Bandai Namco and developer Witchcraft have announced that tactical RPG Digimon Survive will be getting a release in the West. Digimon Survive‘s 2019 release will coincide with the 20th anniversary of the TV show, and it’ll be coming to Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and PC.
2019 will mark the 20th anniversary of the Digimon TV series, a franchise we’ve seen very little representation of in the west when it comes to video games. There are plenty of them, they just hardly ever see release outside of Japan. However, Bandai Namco announced today, alongside developer Witchcraft, that a new tactical RPG called Digimon Survive will be releasing next year, and it’s going to be available in Europe and the United States.
The announcement trailer immediately takes a sharp turn from the tone we expect from Digimon — gone is the aggressive, cheesy rock and the spectacular hamminess that we’ve come to expect from the franchise. In its place, a somber and dramatic music plays as we see a smash-cut of visual novel-style dialogue cinematics and tactical RPG gameplay reminiscent of XCOM and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.
Besides this brief glimpse, we don’t know an awful lot else about Digimon Survive outside of the fact that it exists and we westerners will actually be able to play it without shelling out for imported copies with fan translations. The PR fluff says that in Digimon Survive “a brand-new group of teenagers, led by Takuma Momozuka, get lost on a school camping trip, finding them transported to a strange new world of monsters and danger.”
There’ll also be an apparent importance on player choices, which “throughout the game will impact the evolution of their monster allies, and the final ending.” There’s a lot of Digimon that we don’t see here — perhaps the most significant western release being the Digimon World series — so it’s exciting to see a different kind of game in the form of Digimon Survive being distributed outside of the Japanese border.
