Too be fair. The game is still in its beta phase. But it's heading into a direction no fan would like.
I do like digimon. The concept, that data can take many forms. The illusion, that the way you fight and train your character, or substitutional, a monster obeying your character, forms it and this is shown by real body features. That digimon can digivolve into a higher level and mirror their newgained strength in their outward appearance.
Having had such a good time with digimon adventures, spending over 100 hours alone with digimon world 2003, I stumbled across this game. Digimon Battle. The digital world as an open multiplayer world, as it was anticipated in the above mentioned playstation one titel, seemed to be more accessible than ever.
But these high expectations could never be met, and I think everyone who remembers the old games is doomed to be strongly disappointed.
Let's begin with the positive or at least not so bad (hard judgements for a beta, but the overall direction the game is heading disappointed me too much that I can rate objectively, but I'll mention this later):
You can choose between 3 different tamers as avatars (though other online games have far better customization) and I think you can later on buy clothes and equips. You can also choose between I think 3 different starter digimon. This is nothing spectacular, but the characters are from the third TV season, which happened to be my favourite.
It also uses power up cards which can aid your digimon in battles. This is also taken from the third season.
You can catch more digimon enabling you to journey with a party of up to 5 digimon, and I think there is a storage that can take care of even more digimon.
Whereas the capturing and the battle system itself are the cue to proceed with the negative aspects of the game:
The battle system is utterly monotone. There are not even the RPG-like randomly appearing enemies. You can see all enemies on the map and battles only begin when you wish to do so. Might sound nice, but makes the game quite boring. While in the old games you had to be very careful to take enough supplies with you when you go through a forest, lest you want to reload the game, all danger is perished from the world. And there is simply no feeling of adventure if there are no troubles to cope with. It actually feels more like some farming game.
The battles are hard to describe. You start every single battle with clicking on a digimon on the world map and are then taken to a battlefield which can be thought of at ease if you imagine it as what Square has done in '98 with FF7, but ripped of all special effects and variety. That's pretty much it.
You start a fight with your first digimon facing 1-5 identical digimon of the kind of your choice. The number of enemies seems to be the only thing that is influenced by chance, since they all seem to have the same statistics and if you use an attack multiple times it will deal exact equal damage each time.
Having your first digimon deployed, it has a filling action bar as seen in FF that enables you to act when filled. What is awkward about this is that no matter with how many digimon you journey, only the first one enters the battle directly and I heard from a friend that it even starts fighting at Rookie level, which is only the second stage in the Digivolution hierarchy. When your action bar is filled, you can use your action to summon another digimon or to digivolve your digimon to a higher level or to attack. Sounds like a solid system in theory, but is in fact forcing you to do pretty much the same at the beginning of each fight, since you have to set up your team every time anew.
The capturing system is equally ill-designed. You have three tries per battle to use an action to capture an in-training level digimon, the lowest of all stage in the Digivolution hierarchy. The chance of a successful capture is somewhere around 1%, I'd rather guess worse, but maybe I just don't have too much luck. On the one hand, this makes a successful capture extremely rewarding but ultimately it forces you to endure the same fight, with a varying number of enemies, over and over again, if you want to have a specific digimon. After a while, this feels plain stupid and the player gets rather numb. And the only thing to have an influence on your capturing chances is to give WeMade money. That's the way this games do work, I guess.
But all of this I could have endured, if it wasn't for the one thing that they made utterly wrong that broke the digital world down to pieces to my mind:
They took all variety out of the digimon franchise. Being used to marvellous digivolutions which could be triggered by a lot of different incidents, as in the playstation one games, and an equally wide range of attacks and skills I was extremely disappointed when I noticed that every digimon could use no more than three skills, of which the first one always is a stupid tackle. Eventually, this results in each digimon having two skills of their own. Wow. This is... simplified. For this is the only reason I could imagine to head this way. The programmers must either be completely incapable, or wanted to make the game more accessible. Hence they cropped it down to an awkward, simplified shadow of what digimon used to be.
And the one thing that is like a trademark of Digimon, the digivolution system and the variety of forms your digimon can take, depending on how you grow it, completely vanished. A digimon digivolves strictly after it has grown by 10 levels. The mysteries of digivolution, when you nearly never knew when your digimon could take a new, exciting form, are no more. That was the straw that broke the camel's neck. The illusion of digimon as I loved them faded. The different digivolution states, reduced to apparently no more than a vague indicator of a digimon's level. That was the moment when I thought that there is nothing left what is specifically recognizable as digimon and when I lost all the fun of it. This game is not worth to carry the name of this franchise.