Playing every PS1 game - Digimon Games

My dirty little secret is that for about an 18 month period in my extreme yoot, I was a Digimon fan. I know, I’m sorry. Even at the time, choosing the cringey, copycat Pokemon ripoff over the One True Monster Taming Cartoon Which Was In Hindsight Actually Just The Same Thing was a cause for much playground ridicule. The truth is that Pokemon only aired on Sky TV - at least to begin with - meaning I was locked out. When Digimon came along, it aired on ITV after school on weekdays. It really says something about how utterly culturally enormous Pokemon was that it managed to get such a grip on things despite the anime being restricted to satellite TV enjoyers. The Pokemon game upon which the whole thing was based was also locked to those who owned a Game Boy, which wasn’t that many. On the other hand, Bandai threw all their computer games at the more or less ubiquitous-by-now PlayStation in the early 00s. It actually makes me wonder why Digimon didn’t become a bigger thing.

One way or another, the PlayStation ended up with five PS1 entries, all bunched together toward the end of the console’s lifespan. I intend to play all five of them, but it’s only now that I’ve discovered only four ended up making it to Europe (but I’d stell never heard of Digital Card Battle). After that, there were a couple on PS2, but I’d grown up a bit by that point and stopped caring.

Digimon Digital Card Battle

I wasn’t ever aware of an actual Digimon trading card game, but apparently it was a real thing and by all accounts seems to have been so low-impact that its only real remaining online presence in 2026 is the linked website and a short Wikipedia article. Looking the card game up on YouTube just gives you clips of the PS1 game Digital Card Battle. Imagine if I was able to devote my passion for cultural archaeology toward something a bit more worthwhile.

It tries to look complex, but it isn’t.

Digital Card Battle is one of those card game - video game adaptations which tries to apply a sort of in-universe plot to proceedings when the nature of things means it can never really work - the final boss sequence has your player character literally fighting back the source of multidimensional evil by tapping X through a “You can never defeat the darkness!” Big Bad monologue, before they both quietly sit down to play a card game where all rules are keenly observed and victory comes without any backsies. You are defeated in the crucible of cardboard Bandai merchanise, evil-doer - now put your MegaHitlermon card in your discard pile, and back to Hell you go! They probably even shake hands afterwards.

No seriously, it isn’t.

Your character is the same mysterious Tokyo kid as the mute avatar in Digimon World (which comes later), and many of the sound effects, music tracks and other 3D assets are lifted from its RPG sibling. It doesn’t feel like a cheap cash-in, though. The fact is that there just isn’t that much to this game. I’ve not played the Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh card-game-em-ups on consoles in order to compare, but…it’s just moving JPEGs about in a grid. There is a lengthy tutorial which does a decent job of explaining how the game is played, but you find yourself waiting for the reveal of the extra gameplay dimensions which don’t ever occur.

A familiar 3D model to anyone who had played the other games (so nobody).

When the actual card battling bit happens, a 3D arena loads up where your Digimon use some flashy animations to kick lumps out of each other, a bit like Pokemon Stadium. The thing is, the whole bit only lasts for one move each before going back to the card grid, and it seems to only serve to waste time. The game even straight up asks you at the beginning if you even want the 3D arena activated at all - at first you feel it would be stupid not to enable it, otherwise your game would just be staring at pictures. But after a while you realise that things would actually be a lot more efficient if you turned it off. When you do, you’re left with a very empty game.

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Digimon Rumble Arena

A mate and I gave this a spin a few times back in the day and I remember thinking it was half decent. I was wrong. This is a grade A digi-turd.

Official UK PlayStation mag gave this 8/10.

What we have here is a Super Smash Bros. clone which swaps out Mario and chums for Digimon from the first few TV seasons. For a TV show built around magical beasts burping fireballs at each other with dramatic Michael Bay’s Transformers fervour, you would expect that this sort of game format would fit like the proverbial hand in glove. It doesn’t, unfortunately.

In a shocking and unprecedented gameplay move, you can temporarily transform into a more powerful version of yourself to do more damage.

There’s no background or narrative to speak of; you simply choose a Digimon to take into a scrap, and then proceed to single combat with the others one by one. It makes Tekken’s loose approach to scene-setting look like Shakespeare in comparison.

In the bonus round you may mash buttons to get extra points or whatever. Or just don’t, to bring the nightmare to a sooner end.

And single combat it is, too. Part of the appeal of Smash Bros. was the chaos caused by four different characters getting blown all over the stage. In Rumble Arena, blasting your opponent away means a few seconds of just having to stand there while they respawn, and then lugging yourself to the spawn point again so you can resume the beat down.

Combos aren’t really a thing.

To mix the dull round-robin concept up a bit, you get the odd ‘bonus stage’ where you complete a mini-game of Dexter’s Lab levels of tedium. And the graphics are shoddy, particularly when the camera is zoomed out to capture both competitors on opposite ends of a stage and the 3D model has to be squashed into a wobbly 20x20 pixels or so. An ill-conceived game.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Digimon World

Here’s the TL;DR: Digimon World is a simultaneously great and bad game. It’s ambitious yet by-the-numbers. It’s fundamentally flawed yet well executed. Its bad parts are also paradoxically its good parts. It’s a game that’s hard to properly describe.

One of those questions which is far more harrowing to answer as an adult.

I played this game a lot at the time. The premise wasn’t anything revolutionary; it’s a “build up your hub village” sort of RPG where one ventures out into the wild, bashes some heads together, and meets some new allies along the way, who then appear back in your town to add or upgrade various facilities. This in turn helps make you a bit more of a brute ready for your next foray out into the wilderness, and so on. The village slowly grows from an abandoned backwater with one or two Digimon living in tin cans, to a rather bustling locale with a hospital, restaurant, transport service and shops both regular and hidden.

Some Digimon perform useful tasks for you, some just stand around and do nothing.

It’s also a Tamagotchi simulator. The closest I ever got to a real ‘Tamagotchi’ at the height of the mid-late-90s fad was a some cheap knockoff, which I believe was won as a fairground prize for one of those hoop-chucking games or something (maybe they’d run out of goldfish), but I was familiar with the concept. I was never any good at doing the digital-pet-parenting bit anyway and would frequently lose it under a bean bag or something, only recovering it by accident months later to find myself confronted with a 10x10px gravestone on the display.

It’s a Japanese RPG, so there is a fishing mini-game.

You start the game by doing a quick Q&A with the Digimon who serves as a sort of town mayor, which then informs which of two entry-level Digimon will be serve as your partner and hapless slave gladiator beast for the rest of the game. You are responsible for feeding it, patting it on the head when it does well, bollocking it when it doesn’t, and, of course, taking it to the toilet several times a day. Play your cards right and your Digimon will continue to evolve into bigger and stronger iterations of itself. Fail as a parent, and your Digimon will transform into what is quite literally a giant turd Digimon. Welcome to Japan!

Evolution occurs with a fancy animation. Kids watch anxiously as they discover whether they’re getting something decent or bizarrely random.

What I don’t remember is ever fully understanding how the game worked. Neither did anybody else, really. Digimon World is a classic of the 90s genre of schoolyard rumour and online hearsay driving the legend around a game that hints at enormous depth, but keeps what’s not obviously apparent and how it all really works hidden away in the code binaries. ‘Evolving’ your Digimon happens every few in-game days, but what your beast will actually turn in to is something that the player feels like can be calculated based on what you’ve been doing, but the facts are eternally hovering just beyond your understanding. There’s a genuine appeal to systems like this which aren’t fully exposed. Modern games often present every possible upgrade in advance, complete with requirements, percentages and a small video showing exactly what it will do. Digimon World gives you an egg and asks what sort of parent you are, then quietly judges you based on criteria that it keeps secret.

Combat is performed by standing on the sidelines and trying to give your beast some advice while he gets the shit beaten out of him. A higher ‘brains’ stat gives you a couple more things to shout.

Your Digimon has a fixed lifespan. Get to 15 or so in-game days and, no matter where you happen to be at the time, your trusty pal will keel over and die. You are returned back to town and get to choose a new baby Digimon to start the process all over again. This is the hook, but also one of the biggest flaws. In order to win battles, your Digimon needs to not be a total weakling. To evolve, your Digimon must meet certain unknowable stat criteria. The only way to raise stats is by ‘training’ in the town gym, where excercises run at an hour of in-game time a pop and will raise a stat by a certain semi-random amount. You don’t actually do anything but watch a short animation, but this is where you must spend the bulk of your Digimon’s life if you want to actually achieve anything. It means you get a rather small window toward the end of your gym-equipment-with-teeth’s lifespan to actually get some of the game done before you have to start again. It’s just a bit of a weird approach.

The ‘bonus try’ option allows you to get extra training stats gains by lining up turds on a fruit machine reel.

But weirdness is the currency in which Digimon World trades. It’s a fascinating mess. The English translation is actively hostile to comprehension - conversations can be grammatically strange, instructions can be bizarre and the game is full of assorted mispellings. Ordinarily I would say this is simply a flaw, but here it contributes to the game’s peculiar atmosphere. Random weirdness is common - your player character can get stuck in the geometry, background music restarts itself every time you move to a new screen and there is, famously, the Digimon who after being defeated will join your town and create a jukebox in the restaurant - sounds great, until you try and actually use it, then the whole game crashes.

Why not? Why not have a curling minigame?

I played the game to completion with relative ease thanks to the ubiquity of torn-from-the-binaries data on how the hell the game actually works being published online, but it was still a decent spin. It’s the sort of thing people might talk about getting one of these diabolical ‘remasters’ that form basically all modern game development. But why would you want to fix the bizarre bugs, hilarious translation and utterly opaque mechanics? Those things are part of the appeal. A smoother game would probably be better. It wouldn’t necessarily be Digimon World.

Kept my attention for: A couple of weeks
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10

Digimon World 2

The first sequel to Digimon World didn’t release in PAL regions, maybe because of how bloody terribly the previous localisations went.

It looks cool, but then you start playing it and change your mind.

It appears we didn’t miss much. I wondered at which point it was in development that the publishers realised they’d messed up making this game, but then checked the Wikipedia page to find a line that said both this game and its predecessor were announced and developed at the same time. The ‘source’ which is referenced is a Gamespot article which says nothing of the sort, so I think this factoid is made up. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Travel the wild and wonderful world of Digimon via a static 2D location selection screen.

For one reason or another, it was decided that they would bin the monster-raising, island-exploring RPG gameplay of the original in favour of a turgid dungeon crawler in the style of Azure Dreams (but more accurately Chocobo’s Dungeon). It was not an inspired move. Even with a better translation job, there is nothing about this game which is as good as the original, and little that could be described as ‘good’ at all.

This featureless grid world is genuinely what you spend most of your time staring at.

After some dull exposition, you’re set loose into the first of what are presumably many dozens of boring and empty procedurally generated dungeon levels to trudge around in a familiar ‘I move, you move’ fashion and beat down on purposelessly-wandering aggressive residents. I’m sorry, it’s pants.

That highly detailed 3D environment in full:

The battling itself tries to be a classic turn-based RPG fare with 3D models flinging polygons at each other, but it’s very badly done, with long pauses and uninteresting animations. The bits back in the hub area look terrible and the music needs to be muted to be enjoyed. I didn’t last long.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Digimon World 3

Given we had the good fortune in Europe of being passed over with Digimon World 2, the third edition was rebadged as Digimon World 2003 and was actually released not much more than a year after we got the original. Online sources place a release at Christmas 2002, which would have been just in time for nobody to buy it; everyone in the country was expecting Santa to throw a PlayStation 2 into their stocking that year.

The old man says to the experience-free player two minutes into the game.

A third Digimon World game, a third totally different approach. It’s not as bad as 2, but it’s still nowhere near the thoroughly achievable heights of 1. This time, 3D graphics are eschewed entirely for a isometric cutesy 2D; a lot more similar to the forbidden Pokemon actually. For the second time, it was clearly decided in a boardroom in Japan that the ghastly creature rearing thing (read: the successful and rather fun Tamagotchi mechanics of the original) needed to be discarded and replaced with something unoriginal and dull. This time, Digimon World is a magnolia-flavoured generic RPG.

It tries to make up for the 2D world with a 3D battle map, but…it’s just dull.

I tried to give it a good go. The problem is that the game makes so many missteps in a direction away from fun that I was starting to get impressed at how much effort had been put in to making things difficult to enjoy. You’re forced to sit through an extremely lengthy introduction upon starting the game, an immediate plot dump setting the scene of your character and his two friends eager to get online and do Digimon things and whatever. After sitting through it, your friends basically say ‘See you later’ and disappear leaving you to work out the rest yourself. A lot of contemporary games did little to tell you what you should be doing, but here you get told to get going doing nothing in particular before you’ve even worked out how the game is played.

Saving the game in DW3 probably takes the longest of any game I’ve played. It’s surely at least a minute of staring.

I’d have been willing to look over most of this if the RPG-standardised turn based battling was any good, but like everything else it’s just a few ticks below average. For whatever reason, you have a team of three digital beasts but can only ever use one at a time in single combat against enemies. It just means you take turns whacking each other over the head with some slow animations. Levelling up is as much of a grindfest as you’ll see on the platform, and unfortunately seems to be mandatory - even in the very first area you can visit where you can get into a fight, it is possible to accidentally come across a dugong-looking enemy which will utterly ruin you before you even know what’s happening.

Funnily enough there is an internal card game which turns out to carry more depth than the actual full priced Digital Card Battle game.

Official UK PlayStation Magazine gave this 7/10 (a mark lower than it furnished DW1 with) and called it a ‘surprisingly complex RPG’.

Kept my attention for: An hour or two
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Bonus: Dodgy Digimon World localisation

Some of the lines in Digimon World are odd, some are funny, some are nonsensical.

Every time an enemy drops an item in defeat.

The final boss, after defeat, gives us a cheery sign-off.

Every time you pick up an item. Interestingly, you don’t get this in the NTSC release.

Your enemy wheels in an especially powerful beast to do you in, but is sure to ask very politely.

When you lose at curling.

I have no idea.

Finally! The FRIGE KEY is mine!

Never mind then.