Once more it's time to talk about a non-video game related element of the Digimon franchise that directly ties into our next game...
The original American Starter Set. It came with enough cards so two players could play out of the box.
Introduction to the Digimon Collectible Card Game
The Digimon Collectible Card Game is a pretty strange beast all things considered. In Japan the Digital Monsters Card Game, also known as "Hyper Colosseum", was introduced in June 1999 and lasted till 2005 where it was officially discontinued, and then replaced by three subsequent card games---Card Game Alpha, Xros Wars Super Digica Taisen, and the semi-virtual CCG Digimon Jintrix, but none of these lasted long and the original card game is the most memorable among the fans. So much so that various Hyper Colosseum promotional cards were released to tie into the 15th Anniversary, though I imagine they're more for collecting than actually playing. I'm not sure how popular the game actually was in Japan during its heyday, like if there were serious tournaments based around it or if was mainly a game for collectors, though from my understanding a ton of Digimon debuted through the card game and even when the anime was on hiatus the card game continued to introduce new meta-plot elements to the Digimon-verse such as the Royal Knights and Demon Lords. You could say the three biggest wheels of the Digimon franchise in Japan were the virtual pets, the show, and last but not least the CCG.
Greymon from Hyper Colosseum, Alpha, and Jintrix.
In the U.S. the CCG, known as the "Digi-Battle Card Game" was released shortly after the premier of the anime---I'm actually having trouble finding the exact date of release, but I remember buying the Starter Deck one night after I had just gotten into the show and playing it with my younger brother at a nearby restaurant. The CCG though was released in the U.S. before Digimon World I believe, considering that a promotional card was included with said game, and thus to many folks it introduced them to the more "gritty" art style used in the original V-Pets as well as the concept of the Digimon having variable evolutions as opposed to the linear evolutions seen in the show. Despite the oddity of, say, Biyomon evolving into Nanimon (which still haunts me to this day), and wondering of course why the hell Metal Greymon was purple, the Starter Deck featured all the Adventure Rookie and Champion Digimon advertised on the box, minus Gatomon, so it was easy for a fan of the show to easily be enticed by it. Unfortunately the CCG wasn't treated that well outside of Japan, and even when it first hit during the initial Digimon craze few stores seemed to carry it and never once did I hear of an actual tournament taking place for it. Both the Pokemon TCG, and Yu-Gi-Oh which was released shortly after, easily managed to overshadow the game for a wide variety of reasons---but I think the most important part was simply that Digimon's popularity here was always tied into the show, and the CCG lacked depth meaning that it really couldn't survive without promising fans the ability to play a game with their favorite Digimon. As the show died in the U.S., so did the CCG, the last Booster Pack being released during Tamers before being officially discontinued. There was actually a second, completely original CCG released in the U.S. during Digimon Frontier that was a bit more complex but it barely lasted since after Frontier Digimon truly died outside of Japan, and the artwork was pretty ugly. I bought a few cards from the second series but never got around to playing it, though to be fair I mainly just collected the first CCG as well since no one I knew even played it. And I just found out there was also a CCG released in America to tie into Digimon Fusion (Xros Wars), though I never actually saw that in stores so I assume it died pretty quickly.
Greymon from the second English CCG and the Digimon Fusion CCG. Yeah, Xros Wars changed the design of Greymon quite a bit yet it's still the same species.
There's also sort of a weird way the CCG was handled in the West. In the West, the Pokemon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh were mostly 1:1 with their original counterparts---sure, a couple early cards (like the Pokemon vending machine cards) never made it over here, and there are some minor discrepancies in certain rulings, but the cards we did get were basically identical to the ones the Japanese got and the rules were more or less the same. The Digimon CCG, however, was quite different as the original Japanese rules are apparently a tad more complex (and few English fans even know how the original plays), and countless cards they got never made their way over here or were simplified by the time they did leading to the game ending up as a rather simplistic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors basically which really ruined the longevity of it. The English CCG also really slacked off when it came to the art as well, the first couple of cards in both the Japanese release and the U.S. release were the same deal, the official V-Pet art of the Digimon against a plain background, but as time went on the Japanese art became more dynamic and fun and quite a lot of the cards released later on are pretty neat looking and interesting for collectors. The U.S. version, though, ended up going with this absolutely horrible 3D art for every card in the later sets that is extremely unappealing---the Japanese version did have a couple of CG-style cards, but they were mixed in with the hand drawn ones and were the exception rather than the rule. And really, the Digimon CCG was always pretty plain looking anyway compared to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh so the U.S. version sanitizing the style even more than the Japanese counterpart really didn't help matters.
This 3D Greymon was used for a Japanese card, but they also had many that looked quite nice. The Japanese cards also include little "Dex" entries.
So, yeah, the Digimon CCG kind of sucked all things considered. As many people have pointed out, the game was inherently broken and lopsided due to one of its basic mechanics---Digivolution---being horribly balanced where the player who wins the first "duel" gets to keep their Digimon evolved while the other player has to start back with a Rookie, meaning the first player has a huge advantage and keeps their momentum going throughout the entire game. I also never liked how simplistic the game was, the fact you didn't get to choose your Digimon's attack made it feel like you barely had any control or strategy and the small amount of interesting card effects beyond mere point boosts also really hurt the level of play one could accomplish. I remember kind of liking Digimon over Pokemon though since you didn't have to worry about Energy, an element of the Pokemon TCG none of my friends enjoyed and we'd always ignore that mechanic, but once Yu-Gi-Oh came out and delivered a mana-free game with a ton of potential strategies Digimon really felt shallow and weak to me. I still collected the cards because I liked the monsters, and I'd make alternate games with them such as a little board-game I designed where each space was a different card, but overall I probably spent like 100$ total on Digimon cards throughout my lifetime. In comparison I may have put in 1000$ combined into Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh when I was a child, though nowadays I don't have any time nor room to collect them even though I can afford them far easier now and actually can find people to play with. Such is the pain of growing up!
The card game played a role in Tamers, which took place in "our world". The dub left the original Japanese card backs as-is.
Anyway, there's only one Digimon video game which is actually a virtual representation of the (Japanese) CCG, and that wasn't released till Tamers for the Wonderswan Color. The other two Digimon Card Game video games are inspired by the CCG, but don't actually feature the actual cards nor does it follow the real rules instead kind of doing their own thing...
The viral Metal Greymon once more graces the cover, the last time he'd do so...orange Metal Greymon would soon replace him.
Digimon World: Digital Card Battle
Playstation - December 1999 (JP)
The second Digimon title released for the Playstation, and technically the second "World" title though it isn't part of the numbered series but rather a spin-off, Digimon World: Digital Card Battle is NOT the Digimon: Digital Card Battle that was released in the West. That's actually this game's sequel, known as Digimon World: Digital Card Arena in Japan, and thus this is the prequel which the game we got expands upon. So, why wasn't this game released outside of Japan? Digimon World I recall actually sold pretty well in the United States, making the "Greatest Hits" list, but perhaps they were worried a game based on the fledgling CCG wouldn't do that well and instead decided to focus on the next Digimon World, Digimon World 2? This was before CCG games had really taken off, since the Pokemon TCG video game and the Yu-Gi-Oh games had yet to be released outside of Japan, so it was kind of a strange and shaky market to release a game into. Or it may simply be due to the fact the game featured Hitler Agumon. Seriously. Some of the music from this game, however, was actually featured in the English release of Digimon World: Digital Card Arena replacing various theme songs from the anime, such as the Adventure 02 opening "Target".
Just throw some shades on him and you're good to release it in the West!
Ironically though the game isn't a numbered sequel to Digimon World, it actually has far more in common with Digimon World 1 than any of the other future Digimon World titles (excluding Re
igitize, of course) and is a pseudo-sequel of sorts, taking place once more in File Island and re-using a large amount of resources explaining how it was able to be released within a year of Digimon World in Japan. All the Digimon featured in the game are lifted from Digimon World, except for the debut of Babamon---the female counterpart to Jijimon---and Rosemon. I can't find a lot of information about the game's plot, but it doesn't seem to be actually a sequel to the plot of Digimon World but is basically a re-telling where the player character, who looks just like the protagonist of World 1, is called to File Island to help solve the case of the mystery "Bug Card" causing various glitches to effect the Digital World. To do this he must travel around File Island and battle the seven Card Leaders to retrieve the "7s" cards which will lead the way to Infinity Mountain where all the information in the Digital World is processed. I'm pretty sure that Machinedramon returns as the final boss like in Digimon World once more, highlighting his role as a major enemy in the video game series.
Exploring File Island is now done through a simple menu. The removal of an explorable over world was no doubt done out of cost/time limitations.
Though the game is inspired by the Digimon CCG, it isn't an exact 1:1 representation of it---unlike, say, the Pokemon TCG video game the cards featured in this game aren't actually real cards but rather are made wholly for the game and simply feature shots from Digimon World's engine as the card art. The rules are also quite different, such as the fact that Digimon now have HP as opposed to being defeated in one hit, you're able to choose which one of the Digimon's three attacks you wish to use with some attacks having their own unique effect, and instead of having to start at the Rookie level you can play Champion and Ultimate Digimon straight from your hand though their Attack and HP will be nerfed as opposed to if you evolved them first from the lower levels. Overall the game basically plays the same as the sequel we got in the rest of the world, so I'll go a bit more into how the game plays when we get to Card Arena. By the way, there are 159 cards to collect in the game and I believe that every Digimon from Digimon World is represented except for the Fresh and In-Training Digimon since the cards being at the Rookie level.
The game's battle interface. There's no nice "field representation" like in most CCG games, and as a result things come across as cluttered.
Visually you can tell the game was rushed as it drops the exploration aspect of Digimon World and instead everything is done through menus, the game simply taking shots of Digimon World (such as File City) to use as the background during such segments. Dialogue is told through static portraits of the Digimon World models, zoomed in, and the battle interface is also extremely bland and quite cluttered. At the very least once the battle gets under way you actually get to see the 3D models fight, and they look pretty good for the time---incidentally this game was released in Japan the same month as Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories. I think both games look about graphically the same, though the Digimon models are a bit more authentic to their designs than the Yu-Gi-Oh monsters are in their first 3D debut, though there were far more they had to fit into that game so I can understand not every monster could be accurately represented. And unlike the Digimon, many Yu-Gi-Oh cards didn't fully show the monsters body meaning the 3D modelers had to fill in the gap. Well, there's not much more to say about Digital Card Battle. Don't be too upset we didn't get it because it looks as if Card Arena is pretty much an improvement in every way.
The main cast of Digimon World: Digital Card Battle...note the fucked up Cherrymon in the back.
Next time we talk about one of the most important set of games in the Digimon franchise, the Wonderswan "Tamer" series...and learn about the franchise's most enigmatic character in the Western fandom, Ryo Akiyama.
