You begin the game choosing whether you want to play a male or female character. There is no difference choosing one or the either, they both have the same dialogue and will follow the same story. The game is obviously targeted towards a younger generation, an audience that doesn’t mind that the story doesn’t flow and doesn’t have much logic to it. You start the game by entering a computer lab at school, talking to yourself about these rumors that you’ve been hearing about monsters. Deciding that these monsters can’t be all that bad, you decide to search the internet. Before you know it, you are sucked into the Digital World (through the computer monitor, mind you) where apparently humans and Digimon co-exist as tamer and pet monster. Once you’re there, you see a group of Digimon who are beginning their training. You follow them to Digi Central, a high tech headquarters of some sort where you bump into another human and more Digimon! None of this stuff seems to really phase you, as you are greeted and then asked to become a trainer/tamer. The goal is to become the best tamer ever!

Battles are fairly straight forward and come up randomly. In the upper screen the turn order is shown where the purple Digimon indicate an enemy and the blue indicates your ally. You can have anywhere up to six Digimon in your party but it’s only the first three that will fight. Data from enemy encounters are automatically scanned for you to eventually Digiconvert Digimon into allies. The battle field is split into 5 spaces for each side. Each turn you can choose to move your Digimon as some of their skills can affect more than one space. Like most RPGs, monsters or in this case, digital monsters also have types, types such as dragon beast, aquan, bird, insect/plant etc. There are also various attack types like fire, wind, thunder, water and each Digimon type will have specific vulnerabilities to certain attacks. So instead of just tapping that A button to continue, strategy can be used. Although the game isn’t exactly hard, patience and perseverance can take you anywhere.

The graphics are simple, like the old Super Nintendo days where the characters were all bright and colorful sprites. It doesn’t feel outdated though, since the game environment is all high tech with gadgets and they actually use a Google-ish looking search engine. It’s not a bad thing, since I do wish more recent games would come in this format. Something about that 16-bit charm that brings back memories. Digimon come in all shapes and colors like the characters at the San Rio store. Music wise, it does the job. There’s nothing extraordinary but it’s upbeat and fun. Unfortunately the touch screen doesn’t get much use, it’s still faster to just tap the A button.

I’m not sure if I’d recommend this game to anyone who isn’t already a Digimon fan or a fan of random bizarre funny little monsters. The fact that you collect Digimon makes it different from other dungeon crawlers where all you do is level and collect rare items. Digimon World DS is fun for awhile, but I’m not the type of player who likes to go around collecting stuff and doing the same thing over and over again. The reason I like RPGs is because I like an in depth story. Not really getting much of a story in this game, but if you find random nonsensical dialogue your cup of tea, then by all means give this one a try.