Digimon World Championship - Nintendo DS follows a different path from its RPG predecessors. It's not the traditional monster battler game, but rather takes on a more strategic approach. Bandai Namco has had a hard time describing it, since the game seems to be a bizarre amalgamation of a strategy RPG, a virtual pet, and a sports simulator. It's an ambitious endeavor to completely turn a franchise on its head and try to invent a new genre of game, and I was down for it.
But right from the start the game feels unfinished, limited,. What's the word. Oh yeah god-awful.
There is no story for World Championship. You're a Tamer and you're raising Digimon to fight in battles. There are no humans in the game whatsoever, so you have no avatar to represent yourself. The game never gave me any motivation or purpose. I'm not even sure if I'm in the digital world, like in other games.
Am I physically training my Digimon or is this some kind of meta crap where I'm playing a game about raising Digimon through my computer? I don't need some massively epic adventure, but at least let me be involved. This game isn't immersive by any means, and actually feels like it's actively keeping you at arm's length.
Fans of the series will immediately recognize that the cages feel and look a lot like the DigiFarm from the previous DS games. At first this is awesome, because the DigiFarm was one of the coolest parts of the other games. It allowed players to really tweak their monster's skills and guide them in different directions of leveling. Since Digimon have branching evolution trees, training a monster in a different way will lead to a completely different Digimon, and the DigiFarm helped players train exactly how they wanted to. Unfortunately that's not how it works in World Championship. The Cage system is like the DigiFarm, only terrible.
Players can customize their layout of hexagonal shaped rooms and move Digimon into them to train. The basics are the same: Digimon can train in a number of stats - including max HP, attack, defense, speed, and wisdom - as well as various attributes that affect evolution.
Each cage trains a specific stat or attribute and players move the Digimon around to train them. So instead of having an open space where I could put in different items to train my Digimon (or have them train themselves) any way I wanted, I now have to put together a jigsaw puzzle of tiny rooms and physically drag them all round. It's definitely more hands on, but in the entirely wrong way. Everything about the cages is a chore.
Picking up a specific Digimon becomes a problem when they get too close (which is approximately always). I had to pick up every creature I had just to try and get at the one I needed to. Even worse than the bad setup and controls is the complete lack of a Digivolution chart, or any real explanation of what I should be doing. I'm not a digi-noob here, I know how to train them, and what monsters ought to evolve to what, but I could not figure out what I was doing.
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The whole chart system from the previous games that told players the direction they should take in training to get their desired monster is gone. Now you're flying blind, hoping that what you're doing will produce a good result. If the Digimon doesn't meet the mystery requirements to proceed to the next stage, he devolves into an egg and you start over with him. More often than not this happens right before you needed that monster for some major battle on the schedule.
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Some sort of biological clock would have been nice so I at least would know that my Digimon was about to royally screw me over! Oh, and good luck trying to get that little blob back to a WereGarurumon since you don't even know how you got him there in the first place. I can hear you Digifans scoffing, saying you'd train up his Beast EXP and raise his Virus attribute, but oh no, that would make sense. You'll end up with that freaking turd-shaped Digimon and get your dumb butt handed to you because he sucks and is an absolutely worthless member of the team! He has a poop flinging attack?!