Fun smash like, the models are really nice and i love how many characters there is, if only the gameplay was a tiny bit more complex.

Possibly the most "okay" game I've ever played. It's a pretty basic kids' fighting game that doesn't do anything very well, but doesn't have any severe flaws either. - The gameplay is fine- not that good and pretty simple, but it controls fine and is a decent time waster for an hour. Digivolution is probably the only sort of creative thing it has, though pretty underbaked. None of the characters are too broken compared to the others. The level design is also pretty average, with every stage having its own gimmick to keep things interesting, but some of them (like the one that rotates periodically) just feel more frustrating and flow-breaking than anything. Overall, it's pretty clearly riffing off Super Smash Brothers. It is a little bit slow though- the rookie Digimon move very lethargically. This might just be because I played the PAL version, however, and I have my doubts that a 2001 budget tie-in game was ever optimised for PAL. - The audio is acceptable. The music is pleasant enough to listen to, though I couldn't hum any of it to you after maybe 6 or 7 hours of playing the game (more than enough to beat the campaign multiple times). The voices are a little crunchy, and sometimes hard to understand because of it, especially the Digimon who put on funny voices, but the actual acting sounds fine. - Graphically, it's run of the mill, and it lacks much of a distinctive visual style of its own. The Digimon look good, but they're just put on sort of generic looking environments with an occasional vaguely cyber theming. It would have been more effective had the locations been ones from the TV show, I feel- the end result would be similar, but if we're being honest, fans of the TV show or their parents are literally everyone who ever bought this game, so it would have that going for it at least. It's far from ugly, though, even if it's nothing special to look at. However, the last level of the campaign has this awful trail effect coming off the Digimon, which I guess is meant to make it look cool and techno combined with the psychedelic background on that level, but in reality just makes it far more confusing to look at than it had to be and actually made me feel a little sick if I took too long on it, which games rarely do to me. At least it does look pretty sweet if you aren't actually playing it. - There's no actual storyline to the game, but it does, as mentioned, have a short arcade-style campaign. You fight every Digimon in the roster except the one you're playing as, broken up by a minigame stage and rare interruptions by a more powerful Digimon, until you eventually get to face the big boss Reapermon. It works well enough for what it is, I suppose, and dare I say that trying to rack up a high score can actually be pretty fun, but it's definitely mostly just here for kids who didn't have a sibling they could annoy into playing with them. - In summary, it really is a perfectly 5/10 game- not a total disappointment or waste of time, but there's also no reason I would ever recommend it to someone over any of the other fighting games on the PS1. Well, there is actually one reason, and that's that it's a fighting game with Digimon in it. The Digimon license is really the main thing this game has going for it. Being able to beat each other up with Digimon and find out who would win is pretty fun, even for adult fans, and would be especially cool for kids. But if you aren't already into Digimon, this game certainly won't make you a fan... so just play Tekken or something.

Keeping in mind this was a PS1 game made for a CRT display, the game had a good charm to it for it's time. The initial roster you can play as is mixed in terms of strength but beating the arcade mode with each character unlocks their respective evolutions as permanent characters in versus mode for more interesting fights against the CPU or other players. Some even become available in Arcade mode. The inclusion of 3 mini games to play in Arcade or in a VS fashion may seem small but running into it during the arcade mode can actually be quite a treat in terms of a quick break and sometimes the AI can be strangely good at them even on easy mode settings. Speaking on that there is difficulty settings buried in the settings menu but the easy mode can still provide a decent challenge by the final boss. This gives the game a bit more replay-ability as you can try beating it on each difficulty. Is it the best PS1 game ever? No, obviously not but you can have good quick sessions with it both by yourself or with friends.