Full transcript of “That Digimon Fighting Game You Might Remember | Digimon: Rumble Arena Retrospective (PS1)”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] foreign the Digimon franchise has never ceased to surprise me and nothing perpetuates that feeling more than the video games we've already looked at a v-pet adventure RPG a tabletop card game simulator and we do still have a couple of RPGs to look at but even those don't play like the first one or even really all that much like each other but today we're going to look at a kind of funny entry in digimon's PlayStation 1 Library a party brawler now look I've been doing my best so far in these videos to avoid making unwarranted comparisons between the Digimon franchise and others that it gets frequently lumped in with mostly because those comparisons are reductive tired surface level and there's not
0:47 really as much of a basis for them as people always seem to assume but this right here this is a smash clone now while I've never been especially great at them I'm no stranger to the world of fighting games I'll be there day one for Street Fighter 6. I played the real Classics like Sonic the fighters and of course I have many fond memories of playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 in the back of a Pizza Hut as a kid and I have a truly deep appreciation for that game to this day you know in case you couldn't tell but when Super Smash Brothers hit the scene it not only let kids duke it out as their favorite Nintendo mascots they were already familiar with but introduced them to maybe a couple of new ones and the simplified mechanics and controls gave life to a party brawler an accessible pick up and play fighting game where anyone can pick up the controller and play within minutes but while this was making its rounds on the Nintendo 64
1:33 kids on the Playstation still needed a simple mascot fighting game that they could break out at sleepovers and well I guess this is what they got so how does it stack up all these years later is this a good way to experience the power of your favorite Digimon let's find out today as we take a look at Digimon Rumble Arena [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] it's worth noting that while the larger Digimon games did have a couple of similarities with the anime stuff like shared locations there wasn't a lot here in these games that kids could actually see being pulled from the television series they were watching the clear exception is digital card battle that
2:19 did share some direct story elements and characters but a lot of that was still kind of pushed off to the Wayside oh and the Japanese release of that game actually did have some midi compositions of music from that show sorry I felt silly for not mentioning in the last review and I had to work it in somewhere we would get games later on that were directly based on the anime series like Data Squad or the RPG adaptation of Digimon Adventure that we never got here in the US figures but Rumble Arena wasn't pulling its roster of characters from previous games on the PS1 or some obscure lore the Digimon you could play as and the Tamers that kind of accompany them are pulled directly from Digimon Adventure O2 and Digimon Tamers I love how the Digimon in this intro are all animated in 3D but their Tamers are just 2D images taken straight from their
3:05 respective shows and superimposed over CGI backgrounds I mean I get it I know why they did it this way it's still just plenty to look at and then you get the title screen and are greeted with oh um cute I guess a different Digimon says the name of the game each time you boot it up and nope it's always guilmon and it makes a certain level of sense Tamers was still airing around that time and Gilman was probably the most popular monster in the show well outside of renamon for reasons and don't worry you degenerate she's in the game too but Gilman's English voice is also kind of obnoxious not always but sometimes I'm sorry kinda I get people are attached to this and I think it's Charming because yes Gilman is the best boy but it also
3:50 sounds stupid hearing it every time I go back to the title screen do you think anyone is asked Steve Bloom to read out a bunch of spikes Spiegel's lines but in Gilman's voice I love a rubble toothless that's a little too much belly aching about cute creatures talking though let's just move on to the single player campaign go to the character select and are you gonna play with huh which one oh geez hat Digimon so from here you can choose between some of the most popular rookie level Digimon and you'll play as this character in a series of battles against the rest of the roster pretty standard fare for a single player mode in a fighting game I decided to start with gabumon because he's a good boy and I love him you're the man good morning how compressed are the audio files for the human characters Digimon sound fine but
4:37 the Tamers all sound like their audio is crushed to hell and back when the world happened here okay you know what else is weird the lack of music now some of you that grew up with the game might be confused by what I mean but I don't think this is normal so I recorded this game by playing it on my PS3 and to Classic when his boss fans will remember from my PS1 Treasure Planet review that the PS3 can just be kind of weird about media files on PS1 discs sometimes the music plays sometimes it doesn't and you're just mashing these little digital creatures against each other with nothing but an eerie silence accompanying the action and it's kind of funny I did decide to try playing this game a little bit on original hardware and sure enough the music is actually there and it's fine nothing about it is amazing but it's certainly serviceable and yeah every now
5:23 and again you get some tracks that actually go pretty hard away actually speaking of which they did it again the Japanese version of this game has Recreations and music from the anime I get that audiences in other regions wouldn't be as familiar with these tracks but it's not like The Replacements are compositions they'll recognize are worthy replacements for hearing Brave art playing in the background the stages themselves are okay each one will contain hazards specific to that Arena again that might sound familiar now what's interesting here is that the specialty of each Digimon actually comes into play here split across fire water and nature Specialties not only are certain Digimon stronger or weaker against other Digimon
6:09 of a different specialty but some Specialties are weak to certain terrain so you don't want your nature Digimon falling into a stage Hazard on a fire stage this is so needless it's like the game is going out of its way to unbalance itself why is this a thing as for the actual visual appearance of each stage I mean they're fine some are pretty basic others are okay yeah there's not a lot of creativity on display here I like to imagine this one is just Sky Sanctuary though because everything has to lead back to Sonic eventually honestly it would have been nice to see a few more familiar locations like factorial town or Infinity mountain or maybe some kind of game specific ones like file City I know it's not canon to the anime but I think it would have been a fun way to merge the branches of the franchise a little bit now you might have realized that I've been talking about pretty much every aspect of this game except the
6:55 actual gameplay and well you sure do Press buttons to attack you get your normal attacks from the square button and different finishing attacks tied to the triangle and circle buttons circle is usually going to be some form of ranged attack good for taking on opponents at a distance and triangle will typically be a bit more specialized normally a stronger melee attack this can take several different forms though like one Digimon might have a triangle Tech that attacks directly in front of them whereas a digimon like gabumon will use an upwards attack as for directional inputs and such during any of these yeah that's not really gonna do you any good here simple especious controls are they do offer a certain level of variety where pressing down while using your
7:41 attack buttons or even being Airborne while doing so will change the resulting attack not so much the case here the basics of the combat pretty much boil down to spamming the square button and on occasion you can spice things up with a special attack somebody out there right now really wants to tell me all about just how in-depth this combat actually is but if they have to explain that depth to me because the game itself didn't put it on display I think that's saying something there also aren't really pickup items in this game but you can grab these little digimon cards scattered throughout each stage that give you a temporary buff or in most cases a beefed up projectile now let's see uh what else you can block attacks yeah and uh oh right right you can digivolve as you fight or take damage you fill up a digivolve meter and when it's full you can hit the R1 button to digiball to a new form again it's
8:27 hilarious how clear the audio quality is for Digimon speaking but when the Tamer calls out to them did TK's voice just crack it evolved your Digimon will evolve straight to their mega form skipping the forms between meaning gabumon will turn into metal garurumon Agumon will evolve into WarGreymon yieldmon to gallantmon and gadoman will evolve into Magna German so you've got godomon in this game but she doesn't evolve into anjuomon then why are we even here as you can imagine these new forms beef up your stats and offer new attacks but they're commanded the same way as your previous form you do have a boost here but you're not invincible and if you're playing a lower form against a mega level Digimon you don't have to worry too much because it's still incredibly easy to lock your opponents into a chain not a combo mind you the mechanics
9:14 aren't nearly that interesting but every Digimon in this game is so heavy and the animation for pretty much every move they make are so slow that you really don't have much to worry about once you've got the upper hand you see this gameplay and this was after I turned up the CPU difficulty you do also have to deal with how much this did you evolving animation breaks up the pace of the actual matches too I'm sure the game needs a second to load in the new model in its appropriate data but it's still kind of jarring and it always feels like it just takes away from the moment a bit now this mega form doesn't last forever you only have until the meter depletes and then you have to fill it up again after dig evolving you can also just hit the R1 button again and it auto depletes the meter for a Charged Up attack like WarGreymon using terraforce this game is so broken do I sound unenthusiastic yeah I'm sorry I don't
10:01 mean to be it's just that everything I just said is well that's it that's everything and I'm making it sound like I hated this game and I really didn't believe me I have played worse the issue mostly comes from how drawn out everything feels we're each encounter with another character feels longer than it needs to be and the action itself is honestly pretty slow already just due to the amount of weight everyone seems to have and how long it takes to move from one animation to the next the pacing might be this game's biggest weakness the matches in the single player are best out of three against each opponent meaning that you've gotta fight everybody at least twice before you can move on to the next stage and keep things moving and every once in a while when you've beaten enough bows I'm not sorry about the comparison yeah there's a few mini games scattered through here like destroying a bunch of
10:46 targets shooting hoops and uh mashing a button really fast how are these they're okay they're okay they're certainly not bad but they sure are here I guess so keep mashing your way through these matches to get to the end and take on the final boss reapermon if there's any added context to this guy or any semblance of plot surrounding him or why he's the adversary for everyone I totally missed it and I'm not convinced such context exists hey at the very least he's got a stupid amount of attack range and actually manages to put up a small amount of challenge so at the very least he is a bit more engaging than what's come before and once you've beaten reapermon the credits roll and now you've got him unlocked as a character in fact you can unlock quite a few characters by beating the campaign with different Digimon and there can sometimes be extra prerequisites like you'll need to beat the game with both
11:32 Agumon and gabumon to get access to omnimon all of my complaints up to this point aside uh part of my inner child awakened when I first got to be able to select him and mess around with him for a bit and yeah when you select a high higher level Digimon as your character you only use the meter for their ultimate attack and nothing else which makes sense you can unlock quite a few additional Digimon with most of them being the upgraded forms of the base characters but some other cool ones like Blackboard Greymon antmon or imperial drama and Paladin mode and I can you imagine if somebody just has no context for Digimon and they're just hearing all of these words getting thrown out into the ether and that is Digimon Rumble Arena there's a couple of other cute features I like that by holding down the R1 button when you select a character certain ones like the original Adventure cast will have their images swapped from
12:17 their O2 appearance to their original younger looks and as simple as it is I gotta admit I think that's a legitimately cool touch the rest of the game is well what you make of it it's a party game at the end of the day the majority of fun that you get from it is going to be sitting down with a friend and just embracing the chaos of this janky uneven brawler it's not great and believe me you're much better off with a wide variety of other fighting game options but if you and your friends are Digimon fans this is a good way to soak up a half hour of your time until you decide to play Guilty Gear instead as for recommending this game as a single player experience no this was one I didn't have a huge amount of patience for to be honest the single player mode just drags in a way I haven't experienced in a fighting game before but there were sequels to Rumble Arena that will tackle one day who knows
13:03 maybe they refined the formula and made something really special out of it I'm actually interested in checking the follow-ups out sometime and seeing what was improved as for now I can only recommend the most curious of fans to check out Digimon Rumble Arena but card games party Brawlers these have been some fun detours but I know what you all have actually been waiting for and maybe it's time to finally stop running away from it there is here and there but our next major stop is gonna be deep in the digital dungeons of Digimon World 2. until then and I really do need to get better about promoting this the best way to support me is on patreon if even a quarter of my subscribers all donated a dollar a month I could seriously consider making this a full-time gig and make you all so much
13:49 more content way more often when I say every little bit counts I mean it that being said even just being here watching these videos sharing them around all of that good stuff that is support too and for that thank you for those of you interested in contributing my patreon my top tier patrons get to see these videos two days early you can find me on Twitter twitch Discord Sunset City whichever you prefer links in the description and of course as always spread the word tell your friends and until we see each other again thank you so much for watching see you next mission [Music] hey there everyone and thank you so much for watching I'm glad this one didn't take me three years to get out there it still took a little longer than I would have liked but it uh it wasn't as big of
14:35 a gap as some of my others have been that being said the next one Digimon World 2 that is a hefty game it's gonna be a big video and please understand it is going to take me a while to get that one put together but while I won't have any other main reviews coming out before that I might have some smaller like side quest stuff we'll have to see how that shakes down of course I would not be able to make any of this if it wasn't for you the viewers and of course my wonderful patreon supporters and I do need to give a very special shout out to my top tier patrons this month they are Brendan Hess Broski Earl valko Jeremiah Harrison letterick mckenzel Mr Dr SP Dr pending nickel plated Patricia Marco Cinder in seven snap kick and Cyrus the skeptic man there are so many of you
15:22 thank you all so so much I really really do appreciate that you guys make this possible and you make it worth it with all that said thanks once again for watching I have been Wayne and I'll see you next mission [Music]
