Thought dump on Digimon Survive

I wasn't originally planning on writing one for this game because it's 4 months old at this point and it kinda released in a "sent by the company to die" way, but I've been seeing a few friends talking about it as it has become quite discounted, and it's a game I wrote personal comments on on my phone while playing the way I often do for games like this that I'm interested in talking about to at least someone (though in my case it's largely because of Ghoul02 who talked about this game a lot leading to its release lol).

I'll start by saying that this document will not contain specific story spoilers past roughly the third chapter (part 3) of the game and what has been discussed in promo materials, in an attempt to keep it about as spoiler free as I can possibly make it. I will also spoil the end of this document a little bit from the get-go and say...even after writing it, I genuinely am not completely sure how I feel about this game to be honest.

A trend I've noticed with Digimon games dating all the way back to their earliest iterations on the Playstation is they almost always seem to have a number of really cool ideas that they're going for, but they only manage to deliver on their promise some of the time. Digimon World 1 is a prime example, as it's a game with an absolutely fantastic presentation of a non-linear adventure game with a lot of different ways to go about it, but also one that is often bogged down by the need to spend the time to get a decent Digimon or by how cryptic and at times glitchy the game can be to make progress in. Digimon World 3 has a vast branching evolution chart for your mons and really neat ideas like a tag-team fusion attack when switching between certain mons and an in-game card game rivaling triple triad in scope and fun. And in this regard, I think this about sums up Survive as well; a game with a lot of good ideas and promise, but one that struggles to deliver on all of it.

Survive is a game that sat in development hell for 4 years, changed development teams twice and was moved to run on a different engine, settling on being made in Unity. The way I saw it pitched was it's effectively like if they took a cast from one of the anime and then made the game more SMT-like. The actual presentation of the game is something like a strategy RPG for its combat and action sequences, while the rest of the game is more of a visual novel. Regarding those SMT comparisons, three key ones come forth. The first is the ability to recruit new party members via negotiation, which is played quite similar to Shin Megami Tensei demon negotiations. The second of which is giving the player an alignment system for which many choices they make throughout the game will have an impact on the story and ending. The third of which is an overall more mature and darker narrative tone...at least in theory, but I'll get to that later.

In terms of being a strategy RPG, there's definitely some good and bad here. The game is a bit more casual as a strategy RPG, since there isn't permadeath from running out of HP (although some maps have conditions that are automatic losses when you lose a specific party member), and it has a couple of its own design issues. Mobility is at a premium for the first leg of the game, with your starter mons rarely being able to move more than 2-3 squares at a time, which makes the pace of maps feel annoyingly slow at first. This takes awhile to start being alleviated once you start obtaining more powerful evolution forms and obtain potent ranged attacks that enable you to close the gap in other ways, so by the end of the game the limits in mobility become less of a problem as you actually start to feel more powerful. There aren't a whole lot of elements to the game that ultimately require a lot of strategizing, but I actually don't mind that in this game. It doesn't force the player to be a chessmaster, but rather it just allows them to move around a whole bunch of monsters in a battlefield, which is honestly kind of cool. I honestly would love more monster-controlling grid-based RPGs in general, as the only other one that really comes to mind is Pokemon Conquest, and that game is underwhelming as all get out. That's not to say it's devoid of strategically interesting mechanics either. One thing I really like is how your mon slowly drains their skill point (SP) meter over the course of battle when they're in their evolved forms. This often forces you to consider your meter and manage it a bit more carefully, not enough to prevent you from using skills that use up but enough to make sure you don't just haphazardly spam without consideration for how utterly screwed a base form mon gets to be, especially later in the game. It's also thematically interesting, because in theory your Digimon are supposed to draw from latent power in order to maintain their evolved state and then revert when they run out of energy. In practice, at some points in the game managing your SP won't be too much of a concern, but it's interesting in that it's there and for the most part how it's implemented is good, and it does force you to actually be somewhat aggressive rather than resorting to slow turtling strategies. You can also give each mon supporting accessories and abilities that give you more options in battle.

Also, if you ask me, this game does something more SRPGs need to implement: when you finish a map in Survive, every mon you brought to that map receives exp at the end. Whether they were the MVP or just brought along for the ride, they get about the same EXP. This means that you don't have to resort to crap like babying lower level units by using your chunky ones to soften enemies so a scrub can get the killing blow. This is honestly an area of SRPGs I've adjusted to dealing with but I feel like could be phased out of the genre and would improve it significantly to do so.

There were a couple design problems I did have with this game overall though. To start with, most of the sprites in this game have bigtime mobile-game animation and design syndrome, where on the maps themselves their idle and movement animations are these sort of exaggerated type that just don't look right to me. This is especially egregious for the humanoid looking mons and the human characters, as most of the quadrapeds look fine in most instances. For another, I don't particularly like how often turns amount to "Move to get in place > auto-defend." Any time you try to do anything aggressive, it takes a turn waiting for enemies to retaliate because the game spams defend. On top of that, this game implements the classic turning mechanic where at the end of a turn you face a certain direction and party members are more vulnerable to attacks from the side and back. This has always been a crux of many SRPGs for me since the days of Final Fantasy Tactics because it is not a mechanic that adds any fun or interesting element, rather serving to slow it down entirely because battles between units often devolve into this stupid dance of walking around an enemy to hit it on the side. And while this game has some fun battles, it also has its share of repeated padding maps that slow the game down more than they need to. Part 5 for example has a sequence where you play through a map like four times in a row, repeating a sequence that plays out roughly the same.

In terms of difficulty things can be rather uneven. For the most part, the game takes enough planning and resource management to make you at least try, but some maps are so automatic you can turn the game's auto-battle on and do something else while waiting. Some maps are needlessly bullshit, however (looking at some of the lategame maps and bosses of certain endings in particular). The game also has a habit of occasionally taking away the ability to bring a huge chunk of your main party digimon at once, which will force you to bring along several generic recruited mons to maps. While these aren't super hard to prop up, if you haven't invested the time to actually get them, evolve them, or level them, then these maps can catch you off guard. I wouldn't be surprised if there were ways you could make the game outright unwinnable, because there was a map in the game that did this that forced me to use the game's free battle maps to grind that I could barely get through even after turning the difficulty down (I usually played the game on Hard outside of this). The habit of taking away large numbers of party members I had invested in got really annoying and was frankly the most blatant case of outright bad game design in Survive. Conversely, this game's enemy AI is kind of bad at decision making which makes the game feel easy at times for reasons that feel entirely like an unforced error. They have a tendency to become kind of cowardly at low health, and enemies that have a buff skill will overuse that buff, sometimes even the boss monsters of maps doing this regardless of whether they're set up to do something much more productive against you.

As an SRPG, this game does a lot of cool and even a few unique things that make it stand out. It does however have a few underwhelming aspects, padding in parts of an already slower paced gameplay style, and definitely felt like it could have been more thoroughly refined.

The other side of this game is as a visual novel/adventure game. A good majority of your playtime will be spent doing visual novel stuff, like reading, making choices, the works. And as such, I have to talk about the narrative, writing, and presentation a lot more than I often do when writing these things, because while I can forgive some pretty mediocre to bad stories in video games when they're only a smaller part of the equation of a game and the focus of the game is on the player's experience with the game (gameplay, adventure, etc.), this becomes harder to do when the game prioritizes telling a story. And I'll admit that I like visual novels, even those in genres that often give visual novels a (often unearned IMO) controversial reputation, so this isn't a genre I'm loathe to play/read through.

As a visual novel, Survive is...clean but actually rough. When I say clean, I mean it has a lot of the right bells and whistles. The actual visuals of the novel portions are done very well, with really good looking art and the way the camera shifts between talking characters rather than characters appearing and disappearing on a static background as is often done. Most of the characters have good and expressive sprites and animations, with the only weakness being the occasional generic hostile Digimon being stiff sometimes. The soundtrack of this game is quite good, with several standout tracks, really solid background music that manages to honestly be quite a bit better than your stock "generic VN background music", intense battle themes, and some very somber pieces. The version of "Kizuna" that plays in the credits is one of the best pieces of gaming music I've heard from any game in 2022, using the game's leitmotif in a way that resonates incredibly well, and one that will probably stick with me far, far beyond anything else in this game.

In terms of the actual plot, like I said before it's largely like a Digimon cartoon (although the characters are a bit older than the elementary schoolers that populate many of the franchise's anime you might be familiar with) just with darker stuff going on. Bunch of kids get spirited away to an alternate world full of monsters that all have the suffix -mon attached to their name, find partners that grow along side them, as they navigate the confusing other world trying to find their way home. It's a familiar setting to those who are familiar with the anime, although the games themselves tend to be more varied in terms of presentation. A couple twists on this however are that the game is largely self-contained in its worldbuilding, tying the world of the Digimon to the world of the humans, and perhaps most notably, the Digimon themselves are basically never called that in the script, instead being given the name of "Kemonogami" (loosely translating to beast spirits or animal gods) and their evolutions being called generic terms like evolutions and transformations rather than marketing names like "digivolution" (one I always found kinda cringeworthy personally). Survive is also intended as a very self-contained story, which I bring up because although this game feels like it works as a potential starting point, I do have a harder time recommending this game for people new to Digimon than I do for people already adequately familiar with it for reasons that are somewhat difficult to pinpoint.

Because of the way Digimon tend to operate (they're buddies that ally themselves with mostly powerless humans and "feed off their vibes" as part of their own growth), Survive generally ends up being a bit more of a character driven story. And this ultimately is both where Survive's biggest narrative strengths and weaknesses really start to manifest. I did two playthroughs of this game for two separate endings (and looked up the rest), I can say that underneath the surface I legitimately think there are a couple of good characters with really interesting stories and concepts. By the nature of this game being called "Survive" and with how much it is featured in this game's promotional material, it isn't much of a spoiler to mention the fact that "characters die". The game makes this clear rather early, and a lot of the times characters being killed off rings hollow and does little for me emotionally, but there were some in Survive that genuinely, truly made me feel an emotional response to. Unfortunately, however, there is way too much damn filler in this game's script and structural problems that hurt the pacing of the game, and not all characters are created equally in this game.

For example, Ryo and Shuuji's treatment of their Digimon in early portions of the game make them so unwatchably, irredeemably annoying characters to even have on screen and any attempts at the game trying to get me to like these characters fall absolutely flat. Kaito has shades of being an interesting character in some scenes buried under being such a pre-eminently one note overprotective and overbearing big bro archetype. There are also some characters who truly do have some interesting aspects of their backstories that inform some really interesting aspects of their character that make some scenes great, but boy does it take a lot to even get to that, and it's not always explored with much real depth, and the rest along the way doesn't do a great job making up for it. I don't believe that I need to know everything about a character for them to be good or interesting, but for the amount of time you spend with these characters, there's just simply not enough to go off of that isn't repeated. There's also a lot of stuff that I think that did get stated in the script that didn't need to be, we really don't need that many "boy you've changed" dialogue choices devoted to drawing attention to character development, that's a "show don't tell" thing.

Speaking of dialogue choices, can we stop with the "Bond/Affinity/Social Link-adjacent" stuff in these sorts of games, man...One of the mechanics of this game is that in between major story points you have "free time" sections where you can go and strike up conversations with party members. And by can I mean as far as I can tell you're literally required to burn through all your free time points before you can advance the game. Now, this game doesn't hide that it's predominately a visual novel so some amount of expending time in 1 on 1 conversations with characters is something that comes with the territory, but there are points in the game I legitimately wish I could skip past this. There are some interesting scenes here, but most of these are repetitive and don't really add much to the table, it just consists of a scene of two characters explaining how they feel about something that we already know and often not in very interesting or compelling ways (this is partly why I singled out Kaito above, because I swear to god most of his just end up being "how can I protect my little sister Miu from this thing" or "hey I'm angry because something to do with Miu"). This ends up leading to another issue, these conversations are by far the main way you raise party member bonds, which you need to hit certain thresholds in the game in order for their buddy Digimon to unlock their higher tier evolutions. Because the game typically only increases your bond level by picking the right answer in these choices, you either have to save scum or risk having severely underwhelming party members in endgame (now the game's autosave system does make this a tad bit less annoying, but only a tad). I particularly hate that it's so all-or-nothing because some of the actually interesting responses and reactions that could actually tell you interesting bits about these characters are locked behind the "wrong" answers. At least when Persona does it there's like tiers, answers that automatically give points, and the simple act of even hanging out at all makes it go up. I know Persona's a cliche thing to compare RPGs to, but this system is one that it has kinda unfortunately unleashed on the world of JRPGs and nearly all of them seem to do it worse by comparison.

Because the game has 8 main characters and each one gets a partner Digimon, I also often felt the cast was a bit too crowded. There's at times what I call the "too many voices" problem that works that introduce a large cast relatively quickly and put them all together at the same time often have. In these situations, any time a significant event happens, several characters have to say something in response. Somebody finds a secret? Three characters have to say "Oh wow, what's this?" I noticed this in particular when I played Danganronpa, another game that kills off characters and lets you know that it plans to do so early, because it shoehorns multiple characters into saying something in every scene just to make sure you're reminded that they're there. In practice, this often pads out scenes to make them longer than they need to be to make sure everyone has input, while also often not giving any particular character enough focus for the scene to leave a lasting impact on them. Survive is less egregious about this than something like Danganronpa, but it's honestly been a long running problem for the Digimon franchise as this was an area that really made it hard for me to revisit Digimon Adventure and Adventure 02 for nostalgia reasons back when I rewatched a bunch of childhood cartoons while I was in high school.

And since I'm talking about the anime again, I need to actually get to this game's script, because it's an area that seriously needed work more than any other. The overall tone of this game is rather inconsistent. Much of it reads out like one of those anime following a bunch of kids around, which works okay when the target demographic of the game is ages 8 to 12, but this game is T rated in English and the only reason it is is because some of the more grim (a word literally used on the back of the game's box) scenes are deliberately left to the player's imagination. And like I played Somnium Files 2 and 6 Yakuza games this year and I liked a lot in those games, I don't believe having heavy tonal dissonance is an inherently bad thing, but there are ways to do it well and ways to do it poorly, and I think Survive doesn't have a particular narrative tone that it sticks to in a convincing enough way to reach its full potential. There's a lot of heavy-handed scenes and dialogue, points that lack in nuance with characters explaining themselves to the player in ways more fitting for a cartoon like Digimon when it was targeted towards elementary schoolers and less for an audience that doesn't always need things to be as on the nose. It can also leave the game feeling almost dark without being driven by a sense of purpose, and it's noncommittal with its tone which becomes a problem when it's actually committal with certain plot events.

It can be a bit easy to pin this on localization, and I have my share of gripes with the localization that suggest to me that the script could have used a bit more time rather than Bamco forcing it into a worldwide simul-release. For example, an early scene in the game features the main character (Takuma) yelling "Lardbutt" at a Fangmon (a decidedly string-bean wolf Digimon) to get its attention, which is a bit of a strange thing for him to say when Takuma will also use words like "Damn" and "Shit" in the script somewhat regularly. There's also a point in the script where the game uses the term "Digivolution" to explain how evolution works, which is really weird because the game specifically goes out of its way to not call them "Digimon" or their evolution "Digivolution". But by far the most common problem is the inconsistent pronouns. Now, I believe in Japanese Digimon across the franchise aren't typically referred to by gender, with their own personal "I" pronouns and manners of speech usually being the closest thing you get ("Boku" vs "atashi", ending a sentence with "zo" or "wa"), but they often end up gendered in English as "he" or "she". Frequently throughout this script will switch between calling a Digimon "he" and "she", sometimes literally one right after the other, to the point that it actually can make it confusing as to who is even being talked about anymore when the conversation involves several subjects and makes the script a bit jarring to read. This occurs almost exclusively for the partner Digimon of the female main cast, which tended to speak with far more feminine voices and either feminine or neutral speech, which suggests to me this isn't really a conscious choice done by the localization team, but rather something to do with their editing passes.

Now, I won't shift all the blame onto the loc team for the script, they were most certainly a small team tasked with translating a fuckton of text. There are also a decent share of lines in the script that I felt were kind of weird in general that I cross-referenced with the Japanese voiceover and found the Japanese line says exactly what the English says. For what it's worth, the script rarely felt stiff or devoid of personality, it just needed more work and I would have liked it to take on a tone more reflective of what the game felt like it should have been going for.

Another area of the script's problem stems more from the direction. This game has moments where it just struggles with the idea of object permanence, where the segmentation of certain "exploration" adventure sections will cause characters to repeatedly go over the same bits in the script and characters won't respond as if they haven't already literally heard that already multiple times. There really just felt like there was a lot of fat that could be trimmed in the exploration and free time portions because it goes over the same things more than is necessary. And as a result, the game is at times very bad at foreshadowing, because you see things play out in ways that lead to very obvious conclusions. It took until well into the game before anything truly caught me by surprise. There are things they also just don't learn from that I found myself yelling at the TV "Oh come on man you know what's going to happen you already saw this play out earlier!" There are more than a share of moments of a character grabbing the idiot ball so to speak, and certain behaviors and acts of defiance by certain characters start to get very old.

For as much as I do gripe about this game's story, there are things I've mentioned above that I do like, but the aspect of this game's story I do quite like is the way its paths work out. The decisions you make in the dialogue choices throughout the game affect your karma grade, which is a sort of alignment system where your decisions are judged as moral, wrathful, or harmonious. These affect two very key things: number one, they affect what your Agumon evolves into. As the story of the game states, the partner Digimon reflect the person who is their partner. This is actually a really cool way that the player's choices tangibly affect gameplay, as your different evolutions have different stat spreads, elemental types, and weaknesses. It's a way of incorporating a narrative device and theme that is important to the story in a way that meaningfully affects gameplay. In short, really cool system. The other thing that it does is affect the final act of the narrative, which branches off depending on your alignment and choices. A lot of the really great scenes in this game take place late in the game. It just kinda stinks how long it takes to get there. Especially since I did a new game plus playthrough to get to a certain ending, and while NG+ for visual novels often means just holding down the skip button until you get to text and stuff you haven't scene, man does it take awhile to get through that plus all the early game levels you can absolutely chump on your second go through.

That really is the story of Survive for me. There's a lot of things that I like about this game, but they're spread out across this game that took over 40 hours to get through it all, with only some of it being truly stand out, a decent chunk of it being all right, a good amount of it just being whatever, and its share of problems along the way. It's an incredibly mixed bag of a game for one that takes as long to get through. It plays to some of the strengths of the SRPG style and the visual novel style, but fails to truly stand out as either outside of a couple choice moments. There are genuinely very good ideas here, but only some of them are implemented in meaningful or satisfying ways. And the writing has more than its share of cracks, a decent chunk of which are rather emblematic of a game that had an absolutely turbulent development cycle like this one.

I don't think Survive is the type of cult gem that's going to really outlive 2022, personally. Among Digimon fans there's plenty to like, but if you aren't already a fan of this series, it's hard for me to truly recommend it as a standalone game due to many of its issues. My entire playthrough I alternated quite frequently between "Oh this is really neat", "Oh god, screw off", and "oh this is kind of boring". It's not a game for the impatient, as it's already text filled and takes a long time to pay off narratively, and its gameplay portions are in a genre already deemed fairly slow even among RPGs. Yet, as someone who grew up with this series, I will also admit...this game kinda makes me want to play more Digimon games I haven't got to yet too. It does some genuinely really cool things, and I'll probably still be listening to parts of the OST for a good while. It's probably just the nostalgia talking, but hey, if Pokemon hasn't done it for me in awhile, maybe I oughta do something else.