The exploration and world design in this game is fantastic. They really open up almost everything for you straight away to do in any order you want. There's so many fun things to discover, and getting a new Digimon to your town is always exciting to find out what they'll add, and how it will make things easier for you (and then disappointing when they do nothing but stand there).

This game really does feel like those tamogachi games brought into a fully fledged 3D world. With all the pros of raising a little guy to become powerful, to the cons of having to find a place for it to shit every 5 minutes.

The whole dying and rebirth system is a pain in the ass. Mostly because of the fact every new Digimon will require a lot of repetitive training in the gym. It sucks so much to lose an ultimate level Digimon and then be forced to spend hours getting a new one, because to get back to the area you were just clearing you're going to need your new Digimon to be at least as strong as you already were, if not stronger. The game does very little to mitigate this grind - the new Digimon will get a small stat boost depending on how much your previous one had, but it's so minor that it's really just saving a few training sessions. You can also upgrade the gym to get bigger boosts per session, but the 2 Digimon you can recruit to do this are literally right next to each other at the end of a pretty long section of the story (and that's IF you know where you need to go to get them asap). I don't understand why they couldn't spread them out a bit...

I guess you can't really not have it though since it's sort of baked into Digimon's core design. Still annoying.

While a guide is heavily recommended for the game imo. You probably could get by with just exploring constantly, it'd just take a lot longer. I know as a kid I had no idea what I was doing in the game, and yet there were still places and moments in this replay that I recognised and thought to myself there's no way kid-me would have been able to work all this out. I guess I just brute forced my way through it until I found something that did something.

The requirements for Digivolutions however are a bit of a cluster mess. While players could easily get by either just going with what the game gives them, or trial and error, through stat-requirements, the fact weight and care mistakes matter a lot is something I feel few people would intuitively work out. Weight because many heavy Digimon require massively force feeding the prior form to meet those requirements, and care mistakes because not all Digimon require <x amount made, but some have a minimum amount needed. Who would ever guess that not feeding your Digimon when it's hungry and not letting it sleep could lead to some actually good evolutions? And yet supposedly these things shorten a Digimon's lifespan, so to get certain Digimon you have to shorten their life? That's kinda messed up.

I love a lot of this game. It mostly just gets really frustrating with how often you essentially have to reset the whole process over and over, going through the same slow boring gym training and having very little to show for it when that Digimon dies.