Digimon Survive Dev Diary Shows Concept Art and Gameplay Footage

Today Bandai Namco released an almost 15 minute developer diary for Digimon Survive. The video features the history behind the game, as shared by the producers, as well new gameplay footage and concept art.

Digimon Survive will be the latest instalment in the Digimon franchise and centers on protagonist Takuma Momozuka, who becomes stranded in a strange parallel world while at a camp outing. He and his Digimon partner Agumon journey to return Takuma home. The game will emphasis choice and RPG elements, as the process of digivolution is set to play an important role.

Producer of the game Kazumasa Habu talks about the previous Digimon games and the studio’s efforts to stay as faithful to the source, and the fans, as possible. He explains the importance of the game appealing not just to children, but people of all ages, and cites Digimon’s passionate fanbase as responsible for the games selling overseas.

We also get a look at a lot of the concept art that went into the game, especially for human characters. Habu comments on the direction they took with the visual style, which was that they wanted to recapture the style of the anime:

“We also wanted to create characters that felt a little different from those in past games, characters that felt familiar, characters that felt like people you might know”

Check out the video below to see more the full range of concept art on show.

Assistant producer Katsuaki Tsuzuki goes into more depth about the gameplay of Digimon Survive, stating that the gameplay will be separated into two distinct parts, the story-advancing “drama part” and the “battle part”, that has more traditional battle-style gameplay.

He also talks about how these modes play into your freedom of choice as a player:

“As the player advances in this mode, they come across something we call free actions. These actions allow the player to select where in the other world they want to go, choose what kind of characters they want to talk to, and what kind of events they want to see take place…”

We don’t just have to take his word for it, as the video gives us a look at some brand new gameplay footage, showing more of what the turn-based combat in the final game will look like.

Digimon Survive will release later this year on PS4, Xbox One(except in Japan) and the Switch.