay; it feels like a combination of Pokemon's monster catching system, Persona's combat system, and Mega Man Battle Network's environment, yet still being its own distinctive game and offering an engaging battle system, but with much more room for improvement.