Digimon World Championship First Look

Digimon is back on the Nintendo DS with a new game that heralds a bit of a departure from earlier Digimon outings. Unlike previous games that were structured around some sort of quest or storyline, Digimon World Championship distills the franchise down to its basic components: hunting, training, and battling. At a recent Namco Bandai press event, we watched a tutorial demo on how exactly these elements come together to make Digimon World Championship a fresh entry in the Digimon series.

Aside from the initial Digimon egg that you receive as a starter, the only way to get your hands on a Digimon to train is to hunt one down and capture it in the wild. To do this, you must venture out into one of many different hunting grounds. What type of Digimon you can expect to find depends on the area, the season, the time of day, and the weather. With more than 200 types of Digimon in the game, tracking them all down will prove to be quite an undertaking. Once you've found one, you'll have to catch it. This can be as easy as selecting your rope and drawing a circle around the Digimon with the stylus to lasso it, but it usually isn't that easy. Most Digimon will scurry away, forcing you to bait them with food or try another day. There are more than 40 different kinds of hunting gear, including trip wires and stun guns, which you can use to catch even the most elusive Digimon. Once you've snared one, it's time to head back to your base of operations to begin the training operation.

Training encompasses a wide variety of activities, all of which will affect the type of creature into which your Digimon will evolve. Feeding your Digimon is essential to keeping it alive, as is cleaning up after it and keeping its living space tidy. If you neglect it, it will become sick and require treatment. Without treatment, it might run away, not evolve properly, or die. You can choose to be kind or cruel to your Digimon, which will affect its evolution as well. Actual training and leveling up occurs when you put your Digimon into one of many different cages where it will increase one or more of its attributes. We saw a Digimon get placed in a recreation cage, complete with a track, a soccer field, and a baseball backstop. After leveling up its hit points, the Digimon had to be placed in a recovery cage to chill out for a while. With all these training variables, it's clear that Digimon fans will be able to spend a lot of time tweaking their training technique to raise their creatures into battle-ready beasts.

When you head into battle, you'll assemble a team of three Digimon. Once the contest begins, the action plays out automatically, and you are left crossing your fingers, hoping all your training pays off. Title Matches are set battles that will earn you medals and help you progress toward the championship, which happens roughly every four in-game years. You can practice for the Title Matches in Free Battle, a mode that allows you to set the parameters for the match. Local wireless and Wi-Fi modes will allow you to battle against another trainer to see whose Digimon are the toughest.

Given the hands-off nature of battling, it's clear that the bulk of the strategy and gameplay of Digimon World Championship will focus on capturing and training your Digimon. There looks to be plenty of depth in these areas to keep Digimon fans happy for a good long while, but we'll know for sure when the game is released later this year.