Digimon Con announces no new games due to low budget

Despite acknowledging the massive fan demand for new games, Digimon Con failed to meet even the most basic of expectations.

Joseph Caddick
8th March 2022
Images: Toei Animation and Bandai Namco
2022 marked the inaugural Digimon Con (annoyingly not called DigiCon), boasting a variety of segments from the anime to the card game and various other things for fans to get involved with. Where it failed to stick the landing, however, was the 50-minute section on Digimon games.
Image: Bandai Namco

Rather than being presented like a Nintendo Direct, moving from one game to another, Digimon Con instead opted for a fan Q&A session with Kazumasa Habu, the producer for most of the recent Digimon games. The long-awaited Digimon Survive was discussed first, and it was announced that the game, originally due to release in 2019, still does not have a release date. Some new information was provided, however, like there being 113 available Digimon, and the gameplay primarily being a text adventure as opposed to a more traditional RPG. It's going to be much darker than any previous game in the series, with character deaths playing an active part in the story. A single playthrough is expected to be 40 hours long.

with the gaming segment being so long and no announcements of note being made, fans were left questioning its purpose

The next segment focused on ports, remakes and sequels of existing games within the Digimon series. Almost all major games were at least briefly mentioned, and then swiftly dismissed for a number of reasons, many of which were budget-related. Habu looked disappointed to reveal that most of the games fans wanted were simply not possible due to a lack of funding.

The prospect of porting the Digimon World games for the PS1 was then discussed. Habu was unable to decide whether or not new content would be added to these games to make them more like remakes, or if they would be faithful ports similar to Monster Rancher 1 and 2 DX. It was emphasised that the budget would take a further hit if they opted for remakes over ports.

Perhaps the most interesting announcement was that a new Digimon Story game is currently in development, and will focus on the Olympos XII, Digimon that are not often featured in games currently. Nothing else about the game was revealed, so as an announcement this just wasn’t enough to generate any hype.

Digimon Survive releases new trailer and explains the reason for its delay  - Code List
Image: Bandai Namco

Finally, the remaining questions were about the industry at large. There was a weird question asking about the ages of some characters from games in the series, as well as asking Habu how to get involved in game development. Given the previous content or lack thereof, this seemed to be filler to pad out the runtime of the segment so the schedule for the rest of the event could go ahead as planned.

With the gaming segment being so long and no announcements of note being made, fans were left questioning its purpose as the 5-minute Digimon Survive preview and confirmation that a new Digimon Story game were in development were the only noteworthy revelations, if you can call them that.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

ReLated Articles
magnifiercross
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap