There was a difficulty because Bandai Namco decided not to invest heavily in Digimon Survive and the publisher wasn’t even motivated to commission a pre-release review. It turns out that many players anticipated a different game than what was actually made and released.
Although Digimon Survive is a visual novel with tactical RPG aspects, it seems that many players were taken aback by how much text and dialogue there was compared to actual fighting. First impressions reveal that the game delivers a very gradual introduction to the events, and even later battles are not the game’s primary focus; it is a traditional visual novel.
The Digimon Survive evaluations on Metacritic, depending on the version (PS4 – 0.9 / 10, Switch – 1.6 / 10, XOne – 0.5 / 10, PC – 1/10), started bombing over the weekend since some players had anticipated a significantly different creation.
The hell is going on with Digimon’s Metacritic? pic.twitter.com/DYyNIq7lvY
— TheNCSmaster (@TheNCSmaster) July 31, 2022
It was only when the situation was publicized by IP fans that new people started to give Digimon Survive very high ratings to improve the situation. The game currently presents a better average (PS4 – 6.7 / 10, Switch – 7.2 / 10, XOne – 5.9 / 10, PC – 6.5 / 10).
However, it is hard not to get the impression that the problem of Digimon Survive is the lack of greater promotion – the creators in several interviews mentioned that it is a visual novel, but apparently, not all of this news reached them.
It is worth mentioning, however, that despite the lack of major promotion, Digimon Survive had a good start on Steam . On the Valve platform, the title can boast of “mostly positive” ratings (79% out of 809 texts).