Seff0117
2023
Some fantastic combat and stages.
Awful story and boring characters.
Awful story and boring characters.
2022
This review contains spoilers
Digimon Survive gets a lot right but some pretty unforgivable mistakes stops it from being a modern classic.
I want to start off by saying I did not know this was going to be a visual novel, I've never liked that style, and I bought this game because of the tactical fighting, and well, it's Digimon! That being said, are modern visual novels this visually pleasing? I loved the way the characters are fully fleshed out and gave a 3D presentation. The world is beautiful. Whoever worked on the world building/art really dug into that Digimon feeling. With that came fantastic characters. Most characters have their own personality but manage to steer away from the classic anime trope of being one dimensional. This was integral considering you have to interact with them and build relationships. Everyone has something you can like about them, and a few may annoy you at times, but that's very a human thing, it all adds into the world building. The only character I disliked a lot was Shuuji. It was extremely frustrating being unable to give him a punch in the face for how abusive he was. Lowkey I was happy when Lopman ate him.
On the other side of this, Minoru gave a fantastic representation for character development. After the incidents with Ryo and Shuuji, he begins to lose faith in Falcomon, with it leading to him becoming a douche. But as soon as I started to dislike him, he listened to what I told him and actually put in the effort to make it up to Falcomon. He grew. (just like the Digimon do, get it?)
The story in general was keeping me hooked, well, until it wasn't. What was it that went wrong? I'm not even so sure myself. There just came a point where I wanted to skip a lot of the dialogue. It was a slow burner, but it did manage to hook for me a solid portion of the story. After a while though it does run out of steam. The Shuuji incident was pretty iconic in its own right. Though, the whole "the Master is just a big robotic entity" was pretty awful storytelling. That was a terrible idea for a boss. Arukenimon was a thrilling boss to play cat and mouse with, hell, Piedmon's very short stint as being the "real" villain was intriguing. The Master's reveal was simply underwhelming.
Thinking about it, I know why the story became boring for me.
It's too long. I know, I know. My all-time beloved Final Fantasy VII is longer. The difference is that isn't a visual novel. You can explore the world, it's less dialogue focused with you spending more time fighting and running around the world you're in. You can't do that in a visual novel, you are anchored to a spot. Standing in that spot for 95% of the game time is not engaging enough. This leads me to my next issue, the game mechanics itself. Why are the fights so basic until at least part 9? I played 99% of the battles on auto because of how easy they were. Plopping two enemies in the middle of the map with your six just a few squares away, is terrible level design. They did a piss-poor job all around when it came to the combat. Why can't our Digimon start the battles Digivolved, it's a tedious action to do every time.
Overall, Survive has beautiful art, good characters, and a solid story for 75% of the game. But the fighting aspects were sub-par and really held the game back from being a solid 8-9/10. The final villain was boring but a tweak to that would have made the story one of the best I've played.
7/10.
I want to start off by saying I did not know this was going to be a visual novel, I've never liked that style, and I bought this game because of the tactical fighting, and well, it's Digimon! That being said, are modern visual novels this visually pleasing? I loved the way the characters are fully fleshed out and gave a 3D presentation. The world is beautiful. Whoever worked on the world building/art really dug into that Digimon feeling. With that came fantastic characters. Most characters have their own personality but manage to steer away from the classic anime trope of being one dimensional. This was integral considering you have to interact with them and build relationships. Everyone has something you can like about them, and a few may annoy you at times, but that's very a human thing, it all adds into the world building. The only character I disliked a lot was Shuuji. It was extremely frustrating being unable to give him a punch in the face for how abusive he was. Lowkey I was happy when Lopman ate him.
On the other side of this, Minoru gave a fantastic representation for character development. After the incidents with Ryo and Shuuji, he begins to lose faith in Falcomon, with it leading to him becoming a douche. But as soon as I started to dislike him, he listened to what I told him and actually put in the effort to make it up to Falcomon. He grew. (just like the Digimon do, get it?)
The story in general was keeping me hooked, well, until it wasn't. What was it that went wrong? I'm not even so sure myself. There just came a point where I wanted to skip a lot of the dialogue. It was a slow burner, but it did manage to hook for me a solid portion of the story. After a while though it does run out of steam. The Shuuji incident was pretty iconic in its own right. Though, the whole "the Master is just a big robotic entity" was pretty awful storytelling. That was a terrible idea for a boss. Arukenimon was a thrilling boss to play cat and mouse with, hell, Piedmon's very short stint as being the "real" villain was intriguing. The Master's reveal was simply underwhelming.
Thinking about it, I know why the story became boring for me.
It's too long. I know, I know. My all-time beloved Final Fantasy VII is longer. The difference is that isn't a visual novel. You can explore the world, it's less dialogue focused with you spending more time fighting and running around the world you're in. You can't do that in a visual novel, you are anchored to a spot. Standing in that spot for 95% of the game time is not engaging enough. This leads me to my next issue, the game mechanics itself. Why are the fights so basic until at least part 9? I played 99% of the battles on auto because of how easy they were. Plopping two enemies in the middle of the map with your six just a few squares away, is terrible level design. They did a piss-poor job all around when it came to the combat. Why can't our Digimon start the battles Digivolved, it's a tedious action to do every time.
Overall, Survive has beautiful art, good characters, and a solid story for 75% of the game. But the fighting aspects were sub-par and really held the game back from being a solid 8-9/10. The final villain was boring but a tweak to that would have made the story one of the best I've played.
7/10.
2023
I am confused by Endnight thinking that this is a nearly finished game and only needs "polishing".
This is basically The Forest on a new map. A map that is bigger, but absolutely does not have anything fun or new in it. Just a lot more space to run around in. The lack of a story was understandable because the first one was like that, but they did not improve on the sandbox elements to the game in any meaningful way. In fact, there's actually no point to having a base in this game because it's so easy to get to weapons that just one shot everything. Your backpack can carry an insane amount of stuff too. So, why build a base?
This is basically The Forest on a new map. A map that is bigger, but absolutely does not have anything fun or new in it. Just a lot more space to run around in. The lack of a story was understandable because the first one was like that, but they did not improve on the sandbox elements to the game in any meaningful way. In fact, there's actually no point to having a base in this game because it's so easy to get to weapons that just one shot everything. Your backpack can carry an insane amount of stuff too. So, why build a base?
This review contains spoilers
Boiled down this game is, "an eye for an eye, and the whole world goes blind".
I want to start off by saying I think this game is better than TLOU1. Simply because whilst that game had a decent story, the gameplay felt very linear and simplistic. Which then just has me asking "why am I even playing this game?". I feel TLOU1 is better off as a movie/tv series because your input has no impact, and the gameplay isn't really fun enough to hold my attention for 15 or so hours. Imagine you had to hold a control pad watching a movie, and the movie wouldn't continue unless you pressed forward or x every now and then. Just, why? This game did not have the same feeling. It was actually fun to traverse across the land and fight or sneak past enemies. With this game being a lot longer, it needed to have good gameplay.
The strength of this game for me are the characters. Just, wow. They feel extremely realistic in the sense of their mannerisms and voice acting, I can't think of a game that does it better.
Okay, so let's take a look at the story. I had a train ride of emotions through going from "holy fuck this is a 10/10 game" to "they fucked this up so bad this is getting a 6/10". Did they make the right choice killing Joel? For me, the answer is yes. Without Joel's death the ending of TLOU1 would be stuck as one of those very played out clichés across all media. The cliché I'm talking about is the whole "I'm the good guy but lemme quickly just kill 100 random people who totally don't have families and are all ontologically evil btw". Joel's death is the response to that. Finally, we seen, "hey, those 100s/1000s of people killed by the character we're controlling also has a family". Here I was very much on board with it and felt it was so refreshing to see a "good guy" reap what they sowed. I'm sorry if you're a huge fan of his, but the guy commit mass murder just because he didn't want to be alone.
Now, looking back after finishing, the story's order was frustrating. When you play as Abby and are humanising the other side's emotions and relationships, you know that almost all of her friends die. So whilst Owen was actually a likeable character, it's hard to build a connection when we know his outcome. I empathise with Abby and actually think she's better than Ellie. Many say they're two sides of the same coin but I don't think so. Abby's vengeance is definitely more understandable. Her father and friends, her entire group was wiped out by one dude, the dude who blocked humanity from finding a cure to a disease that caused the end of the world. Even when Abby found him, she only killed Joel. She let all of the others live and shown mercy. The same mercy that Joel did not give to the Fireflies when he shot the woman in the face and said "you'd only come after us". Ellie's revenge was essentially "you justly killed a guy who commit a mass murder of your people. You even shown me mercy and let me live. BUT, yeah, I'm gonna murder every single person you know and follow in his footsteps with another mass murder because now I'm lonely".
With all this in mind, it's kind of ironic that Naughty Dog puts 100s of "NPCs" for you to kill whilst on your journey.
Despite the order being a bit off, it's still a strong story of revenge cycles. I get that people don't like how bleak it is, but it should be bleak, because that's real. Plot armour doesn't exist and bad things will happen to you, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. We too often live life thinking that the bad things we see happening to others will never happen to us.
Overall I generally liked the idea of you playing as Abby and seeing everything from the other perspective, all it missed was a choice at the end. The choice to either kill Ellie or Abby. I realise they might not have done this because a third TLOU can be made.
I want to start off by saying I think this game is better than TLOU1. Simply because whilst that game had a decent story, the gameplay felt very linear and simplistic. Which then just has me asking "why am I even playing this game?". I feel TLOU1 is better off as a movie/tv series because your input has no impact, and the gameplay isn't really fun enough to hold my attention for 15 or so hours. Imagine you had to hold a control pad watching a movie, and the movie wouldn't continue unless you pressed forward or x every now and then. Just, why? This game did not have the same feeling. It was actually fun to traverse across the land and fight or sneak past enemies. With this game being a lot longer, it needed to have good gameplay.
The strength of this game for me are the characters. Just, wow. They feel extremely realistic in the sense of their mannerisms and voice acting, I can't think of a game that does it better.
Okay, so let's take a look at the story. I had a train ride of emotions through going from "holy fuck this is a 10/10 game" to "they fucked this up so bad this is getting a 6/10". Did they make the right choice killing Joel? For me, the answer is yes. Without Joel's death the ending of TLOU1 would be stuck as one of those very played out clichés across all media. The cliché I'm talking about is the whole "I'm the good guy but lemme quickly just kill 100 random people who totally don't have families and are all ontologically evil btw". Joel's death is the response to that. Finally, we seen, "hey, those 100s/1000s of people killed by the character we're controlling also has a family". Here I was very much on board with it and felt it was so refreshing to see a "good guy" reap what they sowed. I'm sorry if you're a huge fan of his, but the guy commit mass murder just because he didn't want to be alone.
Now, looking back after finishing, the story's order was frustrating. When you play as Abby and are humanising the other side's emotions and relationships, you know that almost all of her friends die. So whilst Owen was actually a likeable character, it's hard to build a connection when we know his outcome. I empathise with Abby and actually think she's better than Ellie. Many say they're two sides of the same coin but I don't think so. Abby's vengeance is definitely more understandable. Her father and friends, her entire group was wiped out by one dude, the dude who blocked humanity from finding a cure to a disease that caused the end of the world. Even when Abby found him, she only killed Joel. She let all of the others live and shown mercy. The same mercy that Joel did not give to the Fireflies when he shot the woman in the face and said "you'd only come after us". Ellie's revenge was essentially "you justly killed a guy who commit a mass murder of your people. You even shown me mercy and let me live. BUT, yeah, I'm gonna murder every single person you know and follow in his footsteps with another mass murder because now I'm lonely".
With all this in mind, it's kind of ironic that Naughty Dog puts 100s of "NPCs" for you to kill whilst on your journey.
Despite the order being a bit off, it's still a strong story of revenge cycles. I get that people don't like how bleak it is, but it should be bleak, because that's real. Plot armour doesn't exist and bad things will happen to you, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. We too often live life thinking that the bad things we see happening to others will never happen to us.
Overall I generally liked the idea of you playing as Abby and seeing everything from the other perspective, all it missed was a choice at the end. The choice to either kill Ellie or Abby. I realise they might not have done this because a third TLOU can be made.