i would like to note im not a digimon fan, i was just interested in this game because it was a “vn/srpg”. calling this a vn is like calling anything with dialogue a vn but who even cares. but i was curious to try it out!

i dropped this game in part 4 because it was insufferable. here is every problem i have with digimon survive that i can think of right now.

storywise:
- clunky translations, errors and typos and all that
- i’m not a fan of how the characters are proportioned like high schoolers/college age students (long legs, generally modern fashion teens and young adults would wear, mature voices, how they all have smartphones tho this might be a generational thing), but they’re in middle school. you might think this is a nitpick, but it causes a disconnect in the story for me because they look older than they actually are but keep insisting they’re kids/in middle school. i feel like if they actually looked and sounded like middle schoolers (12-15 year olds) it would be much easier to excuse some of the dumber things they do.
- the characters meet the professor during the trip right before they get sucked into the alternate world. he later dies and for some reason despite knowing him for about maybe 30 hours total every character is totally obsessed with him, saying things like “the professor wouldn’t have wanted this” and so on. don’t get me wrong, it’s reasonable to mourn a guy you just saw die, but he should not be influencing your decisions/thinking to this degree. you should want to be good people because it’s good to be good people, not because some guy told you to be. you guys don’t even know his fucking name?
- every character is extremely passive and actively lets bad things happen. this is apparently supposed to be because you’re supposed to do the NG+ route to save them or whatever, but this has worked in the opposite direction because i hate everyone so much i’m dropping the game.
ryo goes insane because the characters do not engage with him or emotionally reach out to him. after ryo dies, everyone is upset and says how they should have spoken with him more and helped him more. the next day, lopmon is being verbally abused by shuuji nonstop and none of the characters do jack shit, despite just having multiple conversations about how they should do more. lopmon then transforms into a horrible monster and kills shuuji, and this is somehow surprising to the rest of the cast, who are very upset despite literally standing around and watching this guy abuse the fuck out of lopmon. are they stupid?
- the pacing of the story is extremely slow and not in a good way. now i like ryukishi games, i’m used to slow stuff. but typically those slow sections aren’t tedious and add something interesting, like fun character interactions, worldbuilding, or a slow trickle of interesting plot. it’s hard to do either of these in digimon survive, not only because every character and free time event feels laser focused on the “plot” that’s taking forever to piece itself together, but because of how the story is told. the game is told almost entirely through dialogue and has no prose or fluff writing, and this removes a lot of opportunities to get into the heads of other characters, talk about the world around them in a deep way, or give interesting flashbacks or information. we are firmly locked within takuma’s thinking and perspective of the world, and everything he thinks/says is very simple.
- on top being slow, sometimes the story is really repetitive, and makes nothing really stand out.
- during the amusement park with miu, kaito suggests beating up the kidnappers, aka the digimon that were just trying to kill them and will probably try again later. everyone chides him for this for some reason, calls him a thug, and says violence isn’t the answer. against monsters that were trying to kill them. again, are they stupid?

gameplay:
- srpg section feels really simple in a bad way. i don’t know, i’m easy to please, i liked how simple utawarerumono (an actual vn/srpg, play that instead of this) and triangle strategy are with their pretty streamlined gameplay in comparison to something like ff tactics/fire emblem, but a lot of the maps of digimon survive from what i played look the same, don’t have anything interesting going on on them (like special tiles, fun gimmicks), and require very little strategy to actually complete them.
- evolutions also make everything very easy.
- the free events are so repetitive. i don’t know, it really does not feel interesting at all. either make them elements where you can walk around ingame or make the entire game a streamlined visual novel. this half and half take on the idea is tedious, boring, and makes free time events more of a slog to get through so you can get to the main plot.
- they had all that space on the battle conditions and battle start screen, they really couldn’t be assed to write “conditions” and “battle” out in full? they had to keep it as “cond.” and “bat.”?


misc thoughts:
- i’m not a digimon fan. so many of these fuckers are ugly, i would cry if my cute digimon pal evolved into an ugly freak
- it feels like there are only 6 songs in this game
- i didn’t really care for the voice acting but was neutral enough on it, but outright muted it when agumon appeared. again, not a digimon fan so maybe i haven’t built up a digimon voice tolerance, but he is so annoying i’m sorry.

for anyone who wants a GOOD visual novel/srpg, i would highly recommend the utawarerumono series.

i saw other reviews calling this game dark and mature, and maybe that’s true for digimon, but what i experienced (for example, ryo’s mother being dead and ryo being murdered) had the depth of an above ground pool that hadn’t been filled yet. the clunkily slow pacing, passive characters, lack of prose, and stilted writing makes it hard for me to believe this game is very deep at all or is deep in a way that other games don’t do a million times better. i would also recommend utawarerumono as a good example of a “deep” game, or any other vn really.

1.5/5 idk. this just pissed me off so fucking bad.