Digimon MMO Announced

Source: kurot from DeviantART

While I have imagined a game where trainers were allowed to roam with their Digimon among other people, I never expected it to arrive this soon. With WeMade Entertainment localizing South Korea’s take on the game, I can finally fulfill my dream of raising and battling digimon in a game (something that I haven’t done since the early day of Digimon, when they were still Tamagotchi-esque). Even though the holy grail would be to see Nintendo finally make an MMO for Pokemon (but given their insistence on their kid-friendly image and with the risk of predators online, this will never happen in my lifetime), Digimon is still something that I can get excited about.

I know that Digimon was mostly viewed by people who never gave it a chance as the “poor man’s pokemon”, and I can understand that. As a kid though, I was never really into the Pokemon anime series. I loved the movies (only seen the first two since the rest are just killjoy) and the games are perfection but the anime had a repetitive sequence of happenings that even I couldn’t get into. Digimon filled that role at the time, since the first two seasons to me were brilliant as it was episodic and had an actual plot to it, rather than recycling the same plot loop every other episode. With Tai as my favourite male character ever, my attachment to Digimon in those days was visible to all, and it was great that my whole school was as into it as me.

I recently rewatched the Digimon Movie on the insistence of my younger brothers and I can’t help but feel nostalgic all over again. While the animation quality was subpar, the US dub was pretty decent even now and watching the movie through rose-tinted glasses, nothing was out of line or wrong. In fact, I don’t think I can even look at that movie objectively and point out it’s faults (even though I know deep down that there are plenty).

So when I heard a few months back that Korea had a Digimon mmo to play with, I couldn’t help but feel jealous since I really wanted to give it a shot. Hell, I’ve never dabbled with any MMO in my life (I am very stubborn whenever my friends ask me for a game of Warcraft or Starcraft and WoW is dead to me) so I think Digimon, with it’s premise a point of interest, would be a decent enough debut to the genre. Of course, since it was Korean I knew that the chances of seeing this westernized was slim to none. Reading the Kotaku article today was a revelation.

While Agumon will probably not be available (since the game is based on Tamers, which I think is the third season), I look forward to picking Takato and his Guilmon (who is pretty much the Agumon of his generation anyways). With the game getting released in the states, I’m not too sure if I can get a chance of playing it but I can only dream. A release date is set in March 2010 on the official trailer and the official website has some nice little tidbits about the info.

Fingers crossed I can actually get my hands on this (and if not, I WILL find a way :P)