Known as Digimon Tamers: Battle Evolution over here in Japan, this game came onto my radar when I was talking with some friends about weird Smash Bros clones and crossover games. "A Digimon Smash-clone with health bars" sounded like just the sort of weirdness I could get behind, and I was lucky enough to find a copy for really cheap here in town~. It took me about 10 or so hours (it doesn't count playtime) to unlock all the characters in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The game is tacitly based on the Digimon Tamers anime (or so I'm told by my friends who know more about the game and about Digimon than me), but the actual game itself has virtually no story to speak of. There's a single player mode where you play like eight 1 v 1 bouts before you fight Reapermon, but there's no accompanying story of any kind to that. It's just context-less battles between you and the credits. Now while I didn't exactly expect a Digimon fighting game to have a ton of story, a fighting game coming out in 2001, even a licensed one, having literally no in-game story to speak of was at least a little surprising. And while this game may be licensed, it has a pretty decent degree of content. The exact quality of that content is up for debate, but it *is* there X3. The game technically has 24 characters, but it's really more like 10 if you're counting more seriously. The game is a Smash Bros-style platform fighter between only two players, and the first player to get the other's health bar down to 0 wins, and it's best two out of three matches. During the match, you have a super meter that lets you Digivolve into an upgraded Digimon when it gets full, at least if you're playing one of the initial 9 little Digimon (or the one unlockable one). 10 of the playable characters are the Digivolved forms of the little guys, who are indeed their own characters with their own movesets and everything, but they're inherently tied to the little guys if you're playing as little guys. There are then another four already Digivolved Digimon, two of which are reskins of the normal 10's roster, and then there's another one + Reapermon himself. To me, that plays a lot more like there are two rosters, a roster of 10 little guys if you want to play with the Digivolve mechanic, and a roster of 14 big guys if you just want to use supers unconnected to the Digivolving. That said, it's still a pretty impressively big roster for a Smash-clone even these days, and it has a really good representation from well-known characters in the anime. The actual mechanics are okay, but they're a bit shallow and really unbalanced. As previously mentioned, the little guys and big guys are inherently unbalanced against one another, so playing a little guy vs. a big guy in VS mode is mostly just playing with a handicap for one player. Reapermon himself is ridiculously overpowered as a final boss, and given that you need to beat the game with all of the initial 9 characters to unlock everybody, it can make unlocking everyone a real monster when he can easily take out 70% of your health with one simple combo. But even outside of that, the roster is very unbalanced and the stages (of which there are like a dozen) are overall pretty bad and too big with not enough even ground to fight on. It's fine as far as crossover nonsense goes, but the lack of a four-player mode of any kind hurts the Party Game aspect of things in a way that makes the lack of balancing hurt even worse (as it also works pretty poorly as a more serious fighting game). It ends up falling in this weird place of a middle of the road fighter and a middle of the road licensed nonsense game, which is a shame. The presentation is quite good, as one would hope for a PS1 game released as late as 2001. The music is alright, with a collection of quite good tracks mixed among more forgettable ones. It also looks really nice, with well-constructed character models and cool super animations. However, one can't help but speculate that the detail in the character models very well might've been what kept it from getting a four-player mode, and I gladly would've traded one for the other, even if the multi-tap was a relatively uncommon accessory for the PS1. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a pretty neat game as far as Digimon history or Smash-clones (particularly for ones ostensibly competing with Smash 64) go, but outside of that, it just doesn't have much appeal. I'll admit that I think even Smash 64 itself is largely only worth going back to for nostalgia these days, but Digimon Rumble Arena falls even below that with its poor stage design and lack of a four-player mode. If you can get it for cheap and are into Digimon (unlike me) or Smash-clones (like me), this is a fun diversion, but it's otherwise best left ignored.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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