Many of us probably remember Digimon: Digital Monsters in some form or another. It might be...
Some of us may have even played some of the previous Digimon World installments.
Digimon is short for Digital Monsters. These Digimon live in a digital/virtual world called the "Digi World". Everything in this Digiworld, including the digimon are actually pieces of data. Think of it like living inside a computer program. Data can be deleted, rearranged, moved, copied, manipulated...etc.
Its very similar to the Pokemon concept, but bear in mind Digimon came before Pokemon in Japan.
Just like in any game, there is an evil threatening the world...in this case, its the Digital World being threatened by an evil Computer Virus type Digimon. Its your job as a Digimon Tamer (think Pokemon trainer) to figure out whats going on.
You are given a choice of which Digimon partners to start off with in the beginning. There are 3 sets to choose from. Dawn focuses more on brighter friendlier looking Digimon, while Dusk features mostly beastly looking digimon.
The story progresses through a series of quests. Quests are assigned to you via the Quest Office. There you can talk to the NPCs and pick a quest of your liking. Once completed, return to the NPC who issued the quest for your reward. Simple enough.
However, as any good Digimon fan & Pokemon trainer knows the real fun in these kinds of games is training your Digimon/Pokemon, and collecting them all. This is where DigimonWorld: Dusk/Dawn set themselves apart from any Pokemon game!
Digimon have various stages they can go through. Each digimon starts in a baby (in-training) stage. Then, when they get old enough they "Digivolve" to their rookie stage. Under very specific circumstances, this rookie can Digivolve to the next level of power called the Champion stage. In rarely seen situations, Champion level digimon can Digivolve to an even higher level! This is called the Ultimate stage. There are several other variations to Digivolving, but these are the basics.
Your three starter digimon start at the Ultimate level in the very beginning. Nice! This is to better show you what this game is like when your digimon are strong and at their best.
However, a few minutes into the game, that evil virus digimon degenerates your team down to their in-training stage.
From here, your quest begins to find out just what creature you are facing and find out how to stop it.
Training your digimon is done through battling and gaining XP.
For each level your digimon gains, its base stats go up. Nothing out of the ordinary.
However, there is one stat called "Apptitude" that doesn't go up by leveling up. Appt is the max level your digimon can get to.
An Appt of 35 means, your digimon can only get up to level 35.
The only way to increase Appt is by Degenerating to a weaker form or Digivolving to a stronger form. Each time you do this, appt goes up, and your digimon returns to level 1. However, your stats remain largely unaffected. There are certain conditions that must be met before digivolving or degnerating. Let me give you an example.
Say I have a level 1 Koromon.
After training for a while, I reach level 7 and have these stats.
Attack 100
Def 100
Appt 7
Since I can go no further up in levels, something must be done. Good thing a Koromon can Digivolve to Agumon at level 7.
"Koromon Digivolve to....Agumon!"
I now have a level 1 Agumon with 5% higher stats than Koromon.
I then need to train Agumon for a while to try and get his next evolution. Greymon. But Greymon requires Agumon to be level 17, and Agumon's Appt is 10. What do we do? Degenerate to Koromon once we are able to at level 7.
We now have a Koromon with 98% of Agumon's stats.
Train to become Agumon again and digivolve.
Train Agumon to level 17, then Digivolve him to Greymon.
This constant degenerating & Digivolving adds a whole new level of depth to your standard monster collecting/raising game.
But apart from this, some Digimon require much more than specific levels to digivolve to their next form. Specific XP is needed from a digimon type. There are various types of Digimon in the world, and each gives a particular XP. Holy, Dragon, Beast, Aquain, Bug/Plant, etc. Each time you beat a Digimon of a particular class, their class' XP is added to your digimon's tally. Any type can be used for leveling up, but specific XP is needed for certain digivolutions.
Greymon's next form MetalGreymon (an Ultimate level Digimon) requires you to have 3500 Dragon XP and have Greymon at level 34.
Once you met these conditions, you can Digivolve your Greymon to MetalGreymon. His stats go up, but his level goes back to level 1.
This is actually a good thing. From level 1, it makes it very very easy to level up and gain higher stats.
So, now you can see why a highly trained Rookie level Digimon could in theory beat a poorly trained Ultimate level Digimon. Sure, the higher up the digivolution chain...the higher stats. but a highly trained rookie can have just as high stats by simply training.
As if that weren't enough, each digimon has multiple paths to Digivolve into. Koromon can become Agumon or DotAgumon.
Agumon can become Greymon or GeoGreymon. This gives you plenty of options. And the Agumon I'm using in this example is only 1 of the 400 available Digimon in this game.
So you start with 3 digimon, how do you get more?
Battles are usually random, just like any good RPG. Each time you load into a random battle with a wild digimon, your Digivice (think Pokegear/Pokedex) will "SCAN" the data of the enemy digimon. This scan will usually be about 5% of their totall data makeup. After various encounters with that same digimon, your Digivice should eventually get to a 100% Scan Data for that particular digimon. Once there, you can create that digimon and your scan data goes back to 0%. You can get a total of 999% scan data on each digimon. The higher the scan data, the more powerful your generated digimon will be. But at 5% - 15% Data Scan PER ENCOUNTER with that digimon, 999% is a very very long way away.
Now that you've generated another digimon, you can add him to your party. You can have a total of 6 digimon in your party, but only 3 can be active. That means only the 3 you choose go into battle. The 3 on the sidelines can't be substituted in during a battle either.
However, all 6 digimon in your party receive XP when the battle ends. That makes it easy to train everyone in your party at an even pace.
This is the very very bare bone basics to this game, there are many more things to be learned. Things like Armor Digivolving, DNA Digivolving, Online Matching(Breeding), online Fights, trades, Mega level Digimon, Digimon Equipment, Digimon Farms, etc.
Overall this is a very indepth RPG monster collecting/raising game for the nintendo ds. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Pokemon, or is a fan of Digimon.