Heading down to the Bandai booth, I was hoping to spend a bit of time
with the latest .hack project and see how it's going. Unfortunately,
their representatives told me they didn't have any such thing
available for checking out but they did have a Digimon RPG avaliable
to play. Figuring I might as well, I headed over to where they pointed
and checked it out.
Digimon is yet another action-RPG, favoring on the simple side where
you control a digimon (with a possible partner playing another) and
wander around exploring digital worlds in search of data. While the
game didn't give me much to go on as far as story, it was fairly easy
and intuitive to play, likely fitting perfectly for kids with it's
bright and colorful characters. The controls were responsive and
generally easy to get a hang of.
Trying it out further I found that there was a variety of weapons but
each had only two attacks, a normal attack and a charge up attack, both only
usable from the ground. While the character can jump, no attacks can
be done during this action. It's not a particularly big deal as most of the
enemies I encountered were simply dispatched and the one boss was clearly
built to be simple for the player.
Overall, the little I saw pointed to something that, while not for
the mature RPGamer, is certain to please young kids with simple,
engaging gameplay and colorful renditions of Digimon characters.