The crossover king is back and this time it's brought even more friends along for the ride, the sequel to the 2012 original brings together a whole heap of familiar & unfamiliar faces to solve the mysteries behind the appearance of giant gold chains throughout everyone's worlds, characters from Sega, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Nintendo, & Monolith Soft all find themselves unlikely allies against a variety conniving big-bads. The story is carried by short scenes before and after each
game round, mostly static segments where each of the characters pop up and move
the plot along, tending to explain the latest location and their reasons for
being there until they’re interrupted by the new enemies and particular antagonist
of that venue. Once the chit-chat is over it’s time to fight, each round
usually starts with your characters at one side of the map and the enemy at the
other, where you then take turns to move, either positioning your allies
defensibly, making a run for the level exit, or going straight in for the
attack. When it’s your turn, select your character and you’re given
a series of surrounding squares which indicate the overall distance you can
traverse in that turn, hopefully what you want to find yourself doing is
getting into a position to attack the enemy as well as having a teammate within
a short enough distance to be able to call in for support if needed, you also
need to ensure you don’t end up with your back to the enemy when it comes their
turn because if they attack you’ll take a larger amount of damage than if you
were facing them. The fights themselves are fairly straightforward, launching
attacks only involves 2 buttons at the most, and that is usually one press of a
direction on the pad along with A, over time your standard moves charge up your
special power gauge and having done that, a press of Y sets off a combo strike
which is suitably over the top and climaxes in a nicely animated action from
your character that often fills the screen and includes a little nod to their
parent series, and if all else fails the option to call in temporary backup is
there, providing your map placement had you within reach of your allies. As you progress your characters level-up and learn new moves
as well as earning combat points that can be put towards upgrading those moves
and increasing their power, you’ll also have the facility to buy equipment
which can raise your offensive and defensive capabilities whilst also aiding
resilience to any possible negative effects, such as being stunned or poisoned. The learning curve is incredibly favourable and eases you
into the game nicely, initially I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get the
hang of PXZ2 but despite looking and feeling quite confusing, it’s actually
surprisingly simplistic but does ramp up the difficulty as you progress through
the later chapters.
The world feels full and has a feeling of being alive. The
online part of the game manages to portray the World Wide Web in such a
beautiful way. It isn't a completely open world but does give the
impression it is, especially when you find new URL's to discover or new
parts of Japan to explore the areas might not being massive but are still
very enjoyable. The battle system has a very standard JRPG feel to it with
the controls being pretty straight-forward, you can have up to 3 Digimon on the
screen fighting at one time with 8 as a backup, but every time you raise their
levels they take up more data, so the bigger and better they are the more storage
space they will take up, your Digi-Memory increases as you play through
allowing you to bring out better and more evolved ‘Mon to take on harder
enemies. I didn’t expect much from this title initially but I was surprised
to see the amount of depth in it with roughly 200 Digimon to find and Digivolve,
with a deep, immersing story
line with loads of side quests, you also have a Digifarm metagame that helps
level up the Digimon you're not using in your team or you can
look for new side quests to find new items, you can also re-do dungeons, play
online against other Digimon teams, as well as trying to collect all the 500 Digimon
character coins. All in all for the amount that this game has to
offer it’s well worth it, it’ll keep you going for
a substantial period of time and has a whole load of extras to do add
loads of replayability. There’s of course lots of appeal here to Digimon fans
young and old, If you enjoy J-RPG's or even just like something different that
is enjoyable, easy to get into with a good story that won’t tax your brain then
you could do worse than dive head first into the Digiverse and start Digivolving
your Patamon into Angemon.