Sometimes digievolution is not the answer.
All-Star Rumble is an arena fighter in which up to four Digimon can duke it out. You've got six different modes: Survival(3 lives match), Points(Kill the enemy more times in 3 min), 'Damage'(Deal more damage than the opponent in 3 minutes), Medal(Defeat enemies and collect three medals), Bomb(Like survival but there's a bomb that blows off. It's pretty much survival) and another mode in which you fight over a flag. Yeah, they weren't very creative. You can turn items on and off, but you can't change the ruleset. Survival is always 3 lives, time-based fights are always 3 minutes... kinda lame if you ask me.
The cast of characters is so small too, only 12 characters. That's pathetic. Half of the cast comes from Adventure 1(Agumon, Gabumon, Gomamon, Tentomon, Biyomon, Gatomon), 2 come Adventure 02(Veemon, Wormon), 2 come from Tamers(Guilmon, Impmon) and I think the final two come from the anime series that was airing at the time. Every character has a Digievolution they can temporarily turn into by filling their energy gauge, and beating the Story Mode with a character unlocks their alternate Digievolution, usually being extremely cheap and overpowered. What really sucks is that some of these alternate Digievolution are shared. Agumon and Gabumon share Omnimon, which makes sense but it's still lame, Impon and Shoutmon share Shoutmon DX for whatever reason and Wormon and Veemon share Imperialdramon, which makes sense but it's still super lame and lazy.
Ah, the Story Mode! That's were you unlock characters, and it will take you more than one playthrough, for you see, you start with only 4 characters and at the end of every stage you battle a Digimon, if he isn't on the roster yet then you unlock him. I played this mode three times, first with Agumon, then Veemon and finally Guilmon and that way I unlocked everyone.
At first I thought 'Oh! This is really neat! They made it into sort-of an adventure mode!" but the more I played the more I realized how basic it was. 'Cutscenes' are made out of CG still and tons of text. And, as I mentioned previously, you'll have to play this mode MORE than once to unlock everyone... and you'll never be able to skip the tutorial messages. Never. This mode is incredibly simple to the point that a tutorial is 100% superfluous, and yet, you can't skip or turn off tutorial messages on subsequent playthrough. Every stage is super short and super basic, you enter a room, fight weak NPCs and carry on until you reach the end, where upon you fight one of the playable characters under one of the six match rulesets.
All right, so the first six stages are easy to the point of being a cakewalk. Then stage 7 happens and it gets cheap, having you fight strong enemies that leave little windows open for a reprisal, but it's doable. Stage 8 is an absolute nightmare because it spams strong enemies at you. And there are no checkpoints. Eventually I learned how to cheese it by spamming Veemon and Guilmon's Aerial Strong attacks, but my initial go at it with Agumon turned into 10 or so attempts. It wasn't fun with Agumon because it was so unfair, and it wasn't fun with Veemon and Guilmon because I had to rely on cheesing the enemies.
I haven't gone over the basic gameplay, and thankfully, it's decent. Every character has four attack combos, one mashing Square(The weak combo), one mashing circle(The strong combo) and another two that are either two-Square or three-square button presses and then all circle presses, and another one that is either two-circle or three-circle button presses and then all square inputs. Triangle and Triangle plus Circle are your energy-consuming ranged attacks. There are two different energy gauges that fill as you land damage, the green energy gauge that is consumed by ranged attacks or by L1 cancels, and the Digievolution gauge. The cancel system is interesting because it makes no sense in Digimon but hey, if you press L1 as you get hit you'll teleport behind the enemy, provided you've got enough energy. If you press L1 during your own attacks you'll cancel the attack allowing you to extend your combos.
Y'know, Digimon All-Star Rumble wasn't much fun, I think they weren't even trying. It's as if the publishers remembered they had the Digimon license, so they threw a couple of bucks together and got this basic, skimpy game developed. The good news is that afterwards Bamco would get their priorities in check and Digimon would get a fantastic new game, Cyber Sleuth. The bad news is that All-star Rumble happened and it probably soiled the Rumble arena name forever.
4.0
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