A lot of games have a mainline series and afterward work to make spin-off titles.Digimoncompletely breaks this mold by having no “mainline” series, and rather various games of vastly different genres releasing around the same time. The Digimon World games are the closest thing to the core belief of Digimon, having the player take on a human and raising their Digimon into powerful forms that can overcome the challenges of the world the game takes place in.
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Others have adopted gameplay styles such as turn based creature capture, fighting, adventure, and hybrid models of those listed. There have been a constant wave of games since 1998, and it’s worth looking through with such a variety of options for players.
10Digital Monster
Digital Monster was virtual pet device, with a virtual creature called a Digimon Digital Pet that you would keep alive and care for using the buttons on the side. This would include feeding, cleaning up after it, turning the lights off at bedtime, providing medical care, and training it to become stronger.
This device was made by Bandai, the same company that created the Tamagotchi. What set Digital Monster aside from Tamagotchi was its focus on being less about looking like an animal and more like being a monster that their owners could link up to do battles with.
9Digimon World Championship
This game puts the player in a very passive role compared to other Digimon games. Other games in the franchise would have you shout, command, or even select them directly, but Digimon World Championship has you looking after and raising you Digimon and hoping for the best.
Like the Digital Monster virtual pet, you could make choices of when and what your Digimon could eat, when and how they trained, and so forth, and the better you raised it, the more powerful it would become.
8Digimon Rumble Arena 2
With an overwhelming amount of success surrounding Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros franchise, it was obvious that a lot of game developers wanted to take a crack at the genre themselves. Digimon Rumble Arena 2 featured a roster built of well-known Digimon that the players would be most interested in playing as, such as Agumon and Gabumon.
The gameplay in Rumble Arena 2 was similar to Smash Bros, but it added a lot of unique elements inspired by the Digimon franchise such as having health meters and digivolving into more powerful forms mid-fight. Unfortunately, Smash Bros. clearlyhas the edge in terms of level design.
7Digimon Card Battle
This game is based on the Digimon collectable card game from the 1990s, not to be confused with the more recent Digimon card games. The card types available involved putting Digimon into play and using other cards to support and evolve them.
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The terms evolve and Digivolve would be used interchangeably throughout various Digimon Media, with Digivolve being the more frequently used of the two. This would be the first Digimon game to revolve its gameplay and mechanics entirely around cards without any elements that explore raising and caring for a growing Digimon.
6Digimon Adventure
This game followed the story from the first Digimon anime series very well, with the game feeling more like a JRPG than any of the other entries. Players could choose which of the story characters would take the roll of the leader and which other two Digimon would back them up in battles, creating a 3v3 battle structure.
The gameplay was turn-based like other games but with less focus on creature capture and more on a narrative story that guided players along a journey. This game was released exclusively in Japan and for the PlayStation Portable.
5Digimon World
The first in the series of Digimon World games, as well as one of the first Digimon video games in general. This game transported you to another world and partnered you up with a Digimon companion. It gave you all the basics to get started, and you would choose how to train your Digimon and which stats to focus on.
You would also have to consider what their diet would be, how well you took care of it, and all of this ultimately would decide how long it lived and how powerful it could become. Many regard it as the perfect example of how a Digimon game should be. This gamedid an incredible job with its world buildingto make it feel like a world that exists that should not be able to.
4Digimon World 3
The third Digimon World game took a lot of elements from the second installment in the series and merged them with elements from other popular JRPGs and creature capture games. You would use a team of three Digimon, each being able to grow into stronger and more powerful Digimon of the next rank.
This game may have lacked the amount of narrative seen in Digimon Adventure, but it made up for it with incredible turn based gameplay and other mechanics it introduced. It would go on to spawn a sequel in the form of Digimon World 4, which dropped the ball for the series, resulting in it not see another entry until New Order.
3Digimon World: Next Order
This game was originally released on the PS Vita but would later be ported over to the PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch, and PC. This game took everything that was amazing about the original Digimon World and just added so much more to the table.
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It had smooth and beautiful graphics, lots of gameplay variety, and included the ability to control two Digimon at the same time. The battle system in New Order is similar to that of the original Digimon World, where the player would yell commands for the Digimon to obey when they were able.
2Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth
Seen by many as one of the best modern Digimon games due to how it’s gameplay uses a lot of modern gaming standards and mechanics, this is the most fun a fan of creature capture style games can have on a PlayStation console. It is also said thatother creature capture style games can learn a thing or twofrom how Digimon handle things.
The game follows a linear story with many side quests available. Players can capture many Digimon of different ranks to fill their collection and both digivolve and de-digivolve them into stronger version. The game featured various explorations of both the human world and the digital one.
1Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory
The sequel to the original Cyber Sleuth, this game explored the game as a new character set in the same world as the other. It had all the previous Digimon from the original and almost 100 new ones!
Due to how closely it is connected to the first game, it is not recommended for players to start on this game before they play the original, as a lot of cutscenes will make absolutely no sense, and a lot of the reoccurring locations from the first will not have as much impact or nostalgia. Having said that, this game best captures the magic of Digimon.
