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| Bearmon is my partner Digimon, btw The Pikachu to my Ash |
You can read this post on my personal site with other Goodies here!
Howdy, Farmhands!
Digimon World 3 for the original Playstation is one of my favorite childhood games. It's premise and mechanics are incredibly simple, being a Licensed turn-based RPG of a franchise where pointing at the screen and saying in child-like wonder, "That's the guy from the anime" was all it needed to be. The "combat" features 3d models flopping around while special effects
relating to the action you chose plays over them to disguise that each
model only has 1 or 2 animations. It's game balance is entirely out of whack. The OST is alright, but nowhere near as good as half of the playstation's heavier hitters. Don't even get me started on the writing. Badly paced, barely playtested, and shipped out early to fill a Christmas release... and yet it's one of my favorites? Bad taste aside, what is it that endears me to this shitty little game?
It's got some baller isometric environment design, mostly.
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I'm going to regret hosting this image natively on my webserver
but it needs to survive the rot of digital society at full res, so sayeth the Farmer |
The world of the in-universe full dive MMORPG called "Digimon Online" is filled to the brim with pre-rendered isometric environments that make use of it's premise incredibly well. The spaces you run around aren't "real" nor do they need to make sense. Grass has circuit board lines imprinted in the fields. Machinery grows from the ground like trees. Buildings are made of computer parts, sized for giants and populated by regular folk. Every step comes with another burst of fantastical world building. Digimon World 3 isn't afraid to front load it's best ideas in it's starting areas, but not all of them are accessible. Throughout these world, the player will stumble upon areas that are visible, but out of reach. Tunnel exits with no obvious entrance gate off the lower half of the starting City. Most bodies of water have one or two dock-like platforms that appear to have no purpose, and strange holes in the ground mark the land. In the very early game, these areas blend in to the other wild visual clutter scattered around, making them intriguing but dismissable elements of the areas you run through.
This changes about a 1/3rd into the game's story, where plot reasons requires the player make their way to a landmass across an ocean. The player is told that access can be acquired if they seek out the Mystical Artifact known as the Digimental of Sincerity, with only the barest hint as to where it's hidden. Which they do, because the next section of the game is gated off until it's done and one fetch quest later-
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| Now he can call Submarimon and cross the Ocean. |
This is where the game gets clever, because players of JRPGs are used to this sort of thing. You get a boat, which expands your options for overland travel, which leads you to new areas and the game continues. The player quickly finds their nearest Dock-like Platform, uses the Digimental to summon Submarimon and-
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| -cross the... ocean... |
This is not Fast Travel. This is a shortcut; but one the Player must traverse in order to skip distances of overland travel, with the same encounter and combat mechanic as on dry land, through a maze of underwater paths that crisscross the entire game. Some Docks only connect to 1 other Dock. Some have multiple exit points. Suddenly, every area you've passed through until now, and every area you encounter next, has an additional dimension to travel through, hidden away areas or blocked off passages becoming accessible, if the Player dares dive into the mini-dungeons that connect them. Once you know where the connections are, traveling between them is technically faster that going overland... but are they worth the risk? It is possible to get a Game Over in these shortcuts. The system for saving your game involves speaking with an NPC at an Inn, and those don't appear anywhere underwater. The pathways are easy to get lost in, as remembering which exit brings you to a specific spot in the overworld can get confusing fast. It's a new kind of risk, but not an insurmountable one.
Closer towards the end of the game, maybe a little about the halfway point, the plot expands to reveal the evil organizations plot to use Digimon World Online to commit real world terrorism (as you do). The Player is a known antagonist to their plans, leading the organization to purposefully operate from within areas yet inaccessible to them. To chase them down and halt their schemes, the Player is prompted to seek out the Mystical Artifact known as the
Digimental of Knowledge, with only the barest hint as to where it's
hidden. Which they do, because the next section of the game is gated off
until it's done and one fetch quest later-
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I couldn't find an image with the textbox, but I imagine
it reads "Now I can call Digmon and dig tunnels!" |
This is where the game decides it wants to continue being clever, despite already throwing the Player for a loop with it's previous "Fast Travel" option. The player quickly finds their nearest suspicious Hole in the ground, uses the Digimental to summon Digmon and-
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| -ok what the fuck, man |
Digimon World 3 is proud to pretend to be a computer game. It's aesthetic and level design lean heavily into the concept of a world within a machine, and nowhere is it more blatant than this, the Network Interstice. This connection of tunnels between sheets of giant circuitry is, textually, not just digging under the ground to pop up somewhere else in the overworld - It takes you beneath the very code of the world and allows you to travel to servers operating in another geographical location. That's right, the entire late stage of the game takes place in a second copy of the main world map, as you leave the space made for Japanese players and head for America. (The specific countries are left unnamed, but c'mon. You end up beaming yourself aboard a space rocket with giant lasers onboard, it's got to be America's shit.) Where the Underwater traversal was a series of connected hallways with a few doors to lose track of, the Circuit Board is a sprawling maze, potentially capable of popping you out into one of two dimensions. The same rules with Combat and the chance of a Game Over apply.
So what does any of this have to do with TTRPGs?
I firmly believe that any media, in any medium, can have a lesson to learn for the betterment of running TTRPGs. Ours is a hobby of imagination, after all, and imagination needs fuel from outside itself to properly run. What do I think we can learn from Digimon World 3 and it's holes? Perhaps, something like, "Do not Overcomplicate your worldbuilding. Take something small, established early, and reframe it's use. It will appear as though you are a master at foreshadowing." Maybe, if I'm feeling spicy, it would be, "Do not offer Skips, offer Shortcuts, with unique challenges to offset immediate benefits. Make the choice to avoid a portion of the Game a proper Choice to make."
Or maybe, just maybe, the lesson here today is, "Gadda likes Digimon World 3 and saw the chance to blog about it a little."
- Until Next Time,
Farmer Gadda
