Also, y'all, that trailer is So Much, I kinda love it.
Digimon World Dusk is a weird pick, but it’s one that was important to me as a kid. Sure I have fond memories of Pokemon and Advance Wars and Fire Emblem and Phoenix Wright. My taste in games to this day make a lot of sense if you know that I was obsessed with those four franchises growing up. I loved your Mario’s and your Mystery Dungeons and your what have you. And those affected my taste in games and the things I enjoyed. But a lot of that stuff that most people who grew up playing games in my generation played (outside of maybe Advance Wars). Digimon World Dusk was a weird one. In many ways it’s a flawed game. The pacing is pretty bad, the animations lack a lot of the punch of the Pokemon games of its generation. Some battles are intensely frustrating because much of what works on most enemies don’t work on some bosses. Yet it’s a game I poured countless hours into growing up and one I still revisit from time to time. This is largely for two reasons.
Firstly, its roughness was something that made it oddly endearing to me as a child. Games like Pokemon felt clean and polished. The designs were restrained in comparison. In Digimon you had giant guns and monsters with gaping maws for toros and pieces of literal shit and puppet horrors and Lilith and Lucifer to collect to your gang. And unlike Pokemon, collecting these bastards was HARD. Some of them required me to go to Gamefaqs and find specific recipes that the game gives you no indication for. It became my goal to recruit the horrifying ghouls and ghosts and every devilish monster. And because of how janky and weird everything was, it always felt better. (Also I do think the combat system was better than pokemon’s, but that’s a subjective one.)
It’s also close to my heart because it feels like it’s mine. I know other people played this game. Hells, I became best friends with two other kids solely because we were the only people to play Digimon World. One of them continues to be a close friend of mine. It was the sort of game that connected us solely because of how Weird it was. Because it’s not something that everyone played, but it’s still so Specific whenever I meet someone who’s played it there’s an instant connection. And I think that’s really lovely.
