Digimon World: Data Squad is a game based on the upcoming animated series by the same name. Like I mentioned above, you will control Marcus on his quest to find five missing children and figure out why wild Digimon have started acting aggressively.
Data Squad is an RPG where you will fight your Digimon against the wild ones found throughout the Digital World in order to get him or her to digivolve into stronger fighters. You start off with your Agumon, but eventually your party is joined by other Data Squad members who have a Lalamon, a Gaomon and a Falcomon.
Levels are open areas where you run around trying to either find someone in particular or hunt down a target Digimon. As you run around the location, you will be stopped by random encounter battles. As you would expect from a Digimon game, depending on how you fight in the battles, your Digimon might evolve. This game's evolution system is pretty intricate and was one of the reasons I got pulled into it so well.
In the Pause Menu, you can view the Galactic Evolution Map. Here, you choose a galaxy that represents the Digimon you are curious about. The camera zooms into that Digimon as a constellation within that galaxy. The different paths your Digimon can go spread out from that Digimon as other constellations. For instance, if you want to evolve your Agumon into a GeoGreymon, you just move your view to the right and check the requirements for that particular evolution. Requirements come in many forms. Some require you to open a certain number of chests, or use certain types of moves in battle, while others won't trigger until you've faced a certain level of opponent many times. There are even some criteria that requires your Digimon to be in a particular mood (more on "moods" later).
Once you've achieved the requirements, an option in the fight screen will appear to DigiSoul Charge. When this happens, your Digimon evolves and becomes the new form with new attacks. It will stay that form until you tell it to evolve again. The interesting aspect of this system is that you are not stuck on any particular path. If you want your Agumon to evolve into Guilmon, but he is currently Greymon, once you meet the criteria, you will still be able to change him to the new form. The best part is, once it digivolves into that form once, you can manually change it to that form again via the Galactic Evolution Map.
This Evolution Map is a great feature that really pulls in someone with my gaming habits, those habits being the collector tendencies where I feel I'm not done with a game until I've gotten all the goodies. Since the map tells you exactly what you need to do in order to earn a new evolution, I found my battle styles were very different depending on what I was trying to unlock. It's because of that same reason that I took longer than I would have otherwise with this game since I found myself not wanting to continue the story since I was always "so close" to unlocking a new Digimon.
