Digimon All-Star Rumble (PlayStation 3)
User Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): November 11, 2014
- Release Date (EU): November 14, 2014
- Publisher: Bandai Namco Games
- Developer: Prope
- Genres: Fighting
- Also For: Xbox 360
Game Features:
Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative
Fans have been yearning for a new Digimon game in America and Europe, so Bandai thought to release a spinoff of a spinoff to see if the fans are still interested in the franchise. Although, the game’s pretty poor at showing what the Digimon games look and feel like.
When booting up the game, you will hear the badass commentator shouting, “DIGIMON ALL STAR RUMBLE” with some nice music in the background, but once you get into the main menu all you can think of is disappointment. The game features Story Mode, Versus, Training Mode and Options.
The Story of the game describes how there was peace in the Digital World, but because of it, the Digimon became bored, and decided to make a tournament to see who’s the strongest Digimon. Each Digimon had a motive to join the tournament; Agumon because he was bored, Tentomon because of the money, Shoutmon because he wanted to be the Digimon King and etc.
The game has 12 base playable characters. Classics like Agumon and Gabumon appear, with some of the newer one’s like Shoutmon and Dorulumon. This totals out to less characters than the PS1 game Digimon Rumble Arena, which had 14 characters. Of course, because of the low number of playable characters, that means that you won’t see all of your favourite Digimon like Renamon,Terriermon or Patamon, and the entirety of the Frontier characters were cut from the roster.
Once you choose a character, in this case I chose Agumon, you start with a simple tutorial which shows you how to jump and attack. A horde of Shell Numemon will appear, which you are supposed to kill in a Beat ‘Em Up kind of style, but before you do that, Neemon will appear and tell you how to attack. Square, Circle and Triangle, but he didn’t explain what each attack does. Square’s the weak attack,Triangle’s Special Attack, and Circle a Strong/Launch attack. Later in Chapter 3, the game will explain that you can digivolve when the EP Gauge on left side of the screen fills up by pressing L1+R1. Opponents will digivolve during the 1st and 2nd chapter and you will just have to press random buttons to find out how to actually digivolve and because of things like that, the game’s pretty poor at explaining the controls of the game. The same goes for Super Attacks, which can be initialized with the same button combination once you’re in digivolved form and the EP gauge is full. After you beat the horde of monsters, the game will tell you that you need to find the lever which will open the location where the contestant of the tournament is, and then you are supposed to battle with them in a 1Vs1 type of battle.
Each individual chapter of the game has 1 contestant, and 6 in total. Each contestant will have different battle rules. Point Battle, in which you’re supposed to kill opponents to get points and the one with most points wins, Survival, a Last-Man-Standing battle, Medal Battle, kill opponents and collect their coins and whoever gets 3 medals wins, Damage Race, the one who dishes out most damage wins, Flag battle, in which you collect and hold the flag to get points and the one with most points wins, and Bomb Battle, in which you have a timed bomb on your back and the last one standing wins.
Each chapter takes up to 10 minutes to beat and play with the same 3 steps;
1.Kill Hordes of monsters
2.Push the lever
3.Beat contestants
Once you beat the finalist, Magnadramon will appear and tell that the purpose of the tournament was to find the Hero of the Digital World, who then is supposed to beat the legendary Digimon, because some unknown virus has attacked them and made them lose their sanity.
That part of the story is a bit different for other characters, like in Agumon’s story, Magnadramon will tell that the purpose of the tournament was to find the Hero, while if you choose Tentomon, he will tell that if Shoutmon won the tournament, something bad would happen to the Digimon World and in Shoutmon’s boots, the final contestant will be mind controlled by the virus and make a copy of Shoutmon itself.
Everything explained prior is same for all other characters. Same stage, same hoard enemies and same battles, just with a slightly changed pattern of contestants.
Versus mode is self explanatory. You have the 6 battle rules but you can change whether or not items will appear during the battles, turn on or off the DigiCards effects and change from Battle Royale to 2vs2 fights.
DigiCards are added to the game to “ spice up “ the battles. The apostrophe marks are there because it doesn’t really spice it up. While in the Story Mode, beating some of the hordes will spawn a chest in game, in which you will find a DigiCard. You can equip 2 cards; one Attack and one Defense card. All of the cards have a trigger rate which is shown in percentages and the activation of the cards comes after the end of a combo. If the trigger rate is higher, then there’s a better chance that the cards gonna be activated. When a card is activated, you and your opponent's defense card will battle, and whoever card has a bigger number (Which is shown on the top of the card) will win. Only the winning card’s effect will take place. There are effects like to heal 2000 HP or to deal a 1600 Damage wave to your opponents. There’s a shop in the game too, where you can buy the cards. There are 3 cards of which 2 are cheap, while the other 1 is really expensive and the fact that you’re getting really slow money, I don’t even know how you would be able to obtain all of the cards.
Not even the graphics are good in the game; Shadows are horrible, textures are simple and no detail was applied to them, the world is pretty much empty, and the game screams for AntiAliasing. The only positive here would be the characters, which look decent. The finishing move animations look nice as well.
[Click here for bigger pics]
The screen that I mentioned at the beginning of the review has a nice tune, but its only lasts for 6 seconds and after that the game starts loading Demo battles. The game has one or two good battle songs, but Native Forest stage has the most calming song I’ve ever heard in a fighting game (plus, its a reused track from the Native Forest stage in Story Mode).
That’s about it for the game, its disappointment in a box. Namco could have really done better work with it, but it seems that they didn’t want to. Quality wise, Digimon Rumble Arena games are better.The game has 10 stages,12 base playable characters which each have 1-2 digivolutions. Music is boring and the graphics are equivalent to the 6th gen. The AI is so stupid that you'll hardly want to play single player, and the story is a joke. No Online Mode and the Local Multiplayer probably wouldn’t be fun because the game is a brawler button masher. I’m not sure if Namco wants the Digimon franchise to have success in America and Europe, or it wants to bury it up, but for sure the game isn’t worth the 60 bucks price tag.
Verdict
What I Liked ...
- Badass commentator
- Fast loading times
What I Didn't Like ...
- Controls not well explained
- Poor graphics
- No Online Multiplayer
- Story's a joke
4
out of 10
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