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So as I am finally making my way through my Steam backlog, I reached Digimon Survive. Unfortunately I could not mentally survive this game because it was just grating in every way to ruin the enjoyment. The story is about the usual cast of kids that get sucked into the digital world however this time it feels very similar to that of Nier Automata and it’s also time-travely so it feels like they were sucked into a world from 50 years prior. This game has 3 game breaking features that ultimately make me give it 2 thumbs down.
- The Battle System and Exploration system sucks
- The characters are annoying as shit
- You have to play the game twice to get the true ending
So have you ever thought “yo I like Digimon, but I am an adult now so I wish that they made a DARK, VIOLENT, ADULT Digimon game”? I know I haven’t but obviously somebody must have for this game to exist. Ironically trying to make a “mature” Digimon instead turned it into a NOT KID’S STUFF Digimon that felt even more juvenile than the ones for kiddies. “The Digimon DIE BRUTALLY” sounds like the start of a terrible creepypasta but nope, that’s the general tone for this game.
Battle System & Exploration
So the core “gameplay” of this visual novel is 2 things. First you walk around and talk to all the other characters to “find out what they think” and then you will eventually be thrown into or choose to battle to catch your Digimons. The problem is the “walk around” system is just clicking areas on a map and clicking where you see “icons” of people. This can get boring and annoying quickly because you are basically asking each character the exact same question “what do you think about this (insert character)??” You do this repeatedly, sometimes back to back in the same scene so when a character JUST TOLD YOU what they think you inevitably have to now ask them yet again but in “another area”. This got old fast and constantly having to click between areas, click characters, talk to them pick some random choice…you get the picture. This could have all just been an evenly flowing conversation scene by having the protagonist just…go on his own to talk to characters or just have it be a simple VN style choice. The constantly jumping between areas and dialogue really broke up the flow and just made me irritated.
The core problem with this game is that you’re doing the same things over and over and over again. We would look at the hour counter and think “wait it’s only been 8 hours???? It feels like it’s been 20???” The reason this drags so badly is that the characters themselves don’t really act particularly differently from scene to scene in the game, so every event feels the same. This then gets compounded by the additional free roaming systems which often boil down to going to each location in the current area to ask all the characters yet again to talk about what they just talked about in the previous scene (which again, is the same things they talk about in every scene). Now from what I’ve seen, this is at least a bit different in NG+ because characters that would have died earlier in the game will stay alive, meaning that now there are actual choices to make in terms of who to talk to rather than having to exhaust every existing conversation option in order to continue.
The 2nd part that was awful was the battle. I seriously cannot in good faith recommend this battle system because it’s so bad. I will say I hate grid combat so this wasn’t for me to begin with, however I fail to see how in any way it’s engaging to spend MOST OF THE BATTLE JUST MOVING 3 SLOTS TOWARDS THE ENEMY. Literally its like 80% moving towards an enemy who is miles away and then maybe 30% actually fighting them. After a couple of these, I just gave up, turned on the mods and gave myself max move range. Despite this I STILL needed at least 2-3 turns moving because the enemies were THAT FAR AWAY from me. Ridiculous. How in any way is this well thought out or engaging? Oh yea I love moving my characters around squares like I’m playing some god damn game of battle ship.
These are the worst battles I’ve ever encountered in an RPG. The giant maps were a big problem, but the REAL killer is that the enemies themselves just sit there defending the whole time while you trundle over. If they at least advanced towards you then that would cut down the “pointless moving across the map” phase in half. I had a lot of complaints about Valkyria Chronicles but you never had to deal with that level of stupid design in its battle system. Like you seriously needed to spend something like 5 turns slowly trudging across the map in order to get to the enemies in a lot of these fights, and then it’s even worse in the ones where they’re spread across the map so that you need to reverse and go back after you defeat one pack of them ugh.
The Annoying ASF Characters
Alright obviously this is going to be biased but my god Shuuji, Ryo and Kaito were the most annoying shitters in the whole game. That said, even the other characters were unappealing. For example I wanted to kinda ship Takuma with Aoi, but whenever I picked a choice that wasn’t THE correct choice, her stupid ass dog digimon would start bitching at me and basically enabled all of her annoying personality traits. We started calling Labramon as Enablermon because literally every conversation felt this way unless I magically picked the choice that made Aoi spew hearts out of her head. Shuuji was a fucking asshole who abused his poor little digimon and got what was coming to him. Ryo had serious mommy issues (Shuuji also had daddy issues) and Kaito was a MASSIVE siscon. Everything was about his imouto and his imouto absolutely was so fucking done with his shit. The fact that the ending revolves around Kaito’s siscon tendencies going out of control is even more infuriating. By the end of the game honestly the only characters I didn’t hate were Takuma and Minoru – though Minoru at one point started getting really annoying with his Owlmon too ughhh. So ultimately actually only Takuma stayed cool and levelheaded the entire game hence why I said at the start of my post that you, aka Takuma have to be everyone’s therapist.
It was like everyone needed to have some kind of ~trauma~ no matter what because this is a ~mature~ game for millennials (the stereotypical millennial of course having every kind of mental illness and depression). It couldn’t just be that one, maybe two characters were like that. Nope, just randomly because that’s what the game is like. There was no particular reason why Minoru or Saki would randomly have to start having imposter syndrome (another classic millennial mental illness obv), but it’s time for them to also act this way. And again, this makes every scene start feeling them same when no matter what’s going on or who you talk to it’s time for another random traumadump.
Playing the Game Twice
So yea in order to get the true ending, you need to play New Game+ and make sure you get a high level of affection with…Ryo. Ah yes, let me go through the bullshit battle system, the annoying exploration and all the whiny bitching teenagers for another 25 hours!!!
I ended up watching the true end on Youtube and realized I really did not miss out on anything and frankly I saved myself another 25 hours of this nonsense. I’m really mad at myself for throwing $45 (and that was on sale!) into the wind for this garbage game and I’m shocked to find out this was apparently one of the BETTER Digimon games out there. I guess that means all the other Digimon games must be utter garbage if this is what they consider one of “the best”. 😂😂
If, IF the game was a straight VN, then sure, MAYBE we’d play it a second time for the true end. But there is just wayyyyyyyyyyy too much repetition and guide-following when you have to manually go through all those exploration scenes and all those terrible battles a second time rather than just clicking “skip to next choice” and then picking the correct dialogue choice so that finally Shuuji will stop beating his poor Digimon or that Ryo will stop trying to sign up to be a contestant on MILF Island.
Anyway good riddance, this was my first and absolutely last Digimon game I will ever play. The old season 1 Digimon nostalgia was there but it wasn’t enough to carry me through being the therapist to the most annoying bunch of kids I’ve ever encountered in a visual novel. Oh who am I kidding, I’m sure there’s some kusoge otome game out there that probably rivals their stupidity.
Spoiler Warning: It’s because all the Digimon games are utter garbage! You can have your pick of “terrible Tamagotchi knockoff” or “terrible Mystery Dungeon knockoff” or “terrible Shin Megami Tensei ripoff”. I of course never had a phase of “uwu I want to imagine that the characters are holding hands off screen… 🥺👉👈” so I was under no illusions that these games were anything good.
Bread Master Lee 
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