Digimon World: Dusk review (DS)

The battle system is pretty fun, even if it hasn't changed one bit from the previous game. Battles are still turn-based and involve three Digimon on each side. When it's your turn to attack, you pick one of your monster's attacks from a list, select the target, and then watch the attack happen. Turns go back and forth until one side's team is defeated. Traits, such as dragon, beast, dark, and holy, come into play as strengths or weaknesses. You also have to take formation into account. On offense, some attacks affect certain positions on the field but not others. On defense, you have to decide whether to situate your monsters side by side to gain support bonuses or to split them up to prevent your opponent from smacking you with group attacks.

Later dungeons and CPU opponents put up a strong challenge. But between the plodding story and the overall predictability of the CPU, you really need to set up battles against other human beings to enjoy the game. For the first Digimon World, that meant local "same room" matchups only. Dawn and Dusk up the ante by allowing players to duel online through Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connect service. You can't just seek out random opponents, which is kind of weak, but it's not too difficult to swap friend codes and arrange battles over e-mail or your favorite online forum. Because the battles are turn-based, you won't notice any problems with lag or stalling. In fact, fighting a real person feels just like facing off against the CPU, except without the mind-numbing predictability. You can also breed your Digimon with your friends or random people that happen to be online. That will help you acquire the majority of Digimon that aren't in the specific version you're playing. Some of them, though, need to be acquired through straight-up trades, which, for some crazy reason, still can't be consummated online.

The quality of the presentation lacks any kind of heart or soul, but it gets the job done. The isometric 2D environments and tiny characters in the quest view look generic. They're also about as detailed and colorful as the stuff you'd see in every role-playing-game put out for the Game Boy Advance a few years ago. The monsters in the battle view are pretty huge, at least, while their attacks exhibit a wide variety of nifty visual effects for such things as flames, poison clouds, ice crystals, and so on. It's also nice that the game makes use of the upper screen to display helpful status information during the fight. The sound effects are just a bunch of generic slashes, elemental sounds, and growls. However, the music is actually very dramatic and beautifully orchestrated.

Because of the plodding story and modest presentation, this probably isn't a game you should buy if you're not a diehard Digimon fan or won't be able to take advantage of the game's multiplayer features. Conversely, if you are a Digimon fan, as well as know you'll be able to play and trade with other people, you should be able to overlook the game's weaker aspects to get your money's worth.