Back in the glorious days of my youth, I was pretty devoted to Pokemon and loved watching the cartoons and trying to catch them all. However, a usurper would soon rise up to challenge the Saturday morning cartoon show, and wouldn't you know it, but Digimon was a much more interesting show. It's taken a few years but I've finally been able to get my hands on a Digimon videogame, and I've found it's a pretty solid RPG.

THE STORY SO FAR
Digimon World comes in two flavors: Dawn and Dusk. The biggest change between the two is the ease at which you can earn specific digimon, much like how in Pokemon some pokemon were tied directly to certain versions of the game. Besides the digimon factor, the story also changes up depending on which version you have, but apparently only slightly. You play as a member of the group Night Claw, and after a violent attack rocks your world, you are convinced that the rival side of the island inhabited by your rivals – Light Fang – are the ones behind it all. However, if you play the Dawn game, the roles will be reversed. Theoretically everything else should be the same in terms of how the story unfolds with the only differences coming from the Night Claw and Light Fang role reversals.

As a young digimon trainer you're tasked with helping the various digimon over on the Dusk side of the island who have various tasks they want you to do. The digimon will task you with everything from finding an iron pillow to gathering the materials needed to make some shoes. The purpose of these fetch quest missions is to unlock parts of the land further and further, and to power you up enough so that when it comes to the main mystery story of the hacker/virus infecting things you'll be powered up enough to put up a good fight. After getting enough trainer points you'll be able to take on missions for the union, which are the mission that will bring you closer to unraveling the mystery and finding out what is going on.

The story is pretty interesting, but mostly thanks to it involving cyber issues like viruses. If you want to compare the story to that of its most similar rival Pokemon, it's not going to trump it, and it greatly fails to live up to a console RPG like a Final Fantasy. But for a creature collecting and battling RPG, it's not a bad story.

SINGLE-PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
Digimon World: Dusk is mostly a single-player RPG, where you'll trek out on quests, raising character levels so that they can keep advancing forward and battling more and more dangerous monsters. You'll have HP to manage, MP that use up after each attack, and you have healing items and equipment you can equip to make your characters stronger – all of that is pretty standard for a RPG.

You can only have a party of three digimon to fight with at a time, and you have five battlefield zones to place them in, which correspond to the possible five enemy digimon you can be fighting at a time who take up their own zones. Many of your attacks are able to only attack digimon in one zone, which means you'll hit exactly one digimon; however, different attacks have different zone structures, so it's possible to have a three zone attack, which can either be an attack that hits every other zone or one that hits three zones all in a row. Character placement can also play an important part of battling, because if you place your three characters in zones further apart from each other, you just might be out of harm's way when an enemy unleashes their own multi-zone attack.

The thing that makes Digimon World: Dusk different is the collectable aspect of the game, which gives you the ability to collect over 350 different digimon, which is an insane amount of creatures to collect. You start out being able to pick from one of several starting group of three, but as you fight digimon you collect their data and soon can convert them for yourself. Unlike Pokemon where you have to capture them, in Digimon you just have to fight them enough until you have their data at 100%. Some digimon are easier to get than others, because some can give you 10% for each digimon of that type you come across, while some have lower percentages, which means you'll have to fight that digimon more than just ten times to be able to gather its data.

Once all the data is acquired you're able to head to your home, upload your computer, and then create that digimon as a lowly level one character. You can get a bunch of digimon by simply battling them, but if you want their more powerful and cooler appearances, you'll have to digivolve them. Digivolving often involves getting your digimon to certain levels, like having them be a level 33 digimon. However, though some are that easy to come by, there are others where you have to have a specific amount of digimon type experience, which can only come from digimon that fall in that digimon type. For example, if a digimon needs 5000 experience from mechanical digimon, you have to fight mechanical digimon and slowly build that experience up, because mechanical digimon are the only kind that will reward you with that experience type for beating them.

Besides battling with digimon or including them in your party as reserve to get experience points for simply being with you, the other option for raising digimon comes from putting them on one of your islands, which act as farms that lets your digimon gain levels on their own while you go about doing quests. You can put four digimon on an island at a time, but you can't just put them on there and have that be that, because they need food for one thing, so you need to buy a little field to put on the island so they'll always have food. The digimon's levels will raise by themselves, but you can have them focus on specific things by putting in various goods to increase everything from their attack power to life points to speed to defense. Besides increasing those general things, you can also improve digimon type abilities as well, such as putting down a fire road to increase a digimon's dragon type experience. Once everything is set to go with your island, things are pretty hands off, as the digimon will eat food by themselves, train themselves, and you can see everything going on at the island by looking at the top screen of your DS, which is where your island will be except when you are in an actual battle.

The raising of digimon to evolve them is both the game's weakness and its strength. It's great when you finally raise a digimon enough to transform them into something cool, but it takes a really long time to raise them up that high, and some things aren't exactly clear, such as how can you make a digimon reach level 11 to evolve it when the max level that digimon can go up to is 10? It's also hard to get other digimon up to combat speed later on into the game, as I found myself sticking with my starter three only for the sheer fact it would've taken even longer to build another digimon up to where they were just so I could advance and move on with a digimon I really wanted to use.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY
One thing the Pokemon franchise always thrived on was the sociability of the series, where players could come together to trade pokemon and battle them. Digimon World: Dusk has several options to allow people to come together to trade digimon and test their talents against other trainers, and it's all made possible over Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection, so there is no need to physically be looking at your opponent in the eyes. You can choose to battle other trainers for tamer points with your digimon, trade digimon between players for those you can't get or want sooner, and you can even send your digimon off to the other player's island for training.

GRAPHICS
The graphics aren't all that great for the most part, because the environments are pretty sparse with repeating objects, and characters and digimon (especially the more advanced forms) are sometimes pixilated blobs where it's hard to make heads or tails from what you are looking at. Once you get in the field and start battling, the graphics improve a great deal, as the close-up view of the digimon look really well-done, and it's nice to see there are animations for after you've attacked them to show they are really feeling your hits.

SOUND
The sound work is a pretty sparse effort as there isn't much in terms of quality background music, there is no voicework, and the sound of battles is used way too often, and they aren't even that great of sounds to begin, which could've helped matters somewhat.

IN CONCLUSION
Digimon World: Dusk is a solid effort, but it could've been a lot better with some adjustments and tweaks, ranging from gameplay to graphics to audio work. With all that said, fans of the franchise will certainly want to pick this game up, and even non-fans could find themselves enjoying this RPG, which is far from being just a Pokemon clone.

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