I came to this game a couple of years after playing Last Order and discovering that it had a translation patch on both PSP and 3DS. And honestly, out of the three Digimon Worlds that follow the traditional monster raising style of gameplay from the original, this one has to be my favourite. As much as I loved Last Order, raising your stats through hundreds of tedious battles rather than the Gym always made me dread every time my digimon reverted to an egg. So, with gym raising being the more effective way of getting your Digimon ready to go out into the world, I had a much better time.

The story is very by the numbers and is just there as a vehicle to enable the monster raising, but exploring the world and growing File City is as fun as ever.

I wasn’t a massive fan of the 3DS exclusive content that came after the PSP story ended, however. What should have been a pretty fun final chapter ended up with a lot of tedious side quests that felt like they were there just to make you move onto another generation of Digimon to pad the playtime, followed by a very tedious final boss. Which is a shame, because right up to the original finale, I was having an absolute blast. That being said, I still recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed Digimon World 1 on PS1. This is a genuinely better iteration on the ideas in that game (even if it doesn’t quite manage to capture the tone and mood of that game anywhere near as well).