I’ll get straight to it, Digimon World for the Playstation 1 is a weird game. Obscure and uninvolved combat, unclear evolution trees and a progression loop that always feels like you’re on the back foot. It feels like a bit of a relic in the year 2024. Digimon World is a game in which the player is transported to the digital world and wakes up in a place called File Island. The former residents of File City have forgotten who they are and left and our mission is to raise a Digimon of our own and re-unite the citizens and bring the city back to it’s former glory.
Difficulty and progression
The main game loop goes like this: Train your Digimon and evolve it to become as powerful as possible all the while venturing out into the open world to seek out Digimon to join File City. Digimon don’t live forever (or at least yours don’t), so you’ll be racing against the clock to achieve as much progress as you can before your Digimon passes on and a Digimon egg is left in its wake. To put it simply, baby Digimon are weak. You’ll need to spend time to train your Digimon back up to a stronger state in order to continue to progress in the game… and this doesn’t feel great.
The game’s life-cycle mechanic leaves the player with a sense of impending doom as their partner grows older each in-game day and it can certainly feel like a frustrating design choice. It’s worth mentioning that there are some persistent gains that are transferred across partners, namely the Techniques that your Digimon learns. It’s sort of reflective of the modern day rogue-lite, but it doesn’t feel like quite enough. Don’t let the speed runners fool you, this game is complex, slow and it’s difficult, especially considering this is a children’s game!
Winging It, Unfortunately
Your partner’s frailty isn’t the only thing the player will contend with though, as attaining the Digimon you’d like can also be incredibly difficult to do (even if you’re following along to a player made guide). Picture this, you start with Agumon, basically the mascot for the Digimon franchise, awesome! That means you’ll be evolving him into Greymon and then maybe even Metal Greymon, right? Like the show! Well, maybe not. Probably not. Each Digimon can Digivolve into a myriad of different monsters and each have incredibly specific requirements to achieve doing so, not the end of the world right? Well, there is no in-game resource that documents how to achieve each Digivolution, which means most of the time you’ll be winging it and praying for a partner that meets your needs.
Introduction to File City (Digimon World, 1999)
Familiar Faces
Not only does Digimon World 1 feel like a bit of anomaly in game design decades after its release, but it also feels like a bit of an anomaly in the Digimon universe. In much of the media surrounding the Digimon franchise we see consistencies in the relationships between certain Digimon. For example, Gabumon becomes Garurumon, Patamon gets a power-up and turns into Angemon, if you’ve ever seen the original Digimon Adventure anime that’s simple, and it’s a given. However, as described earlier Digimon World flips that all a bit on it’s head.
This is actually in-line with the original Digital Monster virtual pet toy, Bandai’s edgy ‘for boys’ answer to it’s massively popular Tamagotchi. And while there are other games in the series that also taken reflect this approach to the evolution lines, Digimon World 1 released roughly 2 months prior to the massively popular aforementioned anime and this just confused the hell out of me as a kid.
Knock-offs? Probably not
That’s not where the confusion ends however, throughout File Island the player comes into contact with many Digimon and we see countless familiar faces that we’ve met before in the anime and other media. Despite this, the majority of Digimon we actually see are well, recolors of the Digimon we’re used to. They also have different names. Why is this Patamon purple instead of brown, and why is his name Tukaimon? This is another one that stumped me as a child.
I thought that I was traversing the island beating up knock-off Digimon for the longest time. In fact, the only ‘real’ Digimon you encounter are the special ones you’re tasked to with bringing back to the city, which only enhances this feeling of illegitimate mons. Don’t get me wrong, those ‘knock-off’ Digimon are all acknowledged in the Digimon Wiki and have their place in the lore of the franchise, but it just felt inconsistent playing this as a child.
The Digimon World Series
There are four numbered Digimon World games, so you may be asking different can this game’s approach be to the rest of the line. The answer to that is ‘a lot’, in fact no two games of the four are even the same genre. Digimon World 2 is a turn based dungeon crawler. The third game is a JRPG with combat more akin to Pokémon. And the fourth is a co-op action RPG. There are much later games in the franchise that returned to the first game’s design, notably Digimon World Re:Digitize for the PSP and Digimon World: Next Order which serves as a sequel to the first game. Both of these games see more quality of life enhancements over the first game. That’s to be expected, they’re still primarily children’s games after all.
It’s still good, really good
Everything I’ve this article has presented so far might seem a bit negative, but let me be clear; I love this game. I played it endlessly as a kid, I made next to no progress in the game and never had the partner that I wanted, but it didn’t matter. Exploring File Island was in some ways frightening and in every way enchanting.
The game’s stellar soundtrack and the blisteringly loud sounds of footsteps hits me right in the nostalgia. I find myself revisiting it every couple of years convinced I was young and dumb the last time I picked up my Digivice. This time I’ll fully restore File City and finally complete the game. I still never have, and that still doesn’t matter. In fact, it gives me all the more reason to pick it up in another few years time to attempt it all over again.
It’s truly a shame that this game remained an anomaly in the series for as long as it did.
