Digimon World 4
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 Was this supposed to be a Digimon game or was it turned into one for profit? | ||||||||||||||||
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Digimon World 4 (known as Digimon World X in Japan) is a hack and slash role-playing game developed by BEC and published by Bandai for PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox game consoles simultaneously in 2005. It is the sequel to Digimon World 3 and is overall the fourth(fifth if counting Digimon Digital Card Battle)/final game in the Digimon World series. Digimon World 4 supports up to four player local multiplayer.
Plot
The game offers a choice of one of four starter Digimon: Agumon, Veemon, Guilmon, and Dorumon. They are each new members of the "D.S.G. (Digital Security Guard)." Based on Digital Monster X-Evolution, it is immediately revealed that a computer virus known as the "X-Virus" is spreading quickly and is infecting many Digimon. "The Yamato Server" has disappeared, and a new server known as "The Doom Server" has taken its place.
When the first few sections of Level 1 (Death Valley) are completed the player finds out that The Doom Server may in fact be The Yamato Server. The player is then sent to destroy the "Doom Dome." This is where the first real boss appears, Apocalymon. X-Virus signals are discovered coming from the Dry Land, and the player is sent there to investigate, including facing a Skullgreymon and Scorpiomon. The player then has to make it through the Virus Lab, and confronts MaloMyotismon.
The player will then be sent to Venom Jungle and will need to find three ID keys so he is allowed to enter the base that is being guarded by a Gekomon being controlled by the X Virus. The player will then face ShogunGekomon, three Mecha Rogue 3, and Diaboromon, and retrieve their ID keys. The player(s) will then enter the base and confront Lucemon.
The player, Ophanimon, and Seraphimon found out where Mecha Rogue X lies. The player is then sent to the Machine Pit to obtain two ID keys from a Mecha Rouge 4, and surprisingly, LordKnightmon, one of the Royal Knights, who is also under control of the X Virus.
The player then heads to the Mechanical Core to face Mecha Rogue X and finish him off, saving the Digital World, collecting his/her prizes, and returns to the base.
Why It's Not a World
- Most of the playable Digimon wield weapons in game, despite weapon wielding species being an exception like Spadamon. Digimon such as Agumon and Dorumon wielding them make no sense in the lore of the series.
- Unbalanced difficulty that goes all over the place. A huge difficulty spike occurs right at the beginning if you are playing alone, making it very likely to be defeated by the first pair of enemy Digimon you encounter. After you get the healing spell the game becomes an endurance test because you will have massive amounts of MP to restore your HP fully with.
- The game fails to scale difficulty down properly for less than four people.
- Lots of unnecessary loading screens, which take much longer to complete on the PlayStation 2.
- Spells require extensive repeated use of the spell in order to upgrade the spell.
- You get very few experience points from defeating enemies, thus extending the amount of time you have to grind for experience dramatically.
- If a party member dies they lose experience points and all items and bits (the currency used to buy items) will be put in a box. If they die again without the box items being recovered it will be replaced with another box and all items in the previous box will be lost.
- There is a suspend point system where you can go to the hub World and be able to return back to where you were in the level, however you can only do this on certain specially marked spots in levels and you can't shutdown the game or the suspend point will be lost and you can't return to where you were.
- There is no network multiplayer on any version of the game when the Xbox and PlayStation 2 were built for online multiplayer.
- Your block ability is almost useless as it only blocks attacks for a split second when activated. However enemies can somehow block your attacks 50% of the time.
- Enemies can knock you to a corner, back you into the corner, and repeatedly attack you in the corner and kill you due to you not being able to recover and counterattack.
- It is difficult to line up ranged shots properly with targets with the camera being tilted at an angle and the stick not being properly mapped to the camera's perspective.
- You need to use cure disks about three times to cure negative aliments such as poison, and you can only carry nine at a time, reducing it to basically three times you can cure yourself at most without picking up more.
- It is not made obvious that it is possible to destroy some walls to create extra paths, which by the way is required to finish some dungeons.
- The game is extremely long, and has three difficulty levels which require you to finish Digimon World 4 on the lower difficulty to unlock. At least when you go on a higher difficulty you actually get to unlock more things such as more evolutions and additional items to use. While most longplays on Youtube say that it takes 9 hours to beat this game, with the HowLongToBeat Website stating that it takes 23 hours to beat this game, the game can actually take around 40 to 80 hours just to beat one difficulty level, and you need to do this again two more times, thus making the game take over 120 to over 240 hours to beat Digimon World 4!
- The Digivolution/Evolution system is fundamentally flawed, seemly disincentivizing usage of it. You must complete a vague set of tasks to unlock a higher staged evolution of your Digimon, then when you actually evolve it resets your level all the way back to one, reduces your stats, and prevents usage of the items you had before you evolved! Of course when you actually reach your previous level your stats are superior to what were before you evolved, but that doesn't change the fact you have to grind for hours to reach that level again. Digimon are supposed to get stronger after they evolve into a higher stage!
- Speaking of levels, leveling up barely improves your stats other than your HP and MP. Jumping from level 200 to 999 (the maximum level), increases your stats by around 1,000 to 2,000, which may seem a lot, but it doesn't suddenly make all basic enemies instantly die after taking one hit (which you would expect after jumping that much levels, and you have to seriously get tens of millions of experience points to get to that level!).
- Despite the good variety of bosses, most of them fallow the exact same strategy of "hit the boss when they attack".
- Poor graphics with Digimon models that have less detail than the first Digimon World game for the original PlayStation.
- Repetitive dungeon graphics make it look like you're going backwards sometimes when you're actually progressing forward through the dungeon.
- Low frame rate in certain areas of the Digital World which slows down the gameplay.
- It is difficult to jump successfully between platforms and if you fall into a bottomless pit your HP gets set to one. This can cause cheap deaths if you were near enemies or were knocked back by one.
- Some missions in dungeons have overly cryptic and annoying tasks such as beating the mission with exactly 10 minutes on the clock, and absolutely no seconds above or below 10 minutes or else you don't get the best reward.
- One mission's objective is that you to need to beat a dungeon without taking damage. However due to the programmers forgetting that you can level up in the dungeon and restore your HP to maximum, you can set it up so you level up after defeating the boss and cheat the game into thinking you never taken any damage, and complete the mission successfully.
- One of the plot missions bring you to a location called the "Dreadnought" by Leomon, however in the loading screen for the ship location it incorrectly labels the Dreadnought as the "Dread Note".
- Despite being set in the same setting as the Digital Monster X-Evolution movie, the game's story doesn't properly tie into this movie.
- The story is very convoluted and bad.
- The PAL version is called Digimon World 4, yet the second Digimon World game was never released there and the third game went under the name Digimon World 2003.
- The European rating is incorrect, it is rated PEGI 12+, because there's a little to any violence, also the E10+ was existed at the time of the game's release, thankfully, this was fixed with Digimon World: Data Squad which was released two years later. Plus, it does not help that the NA release have an E rating at all, but there is no excuse for the 12+ rating.
Redeeming Qualities
- In defense of the game about the first criticism, unlike Pokémon, Digimon never had a pattern in its stories, even stories about humans turning into Digimon to fight the franchise already had. So a story about Digimon using weapons is completely acceptable.
- In addition, not having similar examples before isn't a problem, since it wouldn't be the first time that a Digimon game introduces new concepts, Digimon World 2 was the first story to introduce humans becoming Digimon and a final boss that is a different digital life form rather than a Digimon, long before Tamers and Frontier.
- This is officially the first contact the West has with Digimon's X-Antibody Era, since the other products like V-Pets, Mangas and Movie are all exclusive to Japan.
- The Soundtrack is very good.
Reception
Digimon World 4 received average to poor reviews from critics, with the PlayStation 2 version receiving a Metacritic score of 48, the Xbox and GameCube versions having a mixed scores of 54 and 55, IGN rated on all platforms an 'okay' score of 6.1 out of 10, GameSpot rated this game a 4.3 out of 10, and X-Play was given a 2 out of 5 for the GameCube version.
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