#had a severe lack of screentime / a few cats / and a dream

[rocklnds]

it's all fun and games until the cowboy is scared of a little kitty cat [OUTER RANGE SEASON TWO ✵ EPISODE ONE]

[kyanitedragon]

My Spoiler-Free Thoughts On Digimon Survive!

All-in-all, I really enjoyed it! I was fully and excitedly expecting a visual novel, and it delivered!

I’ve only seen “cheaper” visual novels before, like DDLC or Dream Daddy or Hustle Cat. And in comparison, Survive has much more work put into their sprites. They have a surprising amount of animation to them, compared to how static your typical visual novel is, which helps make the scenes a bit more dynamic.

The game was admittedly a bit text-heavy at times, but I personally found Cyber Sleuth’s text much more boring and painful to get through.

I really liked the Karma system! Most choice-based games have a very simplistic Good / Bad / Neutral system, but the system here felt very nuanced. There were multiple times where I felt the Wrathful option seemed more Moral and vice versa. I went into the game playing naturally and not aiming for any particular ending, and despite having a mostly unchanged mindset the entire game, at different points I felt myself leaning more towards the different karmas.

The characterization of the human characters is really good. You can see references to the original adventure kids, but the survive gang is so vastly different from the adventure cast, or even any of the other digimon anime casts. Personally I like digimon's reuse of tropes throughout the anime series, but getting new characterizations here was really refreshing. I found Aoi and Saki a bit lacking, and felt they were reduced to just being The Girls, but Miu and Miyuki I really enjoyed and they ended up two of my favorites.

The characterization of the digimon is especially really good. Each digimon has a distinct personality and gets a lot of screentime and attention. Some of the anime series lacked on developing certain digimon, but Survive does it really well! Even the digimon villains I felt had more character and motive than your typical digimon adventure villain did.

I really liked the choices for the main characters’ digimon and their digivolutions. And it was really nice to see the lesser-seen digimon get such a large and well-written role!

As for the digimon options for joining your party, I was a bit disappointed at how few there were. Cyber Sleuth had so many! And the digivolution options here were very v-pet-like — they don’t really make any sense. I was a little frustrated that two digimon would be in the game but not in the same digivolution lines. But it also made guessing the lines more fun.

I also really liked that Survive touched on quite a few dark themes that would have been too dark to cover in the anime series. Even Tri, despite being advertised as dark and adult-oriented, really didn't contain anything worse than the kids anime. But Survive definetly does! These dark things I had been wondering but fully accepted would never make it into the series for being too dark, and was pleasantly surprised when they showed up here. They broke my heart, in the best way.

There were a couple translation errors, but nowhere near as bad as Cyber Sleuth – which mistranslated the word “monster” as “Bakemon” repeatedly and made the game very confusing at times. The most distracting errors I found in my playthrough were:

randomly changing pronouns for the digimon partners (which imo works out, since Digimon arguably don’t have gender, although this game never covers this idea)

at one point, in someone’s dialogue they mention Miu instead of what is supposed to be Miyuki’s name, but this error is pretty clear from the scene’s context

One of my favorite and most appreciated things about this game: There are so many Quality of Life features in the game, available from the get-go!

You can skip through dialogue and scenes!

You can set battles to auto!

Auto-battling comes with several options! You can set them to: (1) no auto-digivolving (2) auto-digivolving (3) using items (4) keep the digimon together to have a better chance of tag-teaming and powering up each other (5) send your digimon to split up and fight enemies one-on-one.

You can change the difficulty before any battle.

If you fail a battle, there’s not a game over and instead you’re given several options to try again: (1) try again with no change (2) change the difficulty (3) get brought to an area to grind and level up before trying the battle again

Changing the difficulty does not change the EXP or prizes you get. As someone who’s not always the best at video games, I really appreciate how it doesn’t penalize you at all for playing on a lower difficulty.

I did get some spoilers before finishing the game (entirely my fault) but none of them took away from the game. Even when I knew certain things were going to happen, I was still shocked by them. In some ways knowing the spoilers enhanced my experience, because it upped the tension a lot. And the spoiler I had been most upset by, ended up being an early reveal so it didn't ruin the story nearly as much as I had feared it would.

So if you've gotten spoilers, don't worry! Survive is definetly the kind of story to stand on its own and still keep you entertained and surprised and guessing, even if you've gotten some spoilers!