Digimon Survive Gets New Gameplay and Story Trailers

During the recent Digimon Thanksgiving event, Bandai Namco has shared new trailers for its upcoming game, Digimon Survive. The game is a Strategy RPG that will feature an original story with new characters and settings. Digimon Survive aims to blend visual novel elements with the more tactical gameplay of an SRPG. There will also be multiple endings and different pathways of evolution for your Digimon. The Digivolutions will also be an in-battle mechanic which is more accurate to the anime than previous entries. Essentially, instead of evolving Digimon outside of combat, it’s now a temporary power-up during a battle sequence. Hence, the focus is on story and gameplay instead of collecting Digimon.

The gameplay is what you would expect from an SRPG. An immediate problem is the slow pace at which everything moves. Hopefully, they speed up the gameplay or add a speed-up option to the game. The video also shows off the Digivolution mechanic which looks fantastic. The art style is something different for a Digimon game as it blends high quality sprites with 3D environments. It looks odd at first, but the animations are smooth and well-made. For early footage, Digimon Survive is already looking polished, despite some frame rate drops.

The teaser trailer indicates that still images and voice-overs will tell the story. It’s typical for low-budget titles to take this route. Regardless, Digimon Survive could still be a compelling experience as long as the battles are fun and challenging.

At the moment there is no confirmation of an English release. However, given that every recent Digimon game has been localized, we can expect this to make its way outside of Japan in due time. You can view the official website here, but keep in mind that it’s in Japanese. Digimon Survive is slated for a 2019 Japanese release on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch