Amun: As I laze around this season, Firechick is back with a different kind of review – a game!
Oh, Digimon Survive, you’ve had a long and hard journey just to come to fruition. Previously announced in 2018, Digimon Survive was touted as a hybrid visual novel/strategy game that promised a much darker, more realistic narrative than both its anime and game contemporaries. I was hooked the second it was announced, because as a person who grew up on the original 1999 anime and watched the later seasons afterward, I’m a sucker for Digimon going in new directions. Plus, Digimon media outside the main anime have started trying to appeal more to older audiences for years, especdially with the Cyber Sleuth games, so something like this isn’t necessarily out of the left field, and you can bet I and many others were looking forward to when Survive would come out. But then the game got delayed. Again. And again. And again, Gravity Falls style. As it would turn out, for a lot of different reasons: COVID, needing more money to produce the game as intended, the creators having to flat-out change development teams, and having to scrap several years of work and starting from scratch. People began to think the game would probably be delayed forever…until it finally, FINALLY got released on July 29th, 2022. I bought the Switch version (And managed to get Guilmon). So with all of this, was Digimon Survive even worth the wait? For me personally, I only have this answer: Hell to the YES!…though not without a few caveats.
One thing you’ll notice right away is that at first, the game seems like it’s just going to be a carbon copy of Adventure: Eight children on a camping trip find themselves teleported to a mysterious world inhabited by monsters and have to find a way to not only get back home, but find ways to just survive day to day. But lots of things make Survive stand out from Adventure and its other contemporaries. For one, there’s a heavier focus on survival and living day to day, and things like foraging for food to deal with food shortages, or finding working plumbing and clean water are treated as the serious concerns that they are, with some minor exceptions. Adding onto this is the game’s heavier leaning into a horror-inspired tone, with a near constant sense of uneasiness creeping into every part of the narrative, like something will just pop out at you at any moment. Granted, Digimon as a franchise hardly ever shied away from occasionally dipping its toes into the psychological and emotionally dark aspects of the Digimon—which, interestingly, aren’t referred to as Digimon in this game—especially when it comes to their relationships with their human companions. Survive is hardly an exception, with it stating flat-out that the Digimon partners are acting as mirrors to the traumatic struggles the kids go through.
Digimon Survive is, by and large, mainly a visual novel that’s very heavy on its story, being told with art renders and dialogue trees where the choices you make can influence the trajectory of the narrative. Whether it’s getting closer to your group of friends and helping their Digimon evolve, or deciding on the best course of action when dealing with the enemy. Some choices are innocuous and don’t do anything, whereas others will have severe, long standing consequences that can even lead to characters dying. Yes, depending on the route you take and the choices you make that lead you to whatever story branches you go down, Digimon Survive shows its characters dying, and in pretty graphic ways, too. Granted, there are two deaths early on that are script-locked, and therefore guaranteed to happen on your first playthrough, so no matter what you do you can’t save those particular characters unless you complete the game and do the New Game+ run. So yeah, Digimon Survive is dark and doesn’t pull its punches. It’s not Magical Girl Site or Platinum End levels of dark, thankfully, and its usage of violence and death actually do have purpose to them, rather than feeling like they’re just shoved in there for the sake of tasteless shock value. Plus, there are still plenty of moments of levity sprinkled throughout the game so it doesn’t feel like the game is absolutely drowning in non-stop misery and despair unlike some stuff I know.
This also extends to the cast of characters and how they deal with the events going on around them. One of the producers, Kazumasa Habu, said in an interview that he wanted to have Survive go in a much more realistic direction in terms of how real people would react to being stuck in a bad situation and dealing with monsters like the Digimon, and that any decisions they make won’t always be the best ones. So basically, he and his team re-used the core archetypes that made up the cast of Adventure, but explored them in ways that make you wonder what would happen if tackled more realistically, similar to how Lord of the Flies handled the premise of kids getting stuck on an island and how their worst vices eventually get the better of them. In Habu’s words, in the real world, not everyone is a hero, and real people can make bad decisions and are flawed, which is pretty apt. That being said, the cast of characters in Survive are still a pretty fun bunch in their own right, all with their own unique strengths, weaknesses, quirks, idiosyncrasies, and ways of dealing with their flaws, and they all grow over the course of the game, some for the better and some for the worst. A lot of their backstories and development are restricted to certain routes, so you won’t learn everything about them on your first playthrough, but the game really goes above and beyond to make their chemistry feel genuine, and since Digimon Survive is a pretty long game (With Habu even saying that each route in the game, including the New Game+ route, contains 40 hours of content, which would make it total up to 120 hours overall), you’re given plenty of time to spend with these characters, making whatever bad circumstances they endure, or the outcomes, hit even harder. On that note, I absolutely respect Habu for sticking to his guns and wanting to make the game the way he wanted to while respecting why Digimon is such a beloved franchise.
And it’s really easy to see the love and passion that went into this game: The backgrounds are the right amount of detailed without being overbearing, with well-rendered portraits and adorable in-game sprites for the SRPG segments, framed with a great soundtrack, full voice acting that’s absolutely stellar (The game only has Japanese audio, with no English dub), and strong narratives no matter which route you play. That being said, as much as I want to hail Digimon Survive as an absolute masterpiece (And believe me, you have no idea how much I really REALLY want to!), it’s not perfect. One of Survive’s biggest issues is its pacing. The opening chapters in particular drag on for quite a while. I personally didn’t mind the slow pacing at first, as this is a game that really wants to take its time to flesh out its characters, establish atmosphere, and develop its setting. But there are definitely times where Survive seems to drag its feet when it comes to narrative progression, with segments where characters repeat things that were already said previously, or have story moments flat-out interrupt battle scenes multiple times when it would have been better to save them for after the battle for a more streamlined experience. I know chapter 11 of the Moral route (Which I played) was pretty egregious about this. Seriously, there are times in that chapter where the game will only transition to a battle scene for, like, a literal nano-second before immediately going back to a story scene. Over, and over, and OVER, dragging on and on and on. Even I got to the point where I was like “Oh my God! Will you just get on with it?! At least let me finish the battle!” One would think that the turn-based battle system would mitigate this somewhat by breaking up the pace, and as someone who always struggled with SRPGs, I appreciate how simple Survive’s take on it was. The game mechanics are pretty easy to grasp, but if you do a bit of grinding, the difficulty levels feel too easy, even on hard (With the exception of the New Game+ route), and you can just brute force your way through enemies without much thought, kind of similar to Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. On that level, the game is very beginner-friendly in a way that can appeal to younger fans, but Digimon Survive probably wasn’t meant for younger gamers given its story and overall tone.
Some other, smaller things kind of threw me off too, but I’ll list them off in a list format:
- I wish the game had more Digimon to recruit, especially rookies like Terriermon or Morphomon or Lunamon. Their selection of recruitable Digimon just feels so limited, and at times it almost felt like recruiting Digimon didn’t add anything to the narrative.
- This is more a personal nitpick but…Habu, did you and your team REALLY feel the need to add in a scene where Takuma walks in on his female classmates changing clothes in the gym?! Granted, there’s no nudity or anything, but I’m just really sick of the whole “guy walks in on a girl changing” trope in general, and considering Saki is canonically 12 years old…yeah. It adds nothing to the story and just felt tacked on. Thankfully, the scene in question is optional and easily skippable, so you can skip it and not miss a thing. Thank God.
- Recruiting evolution slabs early on is needlessly hard if you don’t know what to do. If you have a bunch of rookie Digimon but need to make them digivolve, getting the item needed for them is extremely tedious for some reason. Which is weird because it’s a hell of a lot easier to recruit the items needed to digivolve a champion level Digimon to ultimate than it is to make a rookie Digimon digivolve to champion. This should not be.
- Whoever was in charge of localizing the game is in dire need of a proof-reader. The translation itself is fine, but gender pronouns for Digimon are wildly inconsistent for some reason, there are times when characters refer to one character in the audio but the text calls them by the wrong name, and I don’t think I need to reiterate the fact that a localization note was straight up left in a scene where Dracmon digivolves to mega level. I mean, didn’t ANYONE in Bandai-Namco notice this blatant mistake?! I know Code:Realize had this problem as well, but as far as I’m aware, there were never any points where someone flat-out leaves a localization note in the game!
- Some people might take issue with the fact that some routes provide answers for some subplots while in others they’re ignored, which I can understand. Even the New Game+ route apparently has some issues with not utilizing certain characters enough or having some questionable narrative decisions even after you save certain characters. I haven’t played the post-game route yet so I can’t comment on it for sure, but that’s what I’ve heard from other players.
- Whose bright idea was it to not only give Patamon a voice actor that gives him a really terrible voice, but to give it an absolutely ear-splittingly awful sound effect when you battle it in the SRPG segments?! Good lord, hearing that sound effect actually physically hurt my ears. It makes him sound like a dying chipmunk!
All that being said, considering how hard Digimon Survive fought just to come to fruition, I’m beyond glad the game is here, even in the state that it’s in now. For me, Digimon Survive, as a game, scratched an itch that I’ve wanted since Tamers, and after feeling disillusioned by Digimon Ghost Game’s refusal to progress its story in any way, I can wholeheartedly say that this is honestly one of the best visual novels to come out this year, if not one of the best VNs ever. Granted, I say this as someone who hasn’t played a lot of visual novels other than Ace Attorney, Code:Realize, Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, a tiny bit of Clannad, and many short indie VNs, with A Little Lily Princess still being my number one favorite. Can Survive be a bit of a slog at times? Sure, but I’d rather watch a slog that actually cares about telling a compelling story and having engaging characters than, say, Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure, which made no effort to have either. Is Survive a bit too ambitious for its own good? Yes. But you know what? I’m fine with Survive as it is, and I really hope more Digimon games like it come out down the line. Also, for God’s sake, please don’t hate the game just because it’s a visual novel and for not having enough SRPG elements. If you’re planning on buying the game thinking it’s just a SRPG and nothing else, don’t. Habu has said that the game is 70% visual novel and 30% SRPG, and the game’s been getting review bombed by people who bought it thinking it was more the latter than the former. Do your research before buying Digimon Survive, and don’t complain about it not being the game you wanted it to be, because the producers have been pretty open about Survive’s format! Survive is not a bad game just because it’s more visual novel than SRPG.
Digimon Survive had a hard journey to get this far, and as far as I can tell, it’s an ambitious game made by people who dearly love its mother franchise, and for what it is, I think it’s a gem that deserves a bit more polish, but is still great for what it is. If you’re looking for a compelling visual novel with a strong narrative and a more realistic take on a well-worn premise, don’t sleep on Digimon Survive.
