Review #529: Digimon World 4

 It's finally over.

So... we gonna ape Shadow the Hedgehog?

 Digimon World is Digimon's flagship series, one that, surprisingly, reinvented itself time and time again. For Digimon World 4 they decided to do away with turn based combat, and instead turned it into a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, a la Diablo. It worked for The Lord of the Rings, and it would work once again in the future for the Ninja Turtles, so it should've worked fine. But it didn't. Everything that could've gone wrong went wrong,a nd the end result is one of the worst Digimon games ever made.

 The story... is barely even there. You are recruited as a new member of the Digital World defense corps and must protect the Digimon World from an upcoming threat. I think this game is supposed to tie-in with a movie, which would explain it's bad quality, and how little plot there is, assuming players know the plot of the movie. Regardless, if you so want it, you can take up to three other buddies with you. But why would you? The game is awful, don't do that to your friends. That said, the game supposes you are playing with at least one other player, so the difficulty is scaled towards 2-3 players. Playing on your lonesome is a grueling task on the first and latter part of the game, since for whatever reason the difficulty goes way down on the middle parts of the game.

Most useless service in the game. There're very few things that need appraising.

 X can be used to attack, you can use a charge attack, but it's only useful on the first two-fourths of the game, as the last zones have enemies that love to spam projectiles, thus being a sitting duck is asking for punishment. It probably makes more sense in multiplayer, when others can act as decoys. There's also a weak 360 attack by moving the analog in a circle and pressing X, but once again, it becomes useless in the latter part of the game when enemies just rush you relentlessly. Square is used to block, Triangle... is the last button you'll want to press, since it quickly uses your best healing item. That means that when you're only missing health.. it'll prioritize wasting your incredibly rare Recovery discs(Heals HP and MP), so it's usefulness is debatable. Lastly, circle is used to jump, and yes, the game has a few passable, but unnecessary, platforming sections.

 One of the game's worst mechanics comes in the form of items and magic. To use magic you tap L1 and to use items you use R2. Kinda. Y'see, L1 opens up the magic menu, and R1 opens up the item menu, both in-real time. Which makes sense, since it's a multiplayer game, but it's also a hassle since you have to navigate the menus with the directional pad while simultaneously avoiding enemies with the analog stick. Another problem is that using an item or a spell won't automatically close the window, which in the heat of battle, remember that enemies love to rush in, means that you'll accidentally use items or magic you didn't mean to. It doesn't help that if you press L1 or R1 to close the menu won't work until 1-2 seconds have passed since you used the item/spell, which can throw you off. Needless to say, I guarantee that you'll waste items or magic accidentally.

A friend might make the game more tolerable, but he'll hate you for making him play this game.

 The game loves to go out of its way to annoy you. Let's start with loading screens. Loading times are lengthy, and there are tonnes of them. Let's say you found an amazing weapon or armor in a dungeon... you can't equip it right away, you have to return to the hub city(One loading screen), go to the area of the time that has the digi-lab(Another loading screen), talk to the manager(Another loading screen) then equip the item(Another loading screen, I'm not kidding) then return to the previous screen(Another loading screen) and THEN return to the dungeon(Another loading screen). How annoying is that? How about the fact that the Save spot and the Digilab are a loading screen away from the shop, which is a loading screen away from the gateway to the dungeon? Why not have everything on the same screen? Like, jesus man. Don't even let me get started on the dungeons, each 'Area', of which there are four, is made up of 2-3 'large' zones which house a dungeon or so each. If you die, which you will do frequently, you have to walk all the way back to where you died(if you want to recover your money, the only thing you lose upon death, as well as a few XP). This could mean quite a few loading screens. There's no quick travel of any kind, so you'll be retreading a lot of covered ground.

 The 'Technique' system is a bit wonky too. Basically, the more you use a weapon the more you'll level up its technique. There are quite a few of these(Blunt, Bash, Crush, Slash, Stab, Shot are some of them) and you should invest on three kinds of them... mostly because you can take up to three different weapons with you, since you can only equip or unequip things at the hub town. It's wonky because you gain proficiency levels at random, and it might take quite a while before you get your first technique level up. It's a good idea, but quite bad in practice. And unless you raise your proficiency, you won't be able to equip better weapons of its kind, and your attacks will be easier to block by the enemies. Be warned, there're translation errors, so even though the Double Axes say that they require levels in Bash... it actually means Blunt. A ton of Blunt items were translated as Bash. Well done, Bandai!

Stab weapons are unequivocally the best in the game

 The game requires grinding, or else it will kick your butt all the way to Monday. If you don't get lost, you'll arrive at the first boss at level 4, and he will kill you in one hit. ONE HIT. You need to be level 7 to stand at least one. This is why you'll realize that, if you are gonna play solo, you should invest in a Shot weapon, particularly since your magic, which starts off overpowered, will quickly grow obsolete. The middle part of the game is the easiest one since enemies aren't as tough, that said, don't grow too comfortable, since you can still die to dumb stuff, like getting ping-pong between enemies(Just touching them hurts you, and they love to walk into you) or just walking towards you and getting stuck with a wall on your back. It's kinda ridiculous how poorly planned some things were. Also, if you're lucky your digimon will be able to use electricity or fire, in which case you'll need to mod one of your weapons with the other element, since latter dungeons REQUIRES fire and electricity in some form or another in order to clear them, which is completely stupid. And it's not like modding a weapon is so easy, first of all you need to get lucky and find a weapon with an empty slot(Not as simple as it sounds) and THEN you have to find an electricity and a fire chip. Customizing weapons should've been a neat idea, but it turns into a bother if you make it mandatory when a degree of luck is required yo get what you need.

 But hey, Digimon has always had cool monsters, so maybe playing as them is neat, right? You've always had hundreds of hun... nope, you can only pick between Agumon, Veemon, Guilmon and Dorumon(no Gabumon!!!) at first. And then you can unlock about 16 more, which is just pathetic. What's worse, in Normal mode, you'll be able to get two digivolutions(characters) at most... and if yu opt to unlock these mons... you'll be back at level 1. That's right, all that grinding? All for naught, back at level 1 because screw you. At least you keep your Technique levels so you can equip stronger weapons. Except you don't, those go back to level 1 as well. I was kinda excited to play as Wargreymon X, but as soon as I found out I said screw it and didn't even bother unlocking it, the game was wasting enough of my time as is.

I don't even feel sad about not getting to play as my bae Wargreymon.

 And as bad as the game is... it only gets worse. The end of the game is an absolute drag. The final area is filled with Infermon, a Digimon that loves to lower your stats, jumps away every time you try to attack it, clones itself and murders you with missiles from afar. It also murders your framerate once it gets enough clones out there. The game's dungeons are pretty bad, and monotonously lengthy but the final zone of the game takes the piss. It's a poorly made game any way you look at it.

 I'm gonna be frank here... it's a miracle the Digimon franchise survived this game. This is one of those games in which I have a hard time finding anything good about it, but there isn't. Digimon World 4 is bad, avoid it. Better yet, don't avoid it, just find it, buy it and burn it.
 2.0 out of 10