On the 19th of September, 2018, a new game in an old franchise was announced. Digimon was returning to its old tactics RPG formula, a genre it hadn’t touched since the Wonderswan days. As a classic Digimon fan, this return was exciting. Furthermore, the revival of the Digimon Adventure series had—quality notwithstanding—revived my love of a franchise I had grown out of touch with.

On the 19th of September, 2018, I tweeted a short sentiment…

“It’s everything I’ve written about.”

Indeed. On this blog I’ve spoken about many things, but there have been some consistent elements that keep cropping up. Post-Apocalypse fiction (1, 2, 3). The importance of color usage to tell a story (here). I’ve spoken about a lot of Isekai, even talking about how Digimon relates to the genre (here). And of course, everything I write here relates to my history as a fan of classic Japanese adventure games—visual novels as they’re sometimes known today—or my modern-day position as a developer of such games.

So when I saw a Digital World with a post-apocalypse aesthetic, being used in Adventure‘s isekai fashion, presented as a visual novel, with a trailer that uses the color techniques I spoke about on this very site, and music eerily similar to tracks I’d shared in my post-apocalypse ramblings… it seemed like everything this blog had been building towards had come together to form a single game.

And then that game got delayed. They switched dev teams, redid the whole thing, got hit by ol’ Covid, it was a whole thing. Eventually, in 2022, it released, and I played it once, I played it twice, I watched a third playthrough, wrote a big old review for it…

And then that review got delayed. I took a break to push some other blog posts, I worked on a VN translation, helped the Digimon Dawn/Dusk remakes get started, and finally I got back to Survive and started my fourth playthrough! But then Harvestella released, then I made my own game, then Demons Roots happened, the world kept turning, and I haven’t even finished watching Ghost Game!

It’s now 2025, I’ve been very busy, but I’ve had more than enough time to complete my fourth and final playthrough. And yet, despite my excitement for the game, and despite how memorable my time with it was… I never went back to complete it. As it’s so late after the game’s release by this point, I figure that rather than my usual style of review, I’d sit down to think about why I never 100%’d Digimon Survive.

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Digimon Survive

The Delayed Review

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The Intro

I have a lot of history with Digimon. Despite that, I’ve never felt like much of a fan…

I haven’t seen most of the TV shows in their entirety, I never had a Digimon V-pet until last year, I’ve never played any of the card games, I’d never drawn anything Digimon-related until the Tri movies released. I’ve completed a few of the games (World, Card Battle and Anode… I guess D-project counts, as much of a minigame as it may be) and I’ve played small amounts of World 2, 3, 4,* Cyber Sleuth*, and the DS/3DS games. I don’t know what the Holy Knights are very well. I don’t know what the Olympus whateveryoucall’ems are. I’ve read the Adventure novelization and a bunch of staff interviews, but that’s as far as my lore knowledge goes. And when it comes to interacting with other fans… well, prior to Survive‘s release, I only knew one.

I had a friend that I knew for my entire childhood. In my first year of school, at 5 years old, he was a member of the bully trio that I toppled with my ever-convincing “if you’re mean to people, they won’t be your friends!” speech, and we’d been buds ever since. He wanted to be cool, but not in a cliquey way. His image wasn’t a way of fitting in; it was like someone customising a playable character. He’d latch onto something and get very into it, not really caring about his image in the eyes of others. He had piercings, went through a long hair phase for a year, then shaved his head for a year. He wanted to like himself; to be the things he liked. He was the first person in our age group to start doing drugs, long before it was the popular thing to do, and people judged him for it even after they started doing the same thing. As a teenager, his love of Hip-Hop matched his love of skateboarding, which annoyed me because he made fun of my taste in music when I put on The Marshall Mathers LP in 2001, and my taste in games when I showed him THUG in 2003. Hypocrite! He talked about wanting to do freestyle rap a lot, but whenever I challenged him, he had an excuse to run away ready to go. He was that kind of person.

He was also the guy that, when Pokemon X&Y were being marketed and everyone at my college randomly got back into Pokemon Red and Blue, he stuck with it for months, long after everyone else had stopped. It was nostalgic to him, but I don’t think it went much deeper than that. His nostalgia just lasted longer than most’s. His phases lasted longer. But none of that is why we were friends. The more than 10 years we hung out, it was for one reason: he liked Digimon as a kid, the original season at least. He even liked the Digirap! He was that kind of person.

One day, after much convincing given to my friend group during that weird phase in the mid ’00s to early ’10s when everyone was vehemently against Japanese media, I managed to get a few of them interested in anime. One latched onto Naruto, unfortunately. A second got into Sword Art Online… They were very normie picks, but it was something to talk about at least. They did like Gintama. But for gangsta boi, although he’d become a Naruto fan later down the line, he was convinced by something very different: Digimon Tamers. He loved it. He’d watch it over and over, every day and every week, and we’d chat about it during science class. But… I could never quite tell if it was nostalgia-driven like his Pokemon addiction. Did he love that weird bunny dog’s “momentai” as much as he made out? Was Beelzemon that cool to him? How much of a fan was he?

I say all of this because… the strange thing about that person was how long their interests lasted compared to everyone else. Something that was “in” for a season would be all he cared about for a year. That boy, for that year, was—and still is—the biggest Digimon fan I’ve ever met. A guy who liked two seasons of a show enough to talk about those two seasons to another fan… A man so half-hearted about everything, he’d change on a dime. That half-hearted love is the most I’ve seen another person give to Digimon, and that’s how distant I am from Digimon‘s fanbase, how distant I am from the property as a whole. As a result, it’s possible my expectations for this game are completely different from whatever’s normal to expect of it. I don’t know if people were excited for this game. I don’t know if it’s been well-received. I am living in a one-man bubble, so don’t expect anything more than a person’s isolated thoughts on the game here.

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To start with, as this is a choice-oriented adventure game, I decided to just respond to situations how I normally would. I ended up getting a pretty awkward evolution path where I jumped across all three branches, so I suppose I got a mix of elements from each route, but I ultimately ended up on the Moral route with a mishmash of personality stats. I found my way to WarGreymon in the end.

Terrain mattered a lot, the encounters were quite memorable. Every unit felt unique, and even though some were obviously worse than others, I had a good idea of how I wanted to use them to bring out their strengths. Collecting training items and exploring felt good. As a result, I probably spent far more time engaged in battles than reading text, which I really wasn’t expecting after the “it has no gameplay” complaints levied at it on launch.

Member limits in combat led to a nice balance of choosing which ‘mons you need to succeed in the fight, which you can leave on the bench, and which really need the exp to catch up with the rest. Combined with training items, I really liked going through the motions, keeping my party balanced in level (or attempting to…)

The Digimon selection is really weird in a great way. So many oddball unpopular picks that got me excited. Love Kunemon, love that Lopmon gets to exist separately from Terriermon, love that Floramon becomes Veggiemon and Labramon goes full edgelord.

But away from the gameplay, this is a novel first and foremost, and sadly, there are a bunch of typos in the script, even in the big final part of one of the collectable lore pieces. Kinda ruined it for me. There’s also a dev-note left in the game during one of Kaito’s evolution scenes that I found funny.

The fade animation is really rough. You can see the layers that character sprites are built with because they don’t fade out as a single entity. Floating cut-out eyeballs and scalps showing through hair are the most obvious issues. Sometimes when the camera switches focus to a character, the light/shadow rendering takes a sec to kick in, creating a blocky dark backdrop behind them that pops out of view shortly after.

I imagine these became problems because of the heavier engine in use here. I, a lone developer, have implemented such features into my games before, and even I was able to solve this kind of bug fixing. I expect more of a professional product.

Most egregious to me is how one of Saki’s sprites—a rare one, admittedly—has some awful jaggy white pixels surrounding it. It looks like they hastily cut it out of a white background in Photoshop and then forgot to clean up the edges. Maybe they did, or maybe it’s an asset rendering glitch. The masking is messy.

But this is pretty petty stuff, most would say. It’s around chapter 4 where the bigger problems I had with the game slowly started to emerge:

The worst part on a first-time read is surely the repetitive info-dumping due to the game not tracking exactly which scenes you’ve seen. If you learn something once, expect it to be presented to you as new information again at least 3 more times. On the opposite side, sometimes it feels like a major scene was entirely omitted and we’re only seeing the conclusion.

The UI spoils a major late-game plot point early on, and so that element of the story (and all scenes pertaining to it) begins to feel drawn out as a result. To add to the pacing issues. tedious dungeons often bring the plot progression to a pause. When I think back to the sewers or the theme park, I feel very little positivity.

Units really don’t scale well for the battle system, or maybe I should say they scale too well. Stat boost item usage can massively boost or hamper their usefulness, but most partners lose their original purpose over the course of their evolutions, leaving them feeling a bit valueless. Especially once well-invested units begin flying around the map one-shotting everything, the stragglers feel worthless. It’s worse than Fire Emblem Awakeningfor that, I swear.

Compared to Anode & Cathode (two earlier Digimon SRPGs) there’s definitely less team-building diversity due to the lack of inheritable skills, and terrain is far less important, but in return, we get positional combat effects and the ability to evolve mid-combat. They do evolution very well in this game too, by the way. I was constantly shifting from one stage to the next, even sliding between ‘mons of the same stage to gain access to the movement options or type matchups I needed most in the moment. Labramon tanks better as a Rookie, Falcomon moves furthest as a Perfect, and… even away from the story Digimon, the optional recruitable Digimon have this too, e.g. I much prefer Angewomon’s standard attack to Seraphimon’s, but Seraphimon is easier to position well.

I hate to say it because of how overused this mechanic is in games, but a crafting system would’ve been nice. Too many useless items clog up chest and inventory slots mid-game, and there are very few items that actually inspire a player to use them. I remember getting my first keyword item—a ‘vexing’ keyword that adds taunt to an equippable—and being really excited! …But it was the only real modifier in the entire game. Being able to use more than two equips per Digimon would’ve been nice too.

Also, this is very minor, but the step animation during battles is just the worst. It’s slower than normal movement, and it makes an incredibly loud, unfitting sound. I hate it.

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The Moral Route

I feel like I haven’t made my bias clear enough yet, and it’s important I do so because… there might be a bit of whiplash between my criticism and my praise otherwise, so let me briefly go back to an earlier topic. I find it hard to consider myself much of a Digimon fan because of how distant I am from it compared to other franchises that I think about basically every day. But… like I said, I have a lot of history with the franchise.

That boy I mentioned earlier… He was the biggest Digimon fan I knew. In one of our science classrooms, a chemistry-focused one, we sat at a table second to the front. A single table sat two people. Ahead of us sat a single girl, a short blonde girl who styled herself after Tinkerbell. She was, at least for those three years, the most popular girl at that school. Behind us sat two people. One, a much taller girl who hadn’t bought into the tanned blonde girl aesthetic but was still one of Tinkerbell’s cronies somehow. The other was one of the most popular boys at school, famed for looking good and being great at football. These three people used to talk across our table to one another, and the things they spoke about at the front of that classroom were… a 50/50 split of illegal and moronic. Underage kids bragging about sleeping around, gossiping about bad rumours being spread about random people as if they were truth, and lots of confusion about basic math problems. We actually got along pretty well; our three tables were seen as a collective group. They were a good time-waster, but I didn’t like them as people. Though… I’m not sure I like anyone as people, honestly, so maybe that’s on me.

One day, our little group got shuffled around for duo-based group work. Tinkerbell and I were shunted to the back of the class. Naturally, we didn’t do any work that day and spent the whole time messing around with other groups’ work and talking about whatever. At the end of that two-hour lesson, as we were packing our bags, she invited me to one of her weird parties that their trio were always talking about. Half-jokingly, I replied “maybe if you talked about Digimon”, and we both laughed it off. When my friend heard about this, he was distraught. “Dude, you could’ve gotten laid!” he explained, putting a lot of emphasis on the final word. It was a leap in logic, and neither of us liked that girl (nor any of her group), and we both knew that. But to him, the prospect of sleeping around was all that mattered. He would’ve happily given up on talking about things he enjoyed if it meant he’d be hanging out with a cute girl he doesn’t like. And that was the biggest Digimon fan I knew! He was still just a normal fan at the end of the day.

Compared to him, my love for Digimon seems almost die-hard. To him, it was an incidental piece of entertainment that he happened to enjoy. To me, it was… the way I learned to be an older brother to a younger sister who had no father figure. It was the way I learned to use the internet, to develop all the skills I have today, to draw, to animate, to program. I made a fangame like Digimon World DS before that game even existed! I would waste away detentions by reciting the script of Our War Game in my head, and believe me, I had more detention hours in my childhood than I did non-detention hours.

The first magazine I ever read was probably the Digimon one, and I learned to read German just so that I could read their version of the Digimon magazine too. The first website I ever frequented was a Digimon fansite, my desktop wallpaper at the time: a shot from Episode 21 of Adventure. The first toys I ever asked for as a baby were Digimon-branded. The first thing I ever bought online was Digimon World 4. Heck, the first candy I ever ate was Digimon-shaped. Anyone remember the Digimon gummies? Oh, and those lenticular cards, anyone remember them? I can’t find anything about those on Google- ah, I don’t mean the Aussie ones that show up on a search; different ones. What I’m saying is… It’s been a lifetime. I’ve spent 25 years walking past the local bank machine as it makes weird, garbled tech sounds, thinking “this is where my Digitama would appear.”

As you may be able to tell… His love for Digimon lasted longer than most’s, but mine has never ended. My childhood is no further from me than it was when I lived it, and I will always be a sucker for that early Digimon stuff as a result. It’s not nostalgia-driven; I’ve just never stopped thinking about them. The reality is… I’m the biggest Digimon fan I’ve ever met. I don’t love everything, you won’t catch me watching Frontier any time soon, but I’m so forgiving of things that I imagine most people hate. I liked Tri, and I liked Meiko even. I think Digimon: The Movie is genuinely good. Ghost Game was incredible. Kizuna was incredible. That first Digimon Con was a blast. Digimon World is one of the best adventure games ever made (certainly the best open world) and I even enjoy some of the Wonderswan games (D-project is my favourite of them btw.)

So when Survive falls into old habits, I really should be endeared. When it plays out the episodic evolution unlocks, or when the human characters find their crest-like roles in the group, or when Wendimon shows up to terrify me once again – I do like all this stuff. Seeing the classics, Puppetmon, Myotismon, a certain set of evolutions that I won’t spoil here, that was all fun. But once you hit the mid-point of the game, the interruption to Survive‘s regularly scheduled plot occurs, and the protagonist is sent back to reality, oh, there goes gravity. 10 days pass without the protagonist being around, so you end up feeling a bit distant from the action. This could’ve been a cool storytelling device, but unfortunately, the game starts to feel a bit rushed from this point onwards. It’s an effective time skip for route-branching purposes, but not much of an idea to be explored by the writers. There’s simply not enough time given to the cast’s actions and mindsets, even less than in the chunk of Adventure this plot point mimics.

When it comes to the non-human characters—the actual Digimon partners—I love Kunemon and Lopmon, but they deserve better than what little screen time they get. Still glad they’re here, but… Actually, on that point, despite all the cool unique Digimon included (Yatagaramon, Mermaimon, etc.. Heck, Ceresmon Medium is in this! Medium never shows up in anything!) it is ultimately a story ruled by the popular reliables. Omnimon’s still here to steal the show, and War Game references are still king.

The non-Agumon partners have their evolution debuts in random, unvoiced, semi-offscreen scenes that feel pretty awkward. Really, most of the characters and Digimon feel like they’re not even present towards the end. Even at the start of the game, however, when the ‘mons are getting their story-based Champion-level evolutions, they don’t feel like big moments; it feels like the plot is going through the motions. These evolutions are portrayed with minimal dialogue and go uncommented on after the fact, having no impact on anyone or anything. It feels very abridged, and I really wish the game had been given the time to flesh these moments out.

There are some missed opportunities, specifically with main party Digimon. As an example, Ms. Miko’s Sakuyamon being locked out of Miko mode (which is present and attainable on random wild Sakuyamon) is just… I mean, why not fully commit?

Some of the scenes are certainly far more disturbing than in the TV show, but the dialogue doesn’t feel any more mature. It still feels like it’s targeting the same age group, despite containing material that little kids probably shouldn’t see. Part of this is a pacing issue; scenes are simply too short to justify the emotions on display. It feels like a digest in a way. Part is simply a result of the prose being incredibly basic. It’s not subtle, nor is it evocative; it’s… serviceable, but the text certainly doesn’t do justice to the interesting scenario.

Also, the villain’s just kinda… nothing to me.

I did my first playthrough with a controller, but I tried mouse and keyboard after getting annoyed at a couple things. Directional movement on a diagonal grid sucks with a dpad, and the inspect screen is really clunky on controller. Also, the camera and map functions being bound to the triggers wasn’t something I could get used to for some reason. I kept going back to the map when I wanted to open the camera. Annoyingly, parts of the game feel better with a mouse, or a keyboard (never both) but most things are obviously built for controller. ‘Inspect’ works better with a mouse, sure, but the ADV conversation features (auto, skip, backlog, save, etc…) are easier to access on controller. There are no ways to access those features with a mouse; no buttons, so side-panels, nothing! This is basic stuff! Also, the default keybinds use both sides of the keyboard, so it feels very weird. Ultimately, I ended up swapping my triggers and accepting that ‘inspect’ will forever suck to control.

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The Wrathful & Harmony Routes

Now for the elephant in the room: this is a VN, but the simple QoL stuff that’s been standard in VNs since the ’90s is missing, which makes route-conquering a bit of a pain. Case in point: there’s no way to distinguish read text from previously read text beyond memorising it. If you’re skipping through the game until it hits new text, there’s no way to tell when that new text ends and you’re able to skip again.

The auto-mode’s text display duration isn’t definable; rather, it’s locked to the same speed setting that non-auto text displays at (or audio duration for voiced lines) which means you have to lower the text display speed when you want to auto-progress text, then increase the display speed again when you want manual control. Changing settings has a weirdly lengthy save time, so it’s not a simple press of a button to swap display speeds.

No chapter selection means you have to play through the entire game again, battles, exploration sequences and all. No skips, no benefits, just play the game in full three or four times!

One major issue is that you can’t skip previously read text without using an NG+ savefile, which means your 1st playthrough saves are mostly pointless. Also, tutorials aren’t skippable unless you use an NG+ savefile. So just use NG+, right? But NG+ transfers your levels and items from a complete playthrough without adjusting story battles to any noticeable degree, making gameplay completely trivial, which you might not want. It’s not ideal.

The routes, while different in small ways throughout, are mostly defined by a single choice that appears halfway(!) through the game. Combined with the previous issue, there’s no quick way of seeing how different things can get or if it’s worth the time investment to see alternate options. You just have to blindly trust the game…

That being said, the Wrathful route had some great payoff. Saki’s my favourite of the group, so getting some backstory for her was nice (even if she gets a bit brushed off later on) and I especially liked seeing how well Kaito and Miu grew. Even the route’s new villain feels far more compelling than Harmony’s. The pacing’s a lot smoother after the route-exclusive content kicks in too, I think.

Judging by the fact that you don’t even get max evolution in the route, and the roster you end up settling on by the end is so small, it seems like it’d be fun to play if not for the janky NG+ situation. I regret that I played this with my levels and roster of a previous playthrough; being locked into the route’s Virus evos against almost exclusively Virus enemies would’ve made things a lot harder. Unfortunately, I think the story benefits a lot from coming after Moral, so you’re either giving up gameplay quality or story quality by switching the playthrough order around. Either way, this is a story worth witnessing if you’re a Digimon fan.

One positive came from reminiscing over early battles, though I definitely appreciate being able to breeze through everything on NG+ in mundane moments. Once I realised that I could recall exactly where each of my units pathed in my first playthrough of the pre-ch5 battles, I understood how memorable the early fights were. Seeing all the little changes in the bosses is interesting too. Minoru being captured by Dokugumon was a surprise, and blindly trusting Arukenimon led to a cool moment for Kaito (that admittedly no one ever comments on or thanks him for…) The first couple big story battles are so much more developed than the rest. It makes them stand out, but it also make obvious the development hell the rest of the game went through.

Oh, and before I forget, I actually ran into a major bug during one of the library battles. One of the enemy units tried to path somewhere, got stuck on terrain, and ended up in an endless walking animation. Had to alt+f4 and reload a quick save.

Choice-wise, I rode the middle ground for a while. I did end up making a NG+ save at the route split to accelerate the following route, but after playing through the entire game twice, I didn’t have it in me to load that save file. Instead, I watched the next route on Youtube and skipped to the new bits.

Straight off the bat, I was not expecting the “Harmony” route to be the one that killed of ‘that’ character. I kept thinking to myself (in previous routes) that it’d be devastating to the group, but probably wouldn’t actually happen. Turns out, they snuck it into the good happy funtime route! Guess I shouldn’t have judged the route by its name… Although thinking back, the fact that the Harmony choices were so blindly reckless should’ve clued me in to its infallibility. If anything, the fact that the Wrath route was all about defeating harmony should’ve taught me what Harmony would be about. It’s a direct parallel!

With that out of the way… Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t play this one. It’s very similar to Wrathful, but although the choice of death was bold, it doesn’t have legs as an interesting plot point, and even the writers realised that. The resulting main villain, Piedmon, just isn’t very good. I really don’t think it’s worth putting in the hours to get an arguably worse version of the previous route. Memorable though!

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Concluding

Finally, I dipped my toes into the true end, though burnout hit really hard and I ended up dropping it before reaching the mid-point interlude. It’s not that I didn’t want to see more of the story, but the lack of QoL is a killer. Overall, when it comes to the narrative of Survive, they really could’ve done a better job illustrating why the characters fall apart to such wild extents. It’s something that definitely gets detailed in many routes, and its effects become incredibly apparent in the true end, but the two characters that die during the first-playthrough common route end up leaving some poor first impressions that are hard to shake off, even after understanding how their minds were warped by the fog.

In thinking such, I come back to my earlier point about the game feeling abridged. Although there are ample repetitive filler dungeons to slow down the pace, for the most part, the script passes blazingly fast. It’s far too short to effectively communicate its story, at least given the relatively neutral-looking visual direction the game presents everything with. It eschews visual flair for textual description, but there’s not enough text to satisfy, so it understandably feels underwhelming at times.

I’d describe it as… we get little downtime with the cast, but we spend a lot of time walking through boring dungeons on our lonesome. The balance is really off.

Still, despite those issues, I did like the cast a lot. They’re pretty low-key, don’t fall into the usual pitfalls of globally-targeted VNs such as Danganronpa or Persona with their over-animated cartoony personalities nearing parody, and even though the cast of Survive reflects the archetypes present in Digimon Adventure, it’s not cut and dry, and the interpretation of those values alters from route to route, keeping things fresh.

In different routes, I found myself appreciating different characters. Wrathful made me appreciate Aoi, Miu and Kaito a lot more than I did in my first playthrough, where I mostly only cared about Saki and Minoru. And the Digimon were great too, from the picks to their personalities. Getting to play with the quirky Syakomon brought me back to playing Anode, where a silent Syakomon was my support unit, buffing up the team from the backline. Finally, I have a voice and personality to attach to them! And I never thought I’d like Veggiemon, but the voice line that plays when you evolve from Veggiemon is the most adorable thing. Why are they so damn cute!?

But for all the good I can glean from the cast, as a game, Digimon Survive is full of problems that the industry surrounding it had entirely solved multiple decades ago. Shoddy skip functionality, hard-to-access route branching, slow saving and loading, a lack of basic gameplay features, a lack of basic UI design principles, a terrible localisation, and many more issues do an amazing job of turning an interesting season of anime-like Digimon stories into a miserable reading experience. If you took this game back to the year 2000 and showed it to my younger self, I’d ask you why it feels like a game 10 years out of date. It’s baffling how archaic things are.

In the end, I couldn’t survive Digimon Survive long enough to see it all, but what I did see would’ve been far more interesting as a Youtube upload I could casually skip through rather than a game I’d have to put up with. Alas, the story was interesting, but the laws of reality dictate that every Digimon game must suffer from technical issues and poor translations.

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