Sunday, August 18, 2013

Level Up: Digimon Digital Card Battle

And Cheap Dam-Month continues this week with a look at Digimon! Yeah, with how often I’ve talked about Pokemon, it seems appropriate that I finally follow up with what was known as their big competitor. I’ll get into what I think of the series as a whole some other day, but for now I’m just here to talk about the card game. So let’s look at the only non-handheld game this month: Digimon Digital Card Battle for the Sony PlayStation.
Digimon Digital Card Battle is played with decks of 30 cards made of up of Digimon and Option cards. The game field is comprised of an active Digimon and your hand of 4 cards (which gets refilled at the start of your turn) that are visible to your opponent. At the start of your turn you may discard a Digimon for an amount of Digivolution points. If you have enough points and a higher level Digimon of the same color as the active one (example: a Red Champion to be placed on a Red Rookie), then you may spend the points in order to change your Digimon into the higher level one. (Unlike the Pokemon card game, it does not keep the damage that has been dealt to its previous form.) After that, you choose an attack, which are color coded red, green and blue. Generally, red is your most powerful attack but is often the target of enemy skills, green is medium but usually a safe bet, and blue is weak but uses special skills.
Once both sides have picked an attack, you may choose to use an option or Digimon card from your hand, or a blind card from the top of the deck. These can increase the damage you deal, give your Digimon more HP or any number of effects that can greatly change the outcome of a battle. Once all that is set, both Digimon attack each other (starting with the player whose turn it is). Once a Digimon’s HP is reduced to zero, it (and all previous forms) gets discarded and the player who knocked it out gets a point. A game is won when a player gets 3 points or his opponent has no more Digimon in his deck.
Choosing a Digimon to send out is a bit interesting in this game, since you don’t need to start off by sending out a Rookie: if you have no Digimon on the field, you can send one that’s a higher level, but at the cost of cutting its attack and HP in half for each level you skip (1/2 power for champion, ¼ for ultimate, etc…). Though if you really don’t like what you got, you can choose to discard your hand at the start of your turn and draw a new one. Skill points have also been implemented in this game: you’ll get partner Digimon, and as you win matches, they get experience points and new options you can attach to them. These partner Digimon can actually be quite useful in an otherwise unimpressive deck.
You may be wondering how is it that something like the partner Digimon were implemented in real live. Well, they weren’t. As a matter of fact, this video game has almost no resemblance to the actual card game: Digimon needed specific combinations to Digivolve, your hands weren’t shown, the decks used more cards, etc… The Digimon card game was actually one of my favorites, so I’m disappointed that it’s been replaced with a glorified RPG battle system. Instead you’ll often find using the same attack over and over again is the best strategy. The only kind of cool thing about the game play is deciding whether to sacrifice a Digimon for its ability, Digivolution points or to keep it to use in combat later (which can make or break your victory).
I can’t really think of anything more to say about Bandai’s Digimon Digital Battle Card. It took what I think was a great card game, and turned it into a more strategic version of the regular RPG system of “choose attack and wait”. The graphics aren’t that impressive: most of the game is laid out in menus, except for during the attack phases, which seems to just reuse graphics from Digimon World. I find the music repetitive, dull and all kind of samey-sounding, so the Digimon’s battle cries are not worth keeping the volume up. There’s a story, but it honestly makes no sense: something about a tower, and Digimon being evil, but CARD GAMES are what decides the fate of the world (Pokemon trading card game worked because there weren’t real Pokemon). It’s like every step was taken to make it a boring experience: adventuring has been replaced by tedious menus, the music is boring, the graphics are nothing new, the game play is just waiting and repeating the same actions and the story drags on. It’s not a bad game really, it works well and there is some potential in the game play, but it only just passes. I give Digimon Digital Card Battle for the PlayStation 6 levels out of 10.

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