Di-Gata Defenders (DS) Review
Media tie-in titles have a sort of stigma in the gaming community. Typically, it’s rare to find a game that appeals to the core demographic that enjoyed the property it’s based on AND the typical gamer. Di-Gata Defenders is a game designed exclusively for the Nintendo DS designed to tie in with the “hit” cartoon franchise, though I won’t judge you if you’ve never heard of it – I haven’t either.
The biggest and most unfortunate thing is that, although it seems like a competent RPG, it’s really flawed and hard to recommend to even the biggest fans of the cartoon. Di-Gata Defenders has a very complicated and unnecessarily convoluted storyline, that is really questionable as to its suitability for the target audience. In order to communicate the storyline to you, the readers, in the most efficient way possible, I won’t go into the complicated history of the series, but the general events of the game instead. Players will take the role of an un-named Di-Gata Defender, who the player can create (though the possibilities aren’t overly expansive).
The Di-Gata Defenders are a group of teenagers within an organisation whose sole mission is to protect RaDos, an alien world, from evil beings such as the evil lord Nazmul and the Order of the Infinis. The Di-Gata Defenders then employ Sigils in the form of Di-Gata Stones in order to fight against evil forces. Sigils can be combined in order to provide more powerful attacks or to summon guardians. It’s very much a carbon copy of recent children’s animated shows, where replacing Sigils with cards or Pocket Monsters wouldn’t really change things majorly. You have to give it credit though, as Di-Gata Defenders does try to set itself apart from the rest. The graphics in Di-Gata Defenders are completely three dimensional, and very crude in their appearance. All the characters look almost exactly the same, except with different skins, and the environments appear very sterile – they just lack life. In addition, the graphics and animations seen in the battles are rather uninspired. Almost every attack pulled off during battle takes the form of a beam, except coloured differently. It may not seem a big deal, but when a character uses a move like “Slash” but shoots a blue beam like other attacks, it really ruins the feeling of the game. Gameplay in Di-Gata defenders is your typical RPG fare. There are segments in which the player controls their defender on foot and battle segments. During standard on-foot segments, the player can control their character by pointing the stylus with the direction they want them to travel.
The top screen displays a map of the surrounding area in this mode, also. During battle mode, which are random encounters similar to Final Fantasy, the top screen becomes the battle screen and the bottom screen becomes the Di-Gata Stones used for battle. During battle mode, attacks are divided into attacks and defends. It’s pretty self explanatory what each of those moves do.Tapping the stone performs the attack. In addition, players can “throw” their Summon stone, using the stylus, onto the battleground in order to summon a deity to assist the player in battle.
In most circumstances, the summon stone is overpowered and makes the battles way too easy, removing any motivation to use the other attacks. The soundtrack in Di-Gata Defenders is fairly decent considering how the rest of the game performs. Having a very oriental theme to it, Di-Gata Defenders employs a combination of windpipes and sounds of flowing water to create a very relaxing and very suitable soundtrack. The soundtrack of Di-Gata defenders is something that I really found the game to be performing strongly in, more so than recent DS games.
Di-Gata Defenders is, overall, a fairly average RPG. It does nothing to advance the genre, and doesn’t really do anything to perform up to par with other entries in the genre either. Underneath the interesting concepts that the original franchise brings to it lies a run-of-the-mill RPG which will most probably disappoint those coming off, say, Final Fantasy IV for the DS. While it’s no amazing RPG, it is one that, with it’s simplicity, will appeal to the younger demographic, and for that, I think it achieves it’s purpose. Barely.
